Richard Kahn
Affiliate marketing is a great way for companies like yours to unlock new revenue streams and sell their products and services to more customers. This is why nearly 90 percent of advertisers agree that affiliate marketing plays a critical role in the success of their overall strategies.
In case it’s been a while since you’ve read up on affiliate marketing, here’s a brief definition. Affiliate marketing is an advertising method where other people (affiliates) try to sell your products to the folks in their networks and other internet users in exchange for a commission. On the surface, it’s a win-win. Your business gets its products in front of more eyeballs, and you’re able to close more deals. At the same time, the affiliate is able to build up a business of their own and, in theory, generate a passive income that lets them earn money while they’re sleeping.
Affiliate Marketing Challenges
Despite these upsides, affiliate marketing is not without its share of troubles. At least some affiliates will find a way to cheat the system. It’s just a matter of when.
For example, if your affiliate program pays out on a cost-per-click (CPC) basis, an unscrupulous actor might decide to leverage bots to click on ads on their behalf. As a result, you’d get the impression that more and more people are looking at your products while having to cut bigger checks to affiliates when the traffic is actually fraudulent.
Scenarios like this being the case, you can’t just launch an affiliate program and expect it will be perfect. Like anything else, it requires a lot of planning and strategizing to make sure you get the best results. Technology plays an important role in the success of any lucrative affiliate marketing program. With the right solutions in place, you can build and scale a successful affiliate program that helps you reach more customers and, ultimately, grow your bottom line.
While every affiliate marketing manager has a different tool kit, the following solutions should give you a better idea of what a successful tech stack might look like.
5 Digital Solutions You Need for a Successful Affiliate Marketing Program
There’s no shortage of digital platforms on the market designed to help you build a successful affiliate marketing program. While some advertisers might not need all of these solutions, other advertisers might prefer leveraging even more platforms to build an affiliate engine that meets more advanced or specific requirements.
There’s no sense in making your affiliate program any more difficult than it needs to be. Using solutions like these five can help you start seeing real profits much faster than you would if you approached your new initiative without the right technologies in place. With that in mind, here are some solutions that can help your affiliate marketing program thrive.
1. Everflow
Your affiliate marketing program is only as strong as the actual affiliates that power it. If you have a bunch of fraudsters just trying to game the system—or if you have a bunch of newcomers just cutting their teeth as affiliate marketers—it is highly unlikely, if not altogether impossible, to get the results you’re hoping for with any sense of urgency.
Enter Everflow, a partner marketing platform that prides itself on connecting advertisers like you with proven affiliates. Everflow’s EverXChange partner discovery portal enables you to recruit partners by promotional method, vertical specialization, and GEO, giving you access to professionals who know how to drive serious affiliate revenue. At the same time, this enables you to learn how to avoid people who are simply trying to game the system or figure it out for the first time.
Beyond that, Everflow also offers features like clickless tracking that lets you keep tabs on the performance of your campaigns; real-time analytics that enables you to make better decisions by drilling down into your data; and Smart Switch, a tool that allows you to automatically optimize your campaigns.
2. TUNE
TUNE is a partner marketing platform that makes it easy to manage affiliate marketing programs. Instead of maintaining clunky spreadsheets that are prone to human error or completing time-consuming tasks by hand, you can use TUNE to automate things like payment processing and performance optimization.
What’s more, TUNE also gives you access to robust reporting functionality and intelligent dashboards that enable you to see the big picture at a glance. TUNE prides itself on a straightforward software as a service (SaaS) billing model, robust security features, and high availability, among other things.
3. AdPlexity
AdPlexity is a platform that helps you keep tabs on your competitors’ best campaigns across mobile, desktop, push, native, e-commerce, and more.
By tracking their performance across channels, AdPlexity can help you figure out what your competitors are doing to drive sales success. You can then use that information to inform your own campaigns and let affiliates know what the data suggests will be a winning strategy for your brand.
4. Bitly
Since you’re reading a blog article on the internet, it’s probably safe to say you’ve come across Bitly, the URL shortener, at one point or another.
Bitly is more than a tool that lets you create customized, more recognizable links. It also lets you analyze the performance of every custom link you build, which gives you the data you need to continuously optimize your campaigns across channels. Find out which links are doing the best, learn why that’s happening, invest more energy in replicating that success, and you should drive more sales.
5. Anura
Affiliate marketing is one of the top channels for ad fraud. In fact, it’s not uncommon for affiliate marketers to find 50 percent of fraud in their campaigns—or even more. Believe it or not, some estimates say that 25 percent of all ad clicks are fraudulent. Yikes!
When fraud happens, you end up paying commissions that weren’t earned, and you may be hit with chargebacks and other penalties.
Anura is an ad fraud detection solution that gives you the peace of mind that comes with knowing you’re getting high-quality visitors and that real people are viewing your ads and responding to your offers. With Anura in place, the integrity of your campaigns is preserved, and you’re able to protect every penny in your budget, putting you in a much better position to grow your business.
Anura analyzes billions of requests every day and has the ability to determine whether a user is real or fake in real-time. The solution’s machine learning capabilities help ensure Anura is always keeping pace with fraudsters and working diligently to prevent bad actors from eating into your ad budget.
Ready to Launch a Profitable Affiliate Marketing Program?
An affiliate marketing program can be a major boon to businesses like yours. You can tap into an army of workers who sell on your behalf, and depending on how you set up your program, you might not even have to pay anyone unless they drive actual sales. Still, successful affiliate marketing programs require a robust set of digital solutions that can help you optimize your campaigns, increase profitability, and reduce fraud.
We may be a bit biased, but we believe that Anura is the most important solution mentioned in this post. With Anura, it’s easier than ever to identify bots, clicks farms, paid fraud, human fraud, and more. You can use Anura to reduce fraud in real-time while making sure legitimate transactions are going through. Anura also makes it easy to identify where fraudulent traffic is coming from, enabling you to take steps to block that bad traffic and earn higher ROI on your campaigns.
When used in conjunction with the tools listed above or other platforms like them, Anura helps you build a powerful affiliate marketing program that can take your business to the next level. For more information on affiliate fraud and how it affects businesses, check out our whitepaper or free e-book, Affiliate Marketing Fraud 101.
But don’t just take our word for it. Request a trial of Anura today to see how you can improve campaign performance and reduce ad fraud while building an affiliate marketing program that improves your organization’s finances and puts your products into the hands of more people around the world.
