Affiliate Marketing — How Data Can Help You Find the Right Affiliates
Affiliate marketing is part of performance marketing – also referred to as referral marketing. Both companies (advertisers) who want to sell something, and publishers or affiliates who advertise benefit from affiliate marketing.
Everyone’s talking about it. So how can you make affiliate marketing work for you? And how can your data play a role in finding the right affiliates for your company?
Affiliate Marketing in a Nutshell
In practice, marketing works like this: large companies offer affiliate programs, where you can sign up as a website or blog owner. If you have a successful site that generates enough traffic and fits the target group.
As an affiliate, you include a link on your website that goes to the product or service the company is selling. If a visitor then buys an item, you (the affiliate) receive a small commission.
Briefly summarized:
A customer clicks on a website or blog that has links to one or more advertisers.
If interested in a product, the customer clicks on the link and is directed to the advertiser's site.
By clicking on the link or by the subsequent purchase of a product, the affiliate receives a commission.
There is a kind of symbiotic relationship between the intermediary and the advertiser -- both sides can benefit from each other through an affiliate program. For example, a blog that reports on financial trends can benefit from the fact that interested readers can simply click to sign up for a consultation with a broker.
The important thing here is to choose one or more suitable affiliate programs that fit you and the visitors to your website.
Does Affiliate Marketing Still Work?
The idea of linking to another website and being paid if someone clicks is not new. In fact, the first affiliate marketing website predates most other websites. In 1989, William J.Tobin founded PC Flowers & Gifts, one of the very first successful eCommerce websites.
You might think that with most businesses today having an eCommerce solution, it would be unnecessary to advertise on other people’s websites. For many of us, the idea of clicking on banners or links on a website has been replaced by going straight to our online retailer of choice. Or has it?
Affiliate marketing still works. It is today an 8 billion dollar business. That is almost double what it was in 2017. (Statista).
How Do I Make Money with Affiliate Marketing?
When clicking on affiliate links, cookies are set for the users. This way, precise tracking can take place, and even a sale made later can still be assigned to the affiliate.
Fun fact: those cookies may be a problem going forward.
3 Popular Affiliate Payment Models
First, the model you probably already know -- PPS or Pay per Sale (also CPS: Cost per Sale).
With this form of payment, you as an affiliate only receive a commission when customers have actually purchased a product via your affiliate link.
It's not just through affiliate links and products sold that you earn a commission as an affiliate. There are also alternative revenue models. As is the case in performance marketing, there are other ways to make a commission:
Next, there is the PPL or pay per lead (also CPL: cost per lead). With this method, the advertiser only has to pay a commission if a predefined action is successful. This action can be registering for a newsletter, ordering a catalog, or filling out any other lead generation form. Unlike PPS remuneration, it's not necessary for a sale to take place -- it’s all about the lead.
A third way to earn money is the PPC or Pay Per Click (also CPC: Cost per Click): With the PPC model, the affiliate receives compensation as soon as there is a click on your affiliate link or on your ad. No form needs to be completed, nor items sold.
Using Data to Find the Right Affiliates
Affiliate Marketing is about more than setting a link or a banner on a website and hoping for the best. You wouldn’t drop your fishing line into any old river or lake -- you would do your research. Research into website traffic and the type of visitors using a website is just as important in choosing the right affiliate as it is deciding on the right place to fish. You don’t want to come home empty-handed!
These days, making the right decision means relying more and more on data. Data can be provided by many of the different tools we currently use for our online marketing and services:
Website Analytics
Email and Newsletters
Social Media
Online Shop
Online Ads
Smartphone App
Data helps us not only make decisions but also understand why a decision is going to be made. It needn’t be data tied to a sale either. Think about Web Intent Data for a moment: Intention is the first step in the buying process!
Insight into what people intend to buy before they actually make their purchase significantly strengthens your customer acquisition strategy. With the right data set, search and purchase intentions have enormous potential to positively influence business decisions and customer relationships as well as optimize your buyer journey. (Andrews Wharton)
Data gathered on what your audience wants can be used in combination with data on who your audience is. This is a crucial combination: knowing who your audience is, gives you important insight into their buying habits.
6 Ways Data Can Help You Find the Right Affiliates and Connect with the Right Customers
Activate Your Niche Marketing
There is a lot of data out there. You’re probably swimming in it. Instead of trying to make sense of the whole picture, why not focus on one aspect? Use data to focus on a single niche. Let the data point you in the right direction.
2. Monitor Customer Activities
Customer journey analytics is the most valuable affiliate marketing tool available because it can be used to improve customer experience. You can use this data to identify how your existing customers arrive at their purchasing decisions. These insights help you to understand how they engage with your marketing campaign funnel.
3. Customize Your Marketing Process
One of the main goals of an affiliate marketer is to improve marketing prospects in order to earn more commissions. Learning the buying habits of potential customers enables you to create a more personalized marketing plan that directly targets these buyers.
4. Retarget Your Audience
By using data to identify the people who have visited your site but haven’t converted into customers, you can create targeted ads that are much more likely to result in a sale. Retargeting helps keep your brand top of mind and increases the chances they’ll return to make a purchase.
5. Conduct Competitor Analysis
Understanding what your competitors are doing means more than just collecting data on your competitors’ products, prices, and marketing strategies. By understanding what your competitors are doing, you can gain an edge in the marketplace. One of the easiest ways to beat out the competition is by recognizing and engaging with potential consumers before others do.
6. Track And Find New Affiliate Offers
By tracking the right data points, you can quickly identify new affiliate offers that will likely succeed with your audience. Look at your existing affiliate promotions and see which ones are performing well. What products or services are your audiences responding to? Which offers have the highest conversion rates?
Our Data Connects People
Andrews Wharton is known for sourcing data across the entire marketplace and curating it for your unique needs. We understand the importance of accurate, verified, and compliant data. We literally built a company on it! You can Be Certain, we know how fundamental data is to the future of your business.
