Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing

The industry has four core players:

the merchant (also known as 'advertiser or 'retailer' or 'brand') the network (that contains offers for the affiliate to choose from and also takes care of the payments) the publisher (also known as 'the affiliate') the customer

The market has grown in complexity, resulting in the emergence of a secondary tier of players, including affiliate management agencies, super-affiliates, and specialized third party vendors.

Affiliate marketing overlaps with other Internet marketing methods to some degree because affiliates often use regular advertising methods. Those methods include organic search engine optimization (SEO), paid search engine marketing (PPC Pay Per Click), e-mail marketing, content marketing, and (in some sense) display advertising. On the other hand, affiliates sometimes use less orthodox techniques, such as publishing reviews of products or services offered by a partner.

Affiliate marketing is commonly Confused with referral marketing, as both forms of marketing use third parties to drive sales to the retailer. The two forms of marketing are differentiated, however, in how they drive sales, where affiliate marketing relies purely on financial motivations, while referral marketing relies more on trust and personal relationships.

Affiliate marketing is frequently overlooked by advertisers. While search engines, e-mail, and web site syndication capture much of the attention of online retailers, affiliate marketing carries a much lower profile. Still, affiliates continue to play a significant role in e-retailers' marketing strategies

The added value of affiliate marketing is the fact that advertisers can collaborate with hundreds of partners, the affiliates, without engaging in direct communication with them. Therefore, the advertisers can increase their market position without a need to Conduct time-consuming processes of recurring approvals and relationship building with partners. These tasks are performed by the affiliative system operator, who establishes contact with the advertisers and with the partners and enables advertisers to benefit from the advertising capacity of partners from all around the world.

From advertisers' perspective, advertising services are provided by the operator and not by each partner engaged within the affiliation system.

Analogically, the affliates (partners) are able to provide advertising services without any interaction with advertisers since the affiliate panel gives partners access to all the necessary information needed to run an advertising campaign. Such information includes, for example, advertising materials for each advertised product and service category, geolocation data for individual advertising campaigns for each advertised product and service category, which can be advertised in accordance with its geolocation. Additionally, the affiliate panel includes information about rates per lead generated in a campaign per geolocation. From the perspective of the partners, their services are rendered to the operator and not the advertisers.

In the case of cost per mille/click, the publisher is not concerned about whether a visitor is a member of the audience that the advertiser tries to attract and is able to convert because at this point the publisher has already earned his commission. This leaves the

greater, and, in case of cost per mille, the full risk and loss (if the visitor cannot be converted) to the advertiser.

Cost per action/sale methods require that referred visitors do more than visit the advertiser's website before the affiliate receives a Commission. The advertiser must convert that visitor first. It is in the best interest of the affiliate to send the most closely targeted traffic to the advertiser as possible to increase the chance of a conversion. The risk is absorbed by the affiliate who funnels their traffic to the campaign (normally a landing page). In the case a Conversion is not fired the publisher won't receive any Compensation for the traffic.

Affiliate marketing is also called "performance marketing", in reference to how sales employees are typically being compensated. Such employees are typically paid a commission for each sale they close, and sometimes are paid performance incentives for exceeding objectives. Affliates are not employed by the advertiser whose products or services they promote, but the

Compensation models applied to affiliate marketing are very similar to the ones used for people in the advertisers' internal sales department.

The phrase, "Affiliates are an extended sales force for your business", which is often used to explain affiliate marketing, is not completely accurate. The primary difference between the two is that affliate marketers provide little if any influence on a possible prospect in the conversion process once that prospect is directed to the advetiser's website. The sales team of the advertiser, however does have the control and influence up to the point where the prospect either a) signs the contract, or b) completes the purchase.

We hope this Blog about "Affiliate Marketing" will help you.

Written By - Himanshu Sharma