Today we start a series of 6 articles that come to provide information about affiliate marketing, affiliate program management, affiliate recruitment & motivation, maintenance and optimization of the affiliate program. The 6 articles come to give a complete picture of this marketing channel. The first article in this series of 6 has the role of making an introduction to affiliate marketing.
What is not affiliate marketing?
This is the second question we have to answer almost every time to customers in the discussions we have with them. Most of the time, there is confusion that puts a sign of equality between affiliate marketing and PPC marketing (Facebook Ads, Google AdWords). Wrong.
The confusion comes from the fact that being accustomed to KPIs in PPC marketing, advertisers often analyze the effectiveness of an affiliate program in terms of the volume of traffic sent by affiliates. Wrong, again! The KPIs to follow in an affiliate program are as follows:
- the number of affiliates in the affiliate program
- the quality of the websites that affiliates have
- quality of traffic sent (demographically, targeting, relevance)
- the type of affiliates that are in the affiliate program
- the percentage of active affiliates in the affiliate program
- the percentage of affiliates who register commissions vs. the mass of affiliates who send traffic;
- conversion rate
- AOV (average order value) generated by affiliates and the list goes on.
Most of the time the volume of traffic sent by affiliates is small compared to other marketing channels that advertisers use, but the comparison between these channels should be made not between traffic volumes, but between the conversion rate and the cost per customer purchase. Because in affiliate marketing the cost can be easily controlled, the acquisition cost is often the lowest compared to the other online marketing channels used. Go for the james-scholes.com/evergreen-wealth-formula-review/ in this case.
The sales volume that an affiliate program can generate is somewhere between 10% and 30% of the current sales volume.
Another confusion encountered over time is that affiliate marketing means advertising. Another mistake! In affiliate marketing, all the attributions related to promotion are the responsibility of the affiliates who function as sales agents. The role of the advertiser is to focus on developing a partnership with affiliates, as well as improving the customer experience on his site.
Each of the KPIs presented above can be controlled through effective management of the affiliate program. In the following articles we will present in detail the methods that can be used to achieve this.
Why is it useful to have an affiliate program?
This question is somewhat normal. Why should an online store also use affiliate marketing in the marketing mix it already uses?
The first thing that comes to mind on this question is the statement:
Half of the money I spend on advertising is lost, the problem is that I don’t know which half. Well, in affiliate marketing there is no such dilemma because the advertiser will pay exclusively for the results that the affiliate program generates.