Category: Network News

Updates from Affiliate Networks

Getting ready for Black Friday: Small Business Guide – part two

In part two of our SME guide, our Client Services team explains how to make the most of the ShareASale platform to ensure optimal program performance.

The significance of the Q4 peak trading period has been amplified by changes to the e-commerce landscape, lifestyle and spending habits caused in large by the pandemic. It’s important for smaller businesses to be prepared to capitalize on the global retail events of Black Friday, Cyber Monday and the ensuing Christmas period, and our guide – part one of which can be found here – will help with just that.

From creating a strategy based on your website data and customer behavior, to utilizing ShareASale’s reporting suite to monitor the performance across your partners, you should be ready to execute a campaign to kick start your Q4 activity and truly make this a Golden Quarter.

Setting your Strategy

Your strategy should focus on the Golden Quarter as a whole, with Google data from the past few years highlighting demand growing the most in October. Therefore it’s wise to not just focus on November and December in order to capture the full ‘Christmas’ traffic.

As for Black Friday, we recommend that you utilize your YoY trends if possible to understand when traffic started peaking on your site and align your offer with this. This data will inform your strategy, should you go live the week before or the Monday prior, for example, to capitalize on a primed audience. Last year, Awin and ShareASale saw higher year on year hikes the days preceding the main event.

If you plan on having offers going live on Black Friday, start these from midnight. Research shows many shoppers will stay up and look for those offers early, so don’t miss out on this traffic which your competitors could capitalize on. This is especially important, as Google found that 73% of UK Christmas shoppers are open to purchasing from retailers they haven’t bought from before.

Utilize ShareASale reporting to build your strategy

Black Friday and Cyber Monday have become a vital part of ensuring that Q4 is as successful as it can be, making it more important to have a plan in place than ever before. An effective affiliate strategy will ensure that your campaigns are well planned and that you have an idea of the outcomes you could expect to see.

Once you have your goals and objectives, your most important KPI’s should become clear. This will vary per program and what is important to one brand will not be to another. First, depending on how long your program has been running, make sure the targets are realistic and you have a reasonable understanding of what your weekly, monthly or quarterly targets should be.

Understanding what data can be generated by the various ShareASale reports can help to develop an effective strategy for the upcoming period. It will not only help you identify new successful publishers, but will also help you replicate previous successful activities. To keep up with the evolving trends, we recommend generating these reports frequently:

  • The ‘Affiliate Timespan Report’ can be used by looking at key indicators for a particular time frame, to determine the top publishers and your ‘go to list’.
  • The ‘Weekly Progress Report’ provides information of your performance over a given time period for all publishers or for a specific publisher. You may evaluate previous campaign outcomes, if possible, where tenancy and or CPA budgets have been invested.

Monitor campaign performance

Once exposure is booked in and your campaign is running, we strongly recommend monitoring the campaign performance over this period. The reports mentioned above can help with this. It’s important to know that what you have booked in is working.

When tracking your campaign, which primary metrics should you look out for?

  • Conversion rate (CR): Your CR is calculated as a percentages and shown as: sales/clicks. The CR provides an overview of the overall effectiveness of your website’s promotional strategies (offers, creatives, types of affiliates) and user experience.
  • Average Order Value (AOV): A metric used to measure the average revenue generated per order. Has your AOV increased or decreased?
  • Return of Investment (ROI): This metric can be used to assess the effectiveness of your campaign by looking at how much you spend (commission) versus how much revenue that spend is generating.

By actively monitoring your campaign, you’re able to look at it in real time and adjust anything if necessary.

Does your email stand out?

When reaching out to your publisher ‘go to list’ it’s imperative that your subject line is enticing to publishers to ensure that it doesn’t get missed during the busy period. For example, “Black Friday (insert brand name) discount promotion exclusive”. If you are struggling to locate email addresses for the publishers you’d like to reach out to, please make sure to get in touch with the our Client Success team.

Making the most of the ShareASale platform

Once you have negotiated any activity with publishers for Q4, it’s strongly recommended that any CPA increase rates, exclusive codes or tenancy payments have been set up on the ShareASale platform so there’s no hiccups when the promotion goes live.

This includes placing any codes or promotions in the ‘Deals and Coupon Database’ section of the platform and uploading banners especially relevant to your holiday deals. Any exclusive codes you’ve also negotiated with publishers can be attributed to one publisher only by utilizing ‘Affiliate Individual Commission’ in the ‘Commission Portal’. This means that when the coupon code is used, the transaction is always attributed to the publisher who has been given the exclusive coupon code. The ‘Placement Opportunities’ can also be used to promote affiliate generic offers which publishers can access, so ensure to maximize on opportunities to reach out to publishers both directly and over the platform.

Post Campaign Analysis

After running any activity with affiliates during Q4, we would advise that advertisers undertake some level of post campaign analysis that can help shape their upcoming Q1 and determine budgets for the new year. By looking into the reporting suite in the platform, especially utilizing the above mentioned reports, you will be able to see when performance spikes happened over the period and who was driving those uplifts.

If performance wasn’t as well as you expected, reaching out to the publisher to find out more information on this and what you could possibly do different next time is important. However, should you see strong performance from a publisher you either invested tenancy or CPA in over the period, investing more into the future to maintain performance would be something you could factor in for the upcoming quarter in line with any promotions in order to develop the partnership further.

That concludes our Getting ready for Black Friday guide for SMEs. Now you should be equipped with the key deliverables required to research, create and execute a campaign to ensure a profitable peak period for your business. If you have any further questions please reach out to our Client Services team.

If you’re interested in starting an affiliate program with ShareASale, please get in touch here.

The post Getting ready for Black Friday: Small Business Guide – part two appeared first on ShareASale Blog.

,Read More

Affiliate Marketing on a Small Budget: 5 Strategies to Stretch Your Dollar

Having an endless budget to spend on testing campaigns and traffic sources is every affiliate’s dream.

However, as a beginner, you’re likely to have a small budget with a specific number in mind that you don’t want to go over.

Even if you’re an experienced veteran, there’s several factors that could put you in a position where you don’t want to pump a ton of your money into campaigns at the moment.

To make small budget affiliate marketing work, you simply need to alter your promotion strategies.

We’ve determined five ways to do just that.

You’ll notice that most of our below recommended strategies follow a trend of attempting to reduce competition with other affiliates. That’s because this is a tried and true way to make affiliate marketing work with a reduced budget.

If you’re trying to buy traffic or target users that large, big-budget affiliates are already buying and targeting, you’re naturally going to have to spend a lot of money to compete.

The following strategies will allow you to avoid that competition while still reaching users who are hungry for the product or service you’re promoting.

1. Narrow Your Niche 

Finding a niche and then shrinking its appeal is one way to combat over-saturation. It increases the cost efficiency of your budget by decreasing competition with other affiliates, many with larger budgets than yourself.

Where there is less competition, there’s usually less spending on keywords, ad space, etc.

To accomplish this, choose a popular niche and start thinking of how you can break it down into sub-niches.

Here’s an example.

Fitness: This is a long-standing lucrative vertical but one that’s saturated and highly competitive. There are already countless active ads focusing on weight-loss or a general active lifestyle backed by significant spending.  

To stretch your budget, create ads that focus on smaller fitness communities like bodybuilding, cross-fitters and even users following particular diets like paleo or intermittent fasting.

The product or service you’re promoting doesn’t need to be specific to those sub-niches as long it still relates to fitness. Just make sure your campaign angle, ad copy, and landing page fill in any gaps that exist between the content of the offer and the sub-niche. (Eg. Why people on a paleo diet should purchase this fitness program.)

2. Target Smaller demographics

The goal here is to discover users that are being missed by broad, large-budget targeting.

It’s similar to the sub-niche strategy we discussed above except you’re applying it specifically to demographics.

To do this, you’ll need to spend some time brainstorming creative angles for a campaign. In doing so, it will lead you to more unique users and hopefully untapped leads.      

Let’s say you’ve found a credit score campaign at MaxBounty that you’d like to promote.  

Just advertising to female credit card users will stretch you too thin.

Instead, you could target younger users in their 20s who are shopping for their first new vehicle. They may be so caught up in finding their dream car that they’ve forgotten how they’ll need a great credit score to finance. You can be the one to refresh their memory.

Dead set on a diet campaign? You could think outside the box by targeting middle-aged grooms who don’t want to look out-of-shape in comparison to their beautiful brides on their wedding day.

By narrowing your demographic, you can reach people who have the same level of interest in what you’re promoting but at a lower cost than a wider audience.

3. Select the Right Campaigns

When working with a small budget, it’s important to choose campaigns that are likely to cost you less to test and promote.

It’s also wise to choose campaigns that have a broad appeal. This usually means avoiding cost-per-sale campaigns with high rates.

CPS campaigns are more likely to be high risk/high reward. They also tend to require more budget for testing to determine what’s working and what isn’t.

With a cost-per-lead campaign with a lower rate, you have a greater chance of capturing leads which you can then use to assess your strategy, traffic source, creatives, etc.

Surveys, sweepstakes, and email submit campaigns are just a few great options for smaller budget affiliates for the reasons mentioned above.

We’ll discuss later how you can narrow the niche during your promotion, but the campaigns itself should appeal to a wide range of users.

4. Promote Campaigns in Less Popular Countries 

One of the most common ways to stretch a small budget in affiliate marketing is to avoid promoting campaigns in the most popular English-speaking countries.

Highly populated English-speaking countries like the US and the UK are the top choice for many affiliates. That’s because they offer wide reach while eliminating the need to translate creatives to another language.   

By putting in some extra work, you can find less competitive leads in countries like Sweden, Norway, Brazil, and South Africa to name a few.

However, we don’t recommend just using a service to translate your campaign (ad copy, LP, etc.) to another language and promoting the campaign. This strategy can yield poor results.

Different countries simply have different preferences.

You won’t find the same potato chip flavours in the UK as you will in North America. Residents in those countries prefer tastes that are ingrained in the culture of that region.  

You need to take the same approach when shifting campaign angles to different countries.

Take some time and think of ways you can alter your creatives to be more appealing in other geos. This could be as simple as changing your ad image and landing page headline to something that represents the culture of that country.

5. Utilize Less Competitive Traffic Sources 

In 2020 there are more traffic sources available to affiliates than ever before. From dozens of social platforms like Instagram and Snapchat to countless traffic networks like Taboola and Propeller Ads.

A simple way to save some cash is to avoid the top-tier premium traffic sources that cost the most money.

For example, let’s say you’re planning on using search traffic for your campaign.

You likely view Google Ads as the search alpha dog, and for good reason. Their platform simply offers unprecedented volume and reach.

However, their biggest competitor, Bing Ads shouldn’t just be viewed as a runner-up. In fact, they’re actually superior to Google Ads in several ways:

  • Easier to target an older demographic
  • Reaches users with a higher average household income
  • Cheaper cost-per-click

That last one is likely the most important if you’re on a tight budget.

Where Bing lacks in overall reach compared to Google it makes up for it in cost.

Bing’s average cost-per-click is 60% lower than Google’s.

Bing Ads is not just a substitute. It’s an alternative that can provide great results at a fraction of the cost.

With traffic platforms, you can save a lot of money by choosing the proverbial Pepsi over Coke. Most of the time the conversions will taste just as sweet.  

The post Affiliate Marketing on a Small Budget: 5 Strategies to Stretch Your Dollar appeared first on MaxBounty Blog.

,Read More