Today’s digital marketing landscape is sophisticated and nuanced. Modern marketers rely on relationships that are built on the sturdy foundation of data-driven performance. Both sides of the equation—advertisers and publishers—have a piqued interest in leveraging affiliate marketing in a way that’s measurable and that can be proven to boost their digital efforts. Yet, legacy networks truly fail to deliver the tools and insights necessary to make it happen.
Case in point: here are just five components that your current affiliate network can’t (or won’t) provide:
1. Dynamic Commissioning: Does your network support your channel success by enabling you to dynamically assign commission values based on conversion attributes? If not, you’re taking a rear-view approach to channel spend, rather than being proactive.
2. Attribution tools: Do you have the ability to attribute conversions to specific publishers based on consumer behavior or buyer purchase journeys? Clicks that are first, last, or somewhere in between might warrant spend attribution and allocation based on what’s important to your brand. If you can’t assign value based on what’s important to you, you’re missing out.
3. Brand protection: Minimizing revenue loss and protecting your investment across search, social, domain, code and content is a necessity in the digital landscape. You can’t be proactive if you don’t have always on tools to monitor your channel activity.
4. Comprehensive reporting suite: Data-driven decisions require not only snapshots of channel performance, but also trended views that shine light on areas of opportunity and optimization. If you can’t draw actionable insights from your network reporting and are relying on manual reporting views, you’re spending too much time on what should be a table stake.
5. Flexible pricing models: Marketers must be able to support their digital efforts with pricing structures that align with their competencies, growth plans and budgets. Pricing flexibility, or reconciliation, will only result in sustainable, high-performing partnerships for all relevant parties.
Take the guess work and the hassle of tedious comparison shopping out of the equation by reviewing our Buyer’s Quick Guide to Affiliate Providers, so you can choose the affiliate technology provider that’s right for you. See the difference for yourself.
