To run their company, the average enterprise company employs 120 marketing tools. Suppose your affiliate program isn’t linked to the rest of your marketing and consumer data. You’re looking at isolated trees in a big forest of your entire marketing efforts in that case.
By combining your data, you can only understand the sheer closing power of affiliates, the engagement building of influencers, and how your media spending affects all of your other efforts. This data consolidation is only possible by combining all of your performance marketing data into a single analytical reporting dashboard.
The sooner you link your other marketing data and channels, the sooner you will be able to open new opportunities for scaling your affiliate program and growing its relevance among your marketing channels.
Let’s have a look at the most important affiliate marketing integration ideas.
Shopping carts provide both speed and dependability.
The third-party tracking cookie is no longer in use. Nothing is more frustrating for your affiliate than advertising your brand and then failing to get the expected results due to tracking leaks.
Integrating directly with the shopping cart to track every conversion is the best approach to ensure that you will consistently credit your affiliates and other marketing sources.
Shopping cart interfaces are especially important for agencies and major publishers because they allow them to connect to brand clients instantly without requiring time or complicated technical work, allowing them to focus on delivering results right away.
CRMs for Affiliate Association
One of the most difficult difficulties for B2B and subscription-type affiliate programs is properly paying affiliates. Without the correct data, you must either pay a high sum upfront and risk fraud or pay a lower sum that does not adequately compensate your affiliates for their efforts.
With a CRM link, you can accurately align your affiliates’ payout structure to the quality of conversions delivered. Because you can update their conversions each time a new lead status event occurs in your CRM, you can pay them less in the beginning and considerably more when they are driving proven high-quality conversions.
Once your affiliate’s payouts and customer value data are fully synced, you may offer significantly higher payouts to encourage premium publishers. The more you can payout, the more exciting and one-of-a-kind partnerships you may begin establishing and nurturing.
Paid marketing channels are being consolidated.
Partnerships are merely one tentpole of a scaled brand’s performance marketing efforts.
Affiliation might continuously overlap with your other performance marketing efforts, making determining who gets attribution credit difficult.
The next stage of affiliate marketing is when all of your media buying data streams into your platform, and it turns to be your single source of truth for analyzing how each performance channel produces value. This following stage of attribution demonstrates the full additional impact of affiliate marketing and provides a clearer grasp of the awareness value provided by influencers.
Preventing Fraud Through Automation
There will be fraud from every non-transparent advertising channel as long as there is money to be made. After reaching certain scale peaks, a fraud solution is required, but frequently at large volumes; really utilizing that fraud data becomes a time suck for your team.
When your fraud solution is directly connected to your affiliate program, you can automate the fraud flags to take fast action to prevent fraudulent traffic sources or suspect conversions.
The instant automated action substantially improves the experience for your affiliates, as they will immediately know when their placement has delivered fraudulent commissions and which placements were responsible.
The majority of affiliates buy/receive traffic from dozens or thousands of placements. They do not have the fraud data to identify when those sources are sending fake traffic and can only take action if the brand informs them. With rapid feedback, they can quickly remove those ads and prevent the stress of having conversions and income erased at the end of the month, allowing them to market your brand more sustainably.
Affiliate Marketing’s Underutilized Potential
Despite renaming themselves as affiliate marketing platforms, most affiliate networks’ technology has scarcely progressed. Basic reporting may give the impression that an affiliate program is generating a lot of cash, while in fact, the “conversions” are the consequence of coupon poaching. You can’t blame any of the people involved for not wanting to jeopardize their easy money, but the industry has suffered as a result.
Affiliate marketing has far more potential than simply recruiting the same ten “super affiliates” for each scheme. This does not imply that you should abandon your present affiliates. It means having better reporting and tools to guarantee they are lavishly rewarded when they produce actual value, and they don’t have to worry about conversions being snatched by a last-minute coupon.
With the correct reporting and solutions in place, your affiliates can thrive, and you can expand your program to work with a wider range of partnerships — from the sheer awareness boost of influencers to continuing referrals from symbiotic tech tools. To accomplish really expansive affiliate marketing, affiliate marketing needs both data and adaptable tracking tools.
Smarter Affiliate Programs Grow More Rapidly
The affiliate marketing lead should always be a marketing team rockstar. Affiliate marketing was already incredibly cost-effective (Media Bulletin, 2021), but with a more flexible platform, the affiliate marketing lead should track and own all referral traffic from existing consumers and partnerships.
At Scaleo, almost half of our customers come from references, and they have the highest retention and lifetime value of any traffic source. They would own the most cost-effective sources of traffic with merely affiliate and referrals, plus they have the power to establish exciting new external win-win tech relationships that have the entire company buzzing.
The reason affiliate managers haven’t earned the respect they deserve is due to a two-fold technological limitation:
- The attribution problem of determining who deserves credit for each convert.
- The inability to manage affiliates beyond what is offered within an affiliate network marketplace.
The first problem is determining who deserves credit, which can only be done once all of the data has been aggregated into a single platform and every click and engagement can be correctly compared and understood.
The second challenge is all about tracking any form of partnership and feeding your external marketing data to those partners. With greater data, power, and reporting, affiliate managers will be able to better demonstrate the value of the affiliates they now manage while also expanding the programs to encompass a much broader spectrum of value-driving partnerships.
There are numerous opportunities for fully integrated affiliate market programs that recognize where each partnership and performance source adds value. Begin bringing in your data integrations, utilizing that data, and growing your collaborations more broadly and effectively.
Last Updated on January 17, 2024
