The affiliate channel is growing up

Hi TomInteresting post. We have had very mixed experiences with affiliate marketing. Although we persevere, the affiliate partnerships that have worked best for us are the ones we have created and managed ourselves rather than those through an intermediary. This of course means more management, development and monitoring on our side but overall these are still much more profitable.

Hi NatashaIt doesn’t surprise me that you’ve had success running your own program, although it’s really disappointing to you haven’t achieved as much as you could working with an affiliate network. I agree that nobody is in a better position to communicate the benefits and value of the service than the advertiser themselves and so they can build a successful in-house program if they’re truly proactive. However we believe it’s even more effective to combine the advertiser’s business knowledge and relationships with the additional distribution, experience and technology of an affiliate network. A network can “liberate” the client to focus on the areas that deliver true value rather than the technical or administrative side as well as providing access to a community far larger (over 70,000 in the case of AffiliateFuture) and better established than they can create on their own.Many affiliates prefer working through a network as they are very comfortable and familiar with the interface, confident in the tracking and payment schedules. It’s also time-saving for them because they are probably running several programs already through the network. Further a network’s dedicated technology give merchants exposure they cannot achieve alone, for example AffiliateFuture’s travel search solution aggregates a huge number of products making it far more appealing to affiliates to promote than a single merchant program. Finally networks also have far more robust tracking in place, alongside cookies we have Veracitag ™ our exclusive cookieless tracking solution that thus far has identified an extra 7% of our network’s transactions. Tom