Your Roadmap
Going Beyond Affiliates
What will make your program more successful?
Scope out your plan to be competitive, make sure everything is ready for launching, recruit all types of performance-based partners, and optimize effectively.
Scope Out Your Program
Before starting a partner program, make sure you're starting with everything you need to make your program successful.
Ask yourself:
What will make my program interesting and exciting for partners to promote?
What is a competitive payout that will work for my margins?
What kinds of internal resources do I need to make this program successful?
tip
To structure a competitive affiliate program, start by researching existing programs in your vertical. Seasoned, successful affiliates will expect payouts comparable to or better than what they're already promoting.
Schedule Your Everflow Demo
Our website provides a small glimpse into how we can help accelerate your growth through partnerships and better tracking. The best way to see where we can help your specific business needs is through a consultative demo with our team. You can request now, and keep reading in the meantime:
Request DemoLooking For The Easiest Way To Launch? Try Everflow Plus.
Everflow Plus is our white glove service that provides extra resources for taking your program from pre-launch to scaling. All Everflow customers have access to a stellar customer support, but Everflow Plus takes that support to the next level.
With Everflow Plus, you'll get:
A dedicated account manager to get your program ready to launch, complete with offers, tracking, and attribution in place
Full data and setup migrations from existing platforms
Ongoing training for your team
Technical resources for activating existing integrations, and scoping is available for custom integrations
Global partner payment processing at scale without any outside contracts or setups
Introductions to key Preferred Partners for driving performance in your vertical
Why Everflow Plus
As you'll see in the demo, Everflow's features are a massive upgrade for most partner programs. More capabilities also means more new things to learn.
Everflow Plus was designed to make the launch and transition as easy as possible for your team. We'll set up your program the right way, make key partner introductions to help you earn the ROI you desire, and get your tech stack connected to the platform so that you can start making smart, informed decisions about your performance.
Go Beyond Affiliates By Tracking With Direct Linking
Direct Linking tracks users when they reach your website. This tracking method opens up massive opportunities because it allows you to seamlessly track every channel, including Facebook and Google Ads, and have consolidated reporting for all of your performance.
Direct Linking works similar to Google Analytics.
Partner 5 promotes you using the link:
yourbrand.com?affid=5
When a user reaches your website, our tag will see affid=5 in the URL and start tracking that user. When that user purchases, Partner 5 will get credit for driving that sale.
Setting up Direct Linking is easy. You can do it instantly for our integrated shopping carts, or place two JS tags for all other types of websites.
Use Integrations To Quickly Connect Your Tech Stack
Our most successful customers use Everflow as their centralized hub for all of their marketing efforts that drive ROI. The more data received into the platform, the more informed your decisions will be.
Our most commonly used types of integrations are:
Shopping Carts - Set up tracking in a few clicks
CRMs - Track customer stages as events
CDPs - Connect your external data sources
Facebook / Google - Push conversion data
Payments - Pay partners (included with Plus)
Suppression - For Email & SMS Partners
You can see our full list of integrations and partners here:
See ListCustom Integrations
Do you need a critical integration that we don't currently offer? As part of Everflow Plus, we can scope out your requirements for the integration. Then, we'll provide you with a clear, fair proposal for building the custom integration.
We're here to support your continued growth.
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Manage More Types Of Partners
The affiliate channel is well known for being one of the most cost effective marketing channels available, delivering customers at your desired CPA.
Having access to powerful and flexible tracking methods means you can driver performance from more types of partnerships:
Influencers - Track their performance through coupons and our automatically generated tracking code URLs.
Customers / Fans - Recruit your best advocates to start promoting your brand. With our platform, you own every relationship.
Offline Placements - Use tracking QR codes to drive performance.
Apps - Connect your MMP, use postbacks, and prevent click fraud.
Media Buying - Track your own performance, and use our integrations to push conversion data to your partners ad accounts.
Strategic Partners - Provide them with a reporting dashboard.
Set Up Your Coupon Strategy And Defenses
Here is the unspoken reality for eCommerce affiliate marketing: everything revolves around coupons.
The normal user behavior is to shop, see the coupon code box while completing the purchase, and then look for a coupon code. When the user grabs that coupon, it fires off that coupon site's tracking link and takes the credit for the purchase right along with it. We call this Coupon Poaching.
Even if you decide not to work with coupon affiliates, you can still run into issues if you use coupons for tracking influencers or other channels due to many sites allowing user submissions. Before you know it, you're paying the wrong partners for driving sales.
How do you protect your program from Coupon Poaching? Use our Click-To-Conversion Time reports and implement rules to understand who really deserves credit. If a user grabs a coupon code and completes a purchase in the manner described above, then the length of time between the initial click and conversion (i.e. the purchase) would be unnaturally short and therefore not worthy of attribution. You can learn more about creating a strategy by reading this guide.
Why coupon affiliates are great
There are strong arguments for the value of coupon affiliates. Consumers are more likely to buy and less likely to look at competitors when they find a deal on a third party site. It feels more special.
Also, not all coupon websites are the same. Many are loyalty websites where they offer special coupon discounts to their members. These members weren't specifically planning to buy from you, so when they reach your website they will spend time shopping like your other customers. You can easily see they are driving healthy behavior as there will be a much longer click-to-conversion time in your reporting.
Test To Make Sure Everything Is Ready For Launching
Everything needs to work before you activate your partners. If your partners promote your offer, and don't see any results from their efforts, their motivation for continuing to test your offer will run out quickly.
Our onboarding team will support you with testing the most common setup issues:
Are you tracking user clicks when they reach your website?
Are you recording conversions when these users purchase?
Does the conversion have the correct revenue and payout?
Are your partner tracking links configured to pass you the right data points? Usually the partner ID, offer ID, and their placement IDs.
Are you returning all the conversion data points that would help your partners scale their efforts?
For advanced partners, are you firing their postback properly to pass back all of the data they need?
Recruit Partners Into Your Program
At this point, you'll be ready to start growing your partnerships.
Always keep in mind for partners that are only paid when they drive performance: they are taking on risk. Testing and promoting your offer takes time, effort, and if they buy media, money. You need to make sure that you make it easy for them to get started, provide them with the resources they need to be successful, and offer an enticing payout that will reward them for ramping up their efforts.
Two of the best sources of performance partners:
Research affiliates promoting your competitors: Often the best affiliates to promote your offers are the ones that are already successfully promoting other products in your vertical. You can do quick searches for competitors or specific type of product and include search terms like reviews, discounts, and coupons to see what websites are already promoting in your space. The vast majority will be open to affiliate partnerships (though may be unresponsive without an existing relationship or a very enticing offer).
Your existing customers / fans: Your best promoters will always be people that already know and love your product. Reach out to your own audience about joining your program, and get them set up with tracking links. You may not even want/need to pay them, but letting them see how many purchases they've driven and sending them thank you gifts goes a long way.
Where Everflow Plus Fits In
With Everflow Plus, we're here to help you reach your desired ROI sooner. One of the ways we do this is by introducing you to a curated set of partners that would be a great fit for your product or business. We bring you high valued partner relationships that can form a cornerstone of your program as it grows.
Once you've gained some traction through our partner introductions, you'll want to continuing growing your program through your own ongoing recruitment efforts or by working with one of our certified affiliate management agencies that bring their own relationships to the table.
Understand What Drove Results
It's great when you have your partners delivering sales on a regular basis. Taking your program from delivering good results to being your best performing channel, requires the ability to optimize those partners further. Fortunately, at Everflow we make understanding your data simple.
We recommend tracking and optimizing around the following:
Events - Tracking sales isn't enough, you should be tracking any important events that show engagement. For example, newsletter signups, visiting your pricing page, or purchasing a subscription. Once you track these details, you can better understand channels like influencer or content that may not deliver as many sales, but far more engagement.
Placement IDs - Professional affiliates and media buyers drive traffic from a wide variety of websites and placements. Some placements are good, some deliver fraud, and neither you nor the partner would notice it without looking at performance on the placement level.
Drill down into placements - Using our Dimensional Analytics tool, you can easily drill down into any partner to see their performance by placement. Deactivating low quality placements can quickly take their traffic from good to great.
Review Click-To-Conversion Time reports - Regularly checking this report makes it easy to catch coupon poaching and other common types of fraud. Users shouldn't be purchasing from your website 20 seconds after they reach it, unless they were already almost done purchasing.
Set YOUR PROGRAM Up For Success
Regardless of which plan you choose, our team will help guide you through the onboarding process to make sure you set up your program with the right fundamentals.
You can avoid a lot of fraud and make managing your program much easier by setting up clear, concise rules in Everflow: Only accepting traffic from specified countries, using day parting to only accept traffic during your normal time zone hours, and alerts to notify you whenever something suspicious occurs.