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.

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.

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.