By adopting new approaches, publishers can gain greater control, improve operational efficiencies and, most importantly, make more money from their affiliate and partner commerce.
Recognising the value of partner marketing
As a result of these potential benefits, publishers are taking a growing interest in affiliate partnership programmes. A Digiday survey in early 2020 on publisher goals revealed that 43% were not planning to adopt affiliate marketing as a revenue stream in the forthcoming year. By the follow-up survey in 2021, the number of publishers not planning to earn money from affiliates had fallen to 34%.
Publishers are increasingly recognising that affiliate marketing can help deliver growth by providing them with new revenue streams. It also offers an opportunity to reduce their reliance on the advertising platform giants. Price rises on Facebook, Google, and Instagram put significant pressure on publisher margins and drive increased competition to acquire traffic: the affiliate channel allows them to alleviate these pressures.
And in today's marketing environment, where consumer trust in advertising has never been lower, publishers are in a solid position to offer brands what they crave: affiliate partnerships that give them access to authentic, relevant, and trusting audiences.
The need for a new approach
So, affiliate marketing is becoming more critical to publishers. But building strong affiliate revenues requires them to grow their partner base – and more partners mean more complexity. The sophistication required today to report across multiple networks and platforms, analyse performance over a richer array of contexts, and track how articles, links and traffic sources are performing, go beyond what the traditional affiliate industry offers. Currently, even prizing out and reporting on basic information is overwhelming. To scale their affiliate business, publishers need a new solution.
And in this programmatic-fuelled world, this shouldn't be difficult – and it's not. Technology, like impact.com’s Trackonomics, is now solving the basic but fundamental problem for publisher affiliate marketing: data consolidation. And by addressing publishers' challenges, technology is enabling them to develop their strategy according to what is needed to support their affiliate goals.
Consolidation is king
Publishers can now bring all their data together centrally, report on how affiliates are performing and know how much money they are making. For larger publishers with multiple properties, this insight can become very granular. From viewing overall performance, they can break this down further into different properties, advertisers and networks or go deeper to the page and article level – even down to actual transactions.
Traditional approaches operated across silos and damaged efficiencies. Automation now removes the laborious, manual, and often error-prone process of logging into multiple networks and physically pulling together reports. It makes it easy to consolidate and aggregate data from a myriad of platforms and networks so insights can be accessed immediately. This saves publishers vast amounts of time – time that can be spent on more value-generating activities like creating great content. And in freeing up time, this has important cost-saving implications for a business.
Accessing reliable, relevant, and up to date information empowers publishers to make more intelligent decisions to drive their growth strategies. They can understand what is generating revenue (and what is not), who they should be partnering with, and what commission rates they should offer. It allows them to identify opportunities to optimise their activities and introduce improvements to build their business. Above all, it puts them in control.
Today, affiliate success requires publishers to do things differently. Automation is bringing a real renaissance to affiliate marketing. Streamlining practices, reducing friction, and increasing deal volumes is creating more monetisation opportunities for publishers. And embracing this new era of affiliate marketing, they have the chance to deliver much needed additional revenue.
Automation is bringing a real renaissance to affiliate marketing.
About us
Since its founding in 2014, Trackonomics has been committed to making affiliate e-commerce a primary monetisation channel for publishers around the world. Trackonomics empowers leading publishers with a suite of tools designed to create, analyse, and optimise affiliate content at scale, supporting revenue diversification. Trackonomics is headquartered in London, England, with another office in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Website: www.trackonomics.net
