How do I create an affiliation campaign?

Affiliation has become a ubiquitous phenomenon. The Internet is full of them. What are the mechanics of using affiliation properly? And how do you deploy an affiliation campaign?

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What is affiliation?

Definition of affiliation

Affiliation is a practice launched in the United States by Amazon in 1996. It's a partnership between :

• on the one hand, the advertiser website, also known as the affiliator, whose aim is to promote its products, services or brand.
• on the other hand, the publisher website, also known as an affiliate, whose aim is to bring sales, registrations or traffic to the affiliator.

Affiliate profit-sharing

The goodwill relationship is based on the principle of profit-sharing: the affiliate receives a commission based on his or her contribution. This has become a founding principle in the digital sector. Popular with pure players, it is at the heart of their strategy. As far as publishers are concerned, it's what allows bloggers to monetize their sites.

The different reciprocity schemes for affiliation campaigns

Three units of measurement stand out:

• CPA: Cost Per Action, based on the number of clicks. These clicks may, for example, have resulted in the acquisition of a new customer or the triggering of an order.
• CPC: Cost Per Click, also known as double click, or CPV (Cost Per Visitor). Here, we broaden the base to include all traffic generated by the link.
• CPL: Cost Per Lead, for links that lead visitors to subscribe to a mailing list, answer online questions or fill in a form.

Using affiliation for your business

The objectives of an affiliation campaign

For advertisers, the mechanisms made possible by affiliation provide a pertinent response to a number of challenges, such as :

• making yourself known ;
• promoting your expertise ;
• generate new leads ;
• reaching out to prospects
• winning over new customers.

An attractive cost-opportunity ratio

For the advertiser, the return on investment (ROI) of an affiliation campaign is immediately high, since it generates very few costs and is based on quantified variables. It's therefore an excellent way of promoting your website while maximizing your conversion rate.

The affiliate link and its many forms

The affiliate link can be a text link or a visual. Your affiliates can talk about you in an article or on a page on their site, or through display media such as banner ads and web inserts.

How do I set up an affiliation campaign?

To take advantage of the traffic your affiliates will bring you, you need to launch your affiliate program. The aim is to make yourself known to qualified publishers, in order to launch a "social media" strategy. You then become an advertiser.

Affiliation with Google

Google's paid search system, as opposed to SEO (Search Engine Optimization), is based on sponsored links. With the help of Google Analytics, for example, you can use targeted keywords to move up the search engine rankings. This is known as SEA: Search Engine Advertising. You can complement this Adwords campaign with affiliation campaigns. This is known as SEM: Search Engine Marketing.

Affiliate marketing with platform

On Google, however, you'll soon come up against your own limitations. Even more so if you're a marketing agency. As complexity increases, with hybrid compensation models for example, or a growing number of affiliates, you'll feel the need to switch to a dedicated management tool. There are various affiliate program management platforms available: Zanox, for example, or NetAffiliation.

However, three professional affiliation platforms stand out clearly on the market:

• AdVibe: is an easy-to-use solution. It requires no software installation. Powerful, it can manage large volumes of data. Subtle in its parameterization, it allows you to program your operations over time, with time limits.

• Effinity Marketing Technologies: a real asset when it comes to tracking. The solution enables you to trace web users' journeys in detail. When it comes to remuneration methods, you can easily manage complex rules. You can distinguish actions by product category or sales channel, for example.

• Affilae: this is undoubtedly the easiest interface to get to grips with. Its attributive layer provides an advanced analytical reading of the impact of the various levers used in your web marketing campaigns.

See all software Affiliate Marketing

Top 3 affiliation platforms

Affiliation is a real resource for online marketing, whether it's to promote your website or develop your brand awareness. Its benefits are measured in click-through rates, which are easier to quantify than online advertising policies.

Inserted on a site, blog, mailing or landing page, an affiliate link, if managed via a quality affiliation platform, provides good metrics for evaluating your transformation rates.