The affiliate marketing blueprint is simplistic in nature, but complex in execution. Finding influencers and affiliates that have potential in being revenue drivers is easy, but convincing them to promote your brand over others is hard.
With 14+ years of experience in the affiliate marketing space, I've built up a network that makes my job easier. But what if you are starting from ground zero?
You are in luck! I have documented the affiliate marketing blueprint that I follow with any new program. This is my affiliate marketing blueprint for affiliate managers who can help set your brand up for success. It may also help position you for a promotion.
1. Create Impactful Audits for Your Affiliate Program.
The auditing process is the foundation for successful client engagement.
When an affiliate manager conducts a thorough audit, it positions them as the “expert” in the client's eyes and helps them become familiar with the program.
When creating an audit for a client, here are some key steps you'll want to follow and include notes on in your final audit deliverable.
Sales Funnel Audit
- Examine PDPs, landing pages, and presells for optimization opportunities.
- Look at metrics like Bounce Rate and Time on Page for sales pages in Google Analytics.
- Look at the reviews on product pages.
- Use software programs like Mouseflow to examine user experience and behavior analytics.
- Go through the checkout flow to spot any immediate friction points to purchase.
Product Audit
- Establish what the best sellers or hero products are for the client.
- Learn what the product margins are for your client (especially which products have the highest margins).
- Learn if any products are seasonal.
- Learn if any products have inventory or return rate issues.
Partnership Audit
- Examine if any “publisher types” (content, loyalty, technology, etc) are not present in the program.
- See what the state of coupons and trademark bidding is in your client’s program.
- Examine the creative assets in the program.
- Visit top referring pages (referral URLs) and see if there are non-affiliate links or broken links on those pages.
- Perform a short gap analysis comparing other clients.
- Examine the current offer strategy – dynamic commissions, term templates, etc.
Affiliate managers who follow this auditing process and any internal processes set by their agency will set a solid foundation for program management.
2. Create Partner Personas.
Partner personas are detailed evaluations of the best partner fit for your brand. You need to drill down and find out what type of partner they are, what their job title is, how to find them, and their motivation to partner with you. Here is an example of one I did with a past client:
Try one of these for your brand and identify who your ideal Partner Persona is. Then we can start building a list of who they are.
3. Partner Scrubbing.
Often, affiliate marketing managers try and recruit as many affiliate partners as possible and hope that some of them become productive.
This approach needs to be revised. The number of affiliates in your program is a vanity metric.
Instead, affiliate managers should focus less on the total number of partners in a program and more on the productivity of those partners.
If you're looking at your affiliate partners and determining which to keep and which to scrub from your client list, here is a helpful framework to analyze whether or not they are an asset to your portfolio.
Productive Partners
In this case, productive partners are those that drive traffic or drive traffic and produce sales. You'll want to keep these affiliates in your program and maximize their output.
Of these productive partners, there will generally be a few that produce the lion's share of traffic and revenue to the program. The affiliate partners that do not produce any traffic and revenue are called dormant partners.
Dormant Partners
Dormant partners will typically fall into two groups: those that have the potential to be productive and those that do not.
It is up to you as the affiliate manager to determine which affiliate marketing partners have no potential to be productive. Once you do, it's best to remove them from your program.
4. Utilize Abandonment + Retargeting Partners.
Building traffic and revenue and getting productivity out of affiliate partners can be a waiting game.
Even after you get a partner into the program, it can take weeks or months to see valuable traffic and sales. For clients, that can be frustrating when they invest but aren’t seeing returns or growth.
Consider onboarding abandonment and retargeting partners to appease clients during this waiting period. This is also a way to optimize performance and capitalize on existing consumer demand.
What are Abandonment and Retargeting Partners?
Abandonment partners try incentivizing conversion or email capture when visitors show exit intent.
Exit intent can be hovering over the “X” on your tab, changing windows, or hitting the back button. These “actions” or “behaviors” signal exit intent on the customer’s behalf to the brand.
When abandonment partners detect this, they can deploy pop-ups and other messages to the customer to encourage the sale (discount, free shipping) or capture their email.
While “retargeting” is a broad term, it typically refers to ad units shown to previous visitors to your website, either through paid social campaigns or on publisher websites.
The whole purpose of retargeting partners is to keep your brand at the forefront of customers' minds while they are considering your product.
Some examples of these types of abandonment or retargeting partners include Upsellit, Revlifter, Addshoppers, Retargeted AI, Klickly, NMPI, and Cybba.
Why Use Retargeting and Abandonment Partners?
There are a few reasons why an affiliate manager should use these types of partners.
The first is they can generate more revenue for the client and attributable revenue to the affiliate channel.
These partners help convert customers and incentivize sales through on-site engagement.
The second reason is that they generate results quickly without taking too long to implement or requiring constant upkeep afterward.
While an affiliate manager is waiting for content partners, deal partners, mobile app partners, influencers, and other types of partners to start building traffic, retargeting and abandonment partners can bring incremental value to a program during that time.
The good thing is that as an affiliate manager scales traffic, these types of partners will scale proportionately to traffic growth.
5. Consider On-Site Partners.
Conversion rate optimization (CRO) is the affiliate program's best friend. If affiliate partners see a high quality site and landing page, they know it will convert their traffic, so they are more likely to send you more. On-site partners that can engage website visitors and increase sales.
These on-site partners do not require extensive effort after implementation. These technology partners operate in the background of your on-site user experience.
Raise AOV
One way to increase revenue through an affiliate program is to raise the average order value per customer (AOV).
Technology affiliate partners like Revlifter and Increasingly work to increase the average order value per customer by offering discounts at certain spend thresholds, bundling products, and suggesting recommended products.
These types of partners can be helpful in verticals like fashion, cosmetics, technology, and tools.
Chat and Assisted Shopping
Another type of affiliate partner that engages customers on-site is chat and assisted shopping.
Companies like Envolve Tech implement virtual shopping assistants onto e-commerce websites to engage shoppers on-site, answer questions they may have, and lead them to certain products.
Brands can set up question-led funnels through shopping assistants to help guide shoppers into product decisions.
Trademark Plus Partners
™+ partners, or Trademark Plus partners, are partners who bid on “Your Brand Name” and “x” terms in Google-branded paid search campaigns.
For example, “Nike Shoes” would be an example of a Trademark—“NIKE” + “Shoe” term in Google or other search engines.
There is some debate in the affiliate world about whether trademark plus partners are valuable affiliate partners, and several brands have no trademark plus bidding rules in their affiliate programs.
On a positive note, if the client permits, trademark plus partners like Savings.com and Bravo Deal will save brands CPC budgets on branded term searches.
These partners are relatively scalable as they are outsourced and work through Google, Bing, or other search advertising networks.
The attributable affiliate revenue will also increase whenever a brand’s “brand search” volume goes up.
Partner with the right technology
Not all tracking attribution platforms are made the same. If you want affiliate tracking solutions that work for your brand, check out my post on best affiliate management software. And check out my favorite solution of 2024 Inflektion.ai.
6. Land Review Articles That Drive Traffic.
This is the toughest partner to convince to promote your brand. While scoring premium placements on sites like Forbes, Business Insider, and CNN is a good benchmark to aim for, many other niche review sites may actually be more valuable for an affiliate program.
Just because a publisher may be premium doesn’t mean they are the authoritative voice in a particular industry or for a specific product.
Affiliate managers should be less concerned with the vanity side of affiliate management (the total number of placements and how well-known the publisher's name is) and more concerned with direct results stemming from the partnership.
How to Determine the Right Site for Your Affiliate Client
Affiliate managers must conduct deep research within their client’s industries to understand which websites rank highest for relevant consumer searches.
It might be one of those premium sites, or it could be a niche blogs or review site with lots of product reviews, round-ups, and gift guides.
Tools like Semrush, Similarweb, Ahrefs, and Spyfu can help affiliate marketers identify the critical consumer searches and informational articles that help consumers during their purchase journey.
Whether it’s Forbes or a small personal finance website, what's most important is how much traffic the site drives to your client's affiliate program. High trust and high relevant traffic will lead to high performance.
When looking at a site, evaluate the messaging, appearance, credibility, and professionalism of the publishers they want to recruit as partners.
Metrics like bounce rate and time on page can also indicate the level of trust consumers have in a particular publisher or its content.
7. Add Paid Search Publishers.
Affiliate managers should familiarize themselves with publishers who drive additional website traffic via paid search advertising.
If a publisher’s earnings per click through commission payments exceed the cost per click of advertising, it makes sense for them to drive additional traffic to that page as long as the earnings stay above the price.
From a brand’s perspective, this can accelerate traffic, revenue, and general production from the affiliate program.
Publishers like buyersguide.org, bestreview.guide, and consumerrating.org specialize in this type of media buying.
It’s worth it to comb through their various reviews to see if any reviews would be a fit for a client.
So-called premium publishers also participate in paid search media buying, as seen in the below screenshot from The Spruce.
The Spruce is actively bidding on the term “best vacuum cleaner” and around 100 other relevant keywords for its vacuum cleaner review page.
While estimates are not exact, Semrush suggests that the page receives around 8,800 monthly visits via sponsored listings through the search engines.
That is around 400% more traffic than the page would receive through organic search alone.
That’s additional traffic that a client’s products can get exposure to.
Affiliate managers need to know the flow of organic and paid traffic within a client’s market to provide excellent service.
Outsourced Media Buyers
Another type of affiliate partner that can be extremely useful from a scalability perspective is media buyers or media buying partners.
Affiliate media buyers specialize in paid media channels like Meta, Google Paid Search, Google Shopping, Native Advertising, TikTok, etc.
Typically, these media buyers will perform audits in Google Analytics or a specific paid channel (TikTok, Meta, Tabooa, etc.) they will manage.
They will want to learn about your previous campaigns, campaign performance, and average cost per acquisition.
Though these partners may have different fee structures, they will most often work on a commission basis on a percentage of spend, revenue, or certain costs per action.
Some partners, like NMPI, will work on a fronted advertising spend commission / CPA model.
In this model, media buying affiliates agree to invest money in a particular paid channel, like Google Paid Search, as long as the CPA paid to them is profitable compared to what they invest in campaigns.
For example, if a brand's average cost per acquisition in Google Paid Search is $40, then under the partner-fronted commission advertising spend model, that partner might charge $50 per customer acquired, making a profit of $10 from each referral for their investment and risk.
Companies like NMPI and Imwave operate on this fronted advertising spend model. Additionally, several media buying partners on the Squaredance marketplace operate this way.
Non-traditional Affiliate “Partnerships”
There is a push to rebrand the term affiliate for “partnerships.” In reality, affiliate refers to a business model in which a promoter (affiliate) gets paid for driving outcomes.
Fifteen years ago, affiliate marketing might have referred exclusively to email offers, coupons, loyalty partners, and bloggers. Today, “partnership marketing” refers to more traditional affiliate partners.
Examples of partners include mobile apps, technology, and Connected TV partners.
An affiliate marketer aims to drive as much meaningful third-party (referral) traffic to a client’s website as possible.
Sometimes, that means looking outside the affiliate network to identify traffic sources and partnerships.
App stores are always good places to look. In addition, platforms like Nift have advertising marketplaces (outside of Meta, Google TikTok, etc.) that allow managers to introduce their clients to new audiences.
Pay attention to direct-to-consumer blogs, podcasts, and innovative brands in your industry to identify emerging partners with whom you can collaborate.
8. Integrate Social, Competitor, and Market Listening to Your Process
One way that affiliate managers can stay informed on the latest opportunities is through social media and market listening.
Listening includes setting up alerts, notifications, and lists using competitor, product, and market keywords.
If an affiliate manager runs an affiliate program for a client who sells vacuum cleaners, they would want to set up alerts for “Dyson,” “best vacuum cleaners,” and many other search terms.
You'll want to review these alerts regularly to spot opportunities for recruitment and placement.
Choose Search Terms
To properly set up listening campaigns, an affiliate manager must choose a set of terms to set up alerts.
These terms should be based on product, competitors, and market terms, though they can also be names of publications, influencers, and industry voices.
Choose Listening Platforms
Several different platforms are built for social listening. Some are free, and others are not.
Google Alerts is a free monitoring tool that will automate daily alerts to an email inbox. It is an effective, simple tool to use, but it is limited to listening only from web pages.
If you want to listen to what's being talked about on social media, social listening platforms include Awario, Brand24, and BuzzSumo. These users to monitor keywords on social media platforms like X, Instagram, YouTube, and TikTok.
9. Automate and Customize Reporting
To spend more time on growing and optimizing your client’s program, you need to spend less time number crunching.
Most agencies have reporting tools (like Affluent, Google Data Studio, Tableau, etc) in addition to the built-in reporting capabilities of the network your program is on.
Automate Data from Google Sheets
Suppose you use Google Sheets for data analysis, such as profit analysis. In that case, you can automate and send that data to your client using the Schedule and Send Email in Spreadsheets extension, available in the Google Workspace Marketplace.
Reporting tools like Affluent can only work with data from affiliate networks, so you may have to use an extension for outside data reporting.
Customizing the Data For Your Client
There should be features to customize the report to fit a particular program’s needs and to schedule reports for sending to stakeholders on your client’s team.
You should customize reporting based on the metrics your client cares about. You can determine this by asking questions that help you identify the core metrics that will help you customize your reports and reporting dashboards around the data they prioritize.
Metrics That Will Likely Be Important to Your Client
- Customer Lifetime Value
- Return on Ad Spend
- Cost Per Click
- Cost Per Acquisition
- Earnings Per Click
Questions to Ask Your Client
- What are the top three metrics you care about? Examples: CPA, ROAS, Revenue, New Customer Rate.
- Should the focus be on acquiring new customers or encouraging repeat purchases (new-to-file rate, new vs. returning, new customer revenue)?
- Is there a target CPA you would like to see in your affiliate program?
- Is there a specific publisher type you want to see more of?
- What is the month-over-month growth rate you would like to see?
- Are there specific seasonal periods for your brand?
- Is there a percentage of the total revenue you would like your affiliate program to contribute?
10. Keep Learning
Affiliate managers have access to numerous network resources, including newsletters, publisher features, webinars, educational courses, and agency development teams.
Taking affiliate marketing courses through Google, Datacamp, and Udemy are other ways affiliate managers can use to round out skill sets.
If affiliate managers want to operate at the top of their game, you should use as many of these resources as bandwidth allows.
