You can maximize the performance of your marketing campaigns by consolidating all of them under a single ad platform. This will save time on administrative tasks, offer comprehensive analytics on campaigns across multiple channels and help you optimize them accordingly. Affiliate software is in a unique position to consolidate campaigns from across different channels because it monitors the entire acquisition process. By supporting and tracking different marketing models and offering comparative reports, the right software will provide the intelligence you need to maximize your return.

Consolidating campaigns can be a marketer’s dream come true. Under one platform, a user gets comprehensive analytics on the performance of campaigns across different channels and gains time on campaign administration. A flexible affiliate platform can accommodate the consolidation of multiple campaigns by supporting different marketing models and reporting on key performance indicators (KPIs). This flexibility will extend to tracking online and offline campaigns, supporting different incentive structures (CPC, CPL and CPA), and custom language settings for different markets.

Clustering campaigns under a single platform can provide comprehensive insight into what acquisition channels are best suited for different products or promotions. Affiliate software must have two essential elements: campaign groups and automated group management.

Campaign groups allow you to proactively manage campaigns by assigning publishers to groups with pre-set commission structures and then monitor the results of these specific groups of publishers. Automated management of these groups then takes the guesswork out of managing multiple campaigns by, first, expiring campaigns alongside their promotions, and, second, automatically applying replacement campaigns to all publishers in that group.

Campaigns from the Spanish-speaking market can be consolidated with English language campaigns by working with affiliate software that can support several languages. For instance, publishers targeting your Latin market should be supported by a Spanish language interface. The ability to customize the language settings of your program is essential to consolidating (or expanding into) campaigns that target different language markets.

Optimization
Consolidating campaigns under a single platform allows you to optimize campaigns by testing them in a controlled environment before rolling them out across other channels. Campaigns can be tested in a controlled, performance-based environment (where you pay only for results), allowing you to monitor traffic and conversions, and identify which promotions work best for particular products and in which markets.

There are four kinds of intelligence reporting that your affiliate software may provide in order to optimize your campaigns: traffic, earnings, creative and time periods. Together, these reports provide invaluable metrics on acquisition and ROI.

Traffic and earnings reports will allow you to monitor and scrutinize the two influences on your KPI’s – such as creatives and landing pages. With this information you can compare the conversion success at the click, registration and conversion level. This depth of intelligence gives you insight into the full cycle of a customer acquisition, letting you analyze where your strengths are in the acquisition process.

Your software should let you filter these reports by creative. Doing so gives you insight into what actually resonates with your target market – i.e., what banners users actually click on. By comparing banners that convert to those that don’t, you gain intelligence on which banners to drop and which to keep, and on what elements to incorporate into the development of future creatives. Consequently, when you roll out those creatives across other channels, you will be maximizing your chance of getting not just impressions and clicks, but actual conversions.

Maximize
Once individual campaigns have been optimized, the right software can also help you maximize the return of all your campaigns on an ongoing basis. A period comparison overview will provide a snapshot of how campaign performance fluctuates by showing you the ratio of change – i.e., by what percentage conversions increased or decreased in response to a change in variable. This ratio can be compared against other market performance to determine whether the change in conversions was spurious or, in fact, caused by a change in banner or landing page.

By managing all your marketing campaigns through a single platform, you can maximize the ROI of your campaigns by saving time on management, accessing comprehensive analytics on cross-channel campaigns and optimizing them accordingly. Affiliate software is uniquely positioned to consolidate campaigns from across different channels because it can track the entire acquisition process, providing what you need to optimize cross-channel campaigns and maximize their return.