Director of Business Development
How does an advertiser prevent affiliates from competing with and cannibalizing the advertiser’s own search or display campaigns?
We believe it takes affiliate education and diligent compliance to make sure that affiliates aren’t cannibalizing the advertiser’s own search or display campaigns. The restricted promotional methods should be listed clearly and concisely on the offer page. A good network will work with the advertiser to make sure they have the proper information on what type of search and display sources will be allowed. If search promotion is allowed, their may be restrictions to what advertising platforms the affiliate is allowed to use. Another great tool is a restricted keyword list. Advertisers can set a list of terms the affiliates aren’t allowed to bid on, or even require they add certain terms or domains to a negative keyword list. Most affiliates will read and follow these restrictions. For the affiliates who don’t, that is where you have to have an effective compliance team. Good compliance managers will find violations, and then work with the advertisers to determine the best outcome for these violations. If a network is staying on point with compliance, many of these issues can be stopped or corrected very early on.
Imagine a new advertiser coming to you to launch a new product. What’s the process between contract and launch?
Once a contract has been established with a new advertiser, the process of launching their product on PeerFly has two main segments. First, the technical setup of the campaign. This includes getting the proper links, offer description, banners, and ensuring that any specifications on allowed or prohibited promotion methods are communicated correctly and clearly on the product offer page. During the technical setup phase, tracking is integrated and tested. After verification of tracking, a final audit is conducted and then the offer can go live.
The second phase of the launch is promoting the offer to our affiliate base. With the enormously vast number of offers that affiliates have to chose from, PeerFly’s Affiliate Management team has to “sell” our affiliates on why they should promote a new offer. It can be a lot of work initially to build up awareness of a new offer. I consider a merchant’s offer successfully launched once we see traffic and conversions start rolling in.
During that process, how do you evaluate the relative importance of different channels and what proportion of budget you allocate to them?
The primary criteria for determining what budget to allocate to different channels is going to be based on previous success with a similar campaign. Past performance can be a great indicator of future success. We try to remain flexible and open to changing course, however. Many times you discover overlooked or under-utilized promotion channels can be impactful a new campaign, especially if you’re able to detect positive indicators and quickly work scale the activity. It’s always exciting when you have to adjust your strategy to focus on unexpected successes.
About
PeerFly is considered one of the fastest growing performance marketing networks in the industry and is ranked #2 in the BLUE BOOK rankings of the best CPA networks in the world for 2016.