Impact

: Taming the Wild West of Affiliates By on May 2, 2019 For decades, traditional affiliate marketing roamed the partnership landscape with a swagger, offering advertisers the ability to pay only for sales, rather than impressions or clicks. As affiliate networks boomed in the late 90s and early 00s, however, a Wild West, rough-around-the-edges mentality soon emerged where online brands had little control or visibility into their partnerships. Fast forward to today: The partnership channel has evolved beyond traditional affiliates, but there are still significant fraud-related challenges brands need to be aware of. Thanks to the latest machine learning technology, dedicated data scientists and fraud detection methodologies that review and score traffic, brands can identify fraud across the entire conversion path, while invalid traffic gets cut out.

For instance, for a conversion path consisting of a paid search touchpoint followed by a display touchpoint leading to a single conversion worth $50 in revenue, and assuming an even distribution of credit (i.e. a linear attribution model), the paid search channel gets an attributed revenue of $25 and the display channel gets an attributed conversion of $25. Attributed Revenue / Media Cost ROI stands for Return on Investment, and is a derived metric that captures how effective your media investment was. So, if a display campaign spent $1,000, and garnered 20 conversions, then the the eCPA = $1000 / 20 = $50 CPC, or Cost per Click, is a metric that is tracked in many branding, direct response and performance campaigns across any vertical. A click often refers to clickthru on an ad that directs them to the advertiser’s website, though many rich media campaigns may count a click on the ad that triggers some engagement (for instance, the user clicks on the ad to start playing a video, or playing a mini-game on the ad unit); in the rich media situation, this can also be referred to as Cost per Engagement (CPE).

In this post, Impact’s Strategic Partnerships Director, Richa Dani, chatted with the Fluent team, Kelly Patterson – VP Corporate Marketing and Willis Nelson – Group Sales Director, to learn more about their company and how they are driving intelligent user acquisition for growing brands. Leveraging a proprietary first-party data asset made up of over 190 million opted-in consumer profiles that Fluent acquires across our owned and operated websites, Fluent drives intelligent growth strategies that deliver measurable results and superior outcomes for our partners. In addition to making audience segments available for programmatic targeting, we can help advertisers capture email addresses for a newsletter campaign, mobile phone numbers for a pay per call campaign, or physical addresses for a direct mail campaign. The way that we’re able to make that link is by using the self-declared data that we’re capturing on a regular basis to ensure that we’re connecting brands and consumers with the most relevant offers and service.

There is the opportunity to take advantage of a wide range of partnerships that can help you grow your business, including mobile apps, social influencers, charities, sponsors, ambassadors and strategic business partners. We often see organizations make valiant efforts, but their partnership programs are typically very siloed — with a separate affiliate team that is cut off from business development, social and PR, and even mobile growth. You need the people, processes and technology that can offer data and insights; efficient management; and a deep understanding and unified view of how all of your partnerships are working together to drive growth. It’s tough to sail the blue ocean while manually reefing the sails, handling the tiller and scanning the horizon, and there is no way you can scale your partner program with Excel spreadsheets and email messages to each and every partner.