Tips & Guides — 16 Jul 2020
Affiliate Platform Migration
Platform migration is not a rare thing in affiliate marketing. It usually goes hand-in-hand with the business expansion and the need for higher speed and data volumes, advanced features, and in general, a more secure solution. Moving an affiliate program to a better performing platform can significantly improve efficiency if approached and planned carefully.
There are different types of platform migration depending on the type of platforms within which you migrate. Among the most common platform migration types in affiliate marketing are changing one affiliate network for another, moving from an ad network to a SaaS affiliate platform, or an in-house solution.
There are many reasons for changing a platform, but they all depend on the two major factors: features the current platform can offer and the growth of the business.
Lack of transparency and detailed reports of ad campaigns is on top of the reasons for switching to a new platform. The subsequent campaigns’ success depends on understanding the insight from the previous campaigns, which is impossible without access to the campaigns’ data. When you run an affiliate program as a part of an affiliate network you can lack some data points. And who knows, maybe they could have been crucial for future ad campaign settings. To have access to all data, marketers move to SaaS affiliate platforms.
Once an affiliate program grows and reaches a certain level when it can exist independently, the question inevitably arises in the minds of the program owners. Does it still make sense to run a program on an affiliate network and pay commissions to the network, or maybe it is more profitable to create your affiliate program on a separate solution. Namely, launching a program on a SaaS partner platform instead of an affiliate network.
Naturally, every business will look for ways to cut operational costs. For instance, according to our calculations, clients, who migrated from Tune (formerly HasOffers) to Affise at the beginning of 2019, saved on average $150,000 a year.
Should one succeed in finding a solution that offers the same quality of service for a lower price, it won’t hurt to compare the two solutions. Especially with the free trial period, marketers have an excellent opportunity to try and see whether the platform meets their needs.
We won’t delude you or give false expectations, migrating a platform is quite a task! Especially in affiliate marketing. Program owners don’t go for it just out of curiosity to try and see whether it may turn out to be more beneficial. Marketers go with the platform migration only after careful consideration of all risk and future benefits.
In the first place, analyze all pros and cons of the decision to move platforms. You need to be 100 percent sure that it is the right decision money-wise. Taking into account the whole data transfer process, in some cases, it might be better to pay more for a new integration at the old platform. But considering possible rapid business growth, one can assume that the lack of certain features and different pricing schemes may hinder your growth or cost you more in terms of new development. There are many factors to take in mind, thus allocate enough time and do your due diligence first.
It comes without saying that you need to find the most worthy alternative before making a final decision. Make a shortlist of the possible platforms to check whether they have features that you lack at the current platform. Also, analyze their pricing policy – this is a bottom line of most decisions.
Negotiate all the conditions of the platform migration. Consider beforehand whether you will need a temporary affiliate manager to help move all the data or the platform you move to provides a tool that will synchronize the platforms, and transfer the data seamlessly. Check all requirements from the technical and legal sides. Once you have chosen a platform to discuss the closure deal with them, make sure you have enough time to transfer your data and communicate with your partner while still being at the old platform.
Think about how it will affect affiliates you work with, come up with some incentives, and communicate to them about upcoming changes. First of all, contact the key partners. Assuming that you migrate to another platform for better conditions; otherwise, there is no reason in doing that, your affiliates will also benefit from it. Just think about the words on how to present these benefits.
On this step, you are might part ways with affiliates who are enrolled in your affiliate program but don’t perform. Or on the contrary, it may serve as a pretext to reinvigorate low-performing affiliates or the ones who no longer perform at all. They might get lured with the opportunities on a new platform and get back into your program.
It is not required to change all your content and marketing collateral, but it is somewhat expected that a significant change, like moving to a new platform, will be accompanied by something brand new. And new marketing collateral is precisely the thing. Refresh the design of your creative, come up with new attractive catchphrases, create new landing pages. In this way, you don’t need to go as far as completing a full rebranding, but you refresh the materials that also benefit your brand and can attract more attention. Also, it will be one more additional reason to communicate with your affiliates.
As it is not your first day in the business, you obviously conducted some marketing activities before, which means that all top platforms and listing websites will have your information. To make sure potential clients and partners can google you, update all your web and social media listings. After you complete the platform migration process, go through all of l them and request to update your profile with the relevant links.
With COVID-19 effect on the economy, the topic of a platform migration is at the top of the agenda among advertisers and partner program owners. If previously they had these thoughts, but the idea of a tedious data transfer process contained them, today the emphasis shifted. Right now, some advertisers or program owners feel the need to change a platform more than ever.
In the industry, Affise is always the first to introduce the most advanced technology. Owing to the team experience in this area, we successfully predict all marketers’ needs and be the first to reflect them on our platform. The platform features aim to simplify campaign management, automate routine work, and apply AI for campaign settings that can guarantee higher ROI. Have a look at Zorka.Mobi, they increased their turnover by 35% from the first month working with Affise.
The majority of the long-established companies still charge for clicks, which is not cost-effective, especially when there is always a risk of coming across fraudulent traffic. Affise, in its turn, offers a pricing policy where you will pay based on your performance. In this way, you protect yourself against inflated fraudulent clicks or simple clicks that do not end in the conversion. Thus with Affise, you will win in terms of how much you pay for the SaaS platform. For example, just two months after migrating to Affise, our client increased their net profit by 200%.
Affise solves the problem of the lack of transparency in ad campaigns. Being a SaaS partner marketing platform, Affise allows building a partner program where you are the full owner and can access all data on campaign performance. No more hidden statistics or missing data. Further, you will be able to look at your data under different angles owing to Affise 50+ data slices. You can customize your reports and put the most critical indicator in front. Affise’s statistics design allows us to focus on the most significant indicators and arrange statistics columns by order of importance.
You probably heard that a platform migration is a nightmare. We won’t lie, it used to be. However, with affiliate networks changing platforms, advertisers moving to affiliate platform to launch their own partner programs, the need arose for a tool that would simplify data transfer. And that’s how Affise came up with CPAPI, the first technology on the market that automates transferring and synchronizing data between systems. It seamlessly syncs different systems and pulls data from one system to another. At present, there are already more than 100 integrations conducted by CPAPI.
Thus you have nothing to fear. With Affise onboarding package and automated offers pulling service, CPAPI, your migration to Affise performance tracking software process will be fast and easy.
Curious, but still have some doubts left?
We understand it is not an easy decision. How about having a conversation where our product specialist will tell you more about running a partner program at Affise?
Leave the request, and you will receive more information on:
Keep in mind that first of all Affise offers a 30-day free trial, which is a great chance to see whether the platform suits you!
Content Manager
Yulia is a Content Marketer with a love to a great story and an eye to small details. Carrying a voice and delivering an accurate message - that’s what Yulia believes content marketing is for. Looking for thorough research and long-reads? You came to the right person. Her goal is to produce content that educates and entertains, and most importantly, has an impact. Challenges and something that is yet to be explored are her main motivators.
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