Tips & Guides — 07 Dec 2022
What kinds of indicators should you use to monitor?
Relying on channels like Facebook and Google has become more expensive, while digital agencies are decreasing earnings from general marketing channels. As a result, they are looking for more cost-effective options and turning to affiliates and influencers for their campaigns.
Influencer marketing has grown increasingly popular among businesses. A Hubspot survey that investigated emerging trends in marketing showed that influencer marketing is on the rise, as it is short video content. Mobile-friendly website design, virtual events, and experiential marketing are also on this year’s list of trends, as we can see below.
Image source: Hubspot
To work with partners sustainably, digital agencies need to know the brands’ goals and clearly define their partners’ KPIs. However, one of the most common challenges is keeping track of many channels, using various tools, and having a small team to monitor all indicators. Not only is this time-consuming, but it can also drain your resources.
As with any other marketing channel, monitoring affiliate and influencer marketing goals is important to achieve desired actions. Below, we’ll go over the most common metrics you should keep an eye on. Let’s dive in.
Before launching a campaign with partners, digital agencies need to make sure that the target audience fits with the brand. Remember that estimated audience size and reach are constantly being updated, as it depends on several factors that change in real-time, such as how many people have been seen in ads in the last 30 days, demographics, what content people are interacting with, and so on.
The CPM is calculated based on the per thousand impressions of a campaign. It is a payment model commonly used by different platforms such as YouTube. As the name suggests, this metric monitors ad performance and how much it costs to publish and view an ad a thousand times on a website. Monitoring is crucial for ads such as small commercials or videos because the focus is on the number of impressions instead of the number of clicks.
Understanding which aspects of your marketing campaigns are working well and which need improvement is what Click Traffic measurement suggests. Essentially, it’s about gathering as much information as possible about the clicks you receive through affiliate links or ads. This includes knowing which channel the leads are coming from, whether they are bouncing, which platforms they use the most, and whether how long it is taking for them to become paying customers.
How to Run CPC and CPM Campaigns at Affise
Learn now →This metric seeks to evaluate the quality of customers brought in by affiliates. The idea is to keep an eye on this metric to avoid chargebacks, technical failures, and fraud. Good health and sustainable growth can be observed within your affiliate program when this rate is stable. So, whenever you identify something suspicious within your program when monitoring this indicator, take a closer look to understand and solve the problem.
Is your campaign performing as well as you’d expect? One way digital agencies can find out is by calculating your cost per action, the CPA, and tracking your affiliates’ performance. It is one of the most popular models among publishers. However, choosing the best referral model among CPA, CPC, and CPM will depend on the strategy that each of the brands your digital agency will follow.
Each time your partners exceed the desired action, they should receive a commission. The amount of the commission is determined by the digital agency in question. It can be based on measures such as increasing the number of visitors or the website’s conversion rate. This is an essential indicator of how profitable your partnership program is. You can test alternatives to find the best bonus model for your digital agency to determine which model is best for the business.
In most cases, top affiliates or partners have reasonable engagement rates. Finding the partners most dedicated to promoting your brand, consequently increasing your sales rate, is crucial for the success of your campaigns.
One idea is to establish an engagement rate metric to define it. Active and engaging affiliates is a skill that you’ll want to increase within your partnership program. If you have a low rate of active affiliates, it can be a sign that you need to review your strategies and recruitment methods. Defining engagement rates can be challenging. Observe the frequency of interaction, participation in your marketing campaigns, and even participation in the training of each partner.
How to choose the right partners based on your needs?
Learn now →Looking at the profit margin is one way to know if it exceeds the costs of running your affiliate program. Agencies with this data gain more trust and opportunities to develop long-lasting relationships with brands as they track every stage of the partnership program.
Costs include what is paid directly to project affiliates in the form of commission, affiliate platform fees, and any other amount or expense your agency may have for recruiting or maintaining the partnership program. After calculating these values, you will know, on average, the profit margin that a partnership program represents for a digital agency.
Without a doubt, if you already work with affiliates, you know that they play a key role in leveraging the campaigns of the brands your digital agency works with. Still, you need to keep an eye on the actions, and the percentage of sales affiliates generate for each brand.
The goal here is to identify which affiliates drive the highest sales. Counting the number of sales generated by a particular affiliate is also a great way to set up a system of targets and rewards focused on affiliates and partners who demonstrate high performance and drive value.
One of the essential metrics for agency digital marketers is looking at the new customer’s lifetime as well as the loyalty of the existing ones. The lifetime value of referred customers seeks to assign a profit forecast for each customer referred by a partner. This metric focuses on the relationship this client will develop with the brand over the years.
To understand this metric deeply, think that a customer spends little initially, may return to spend more in the future, or recommend your products to friends and colleagues. As we know, referral marketing, also called word-of-mouth, is a powerful strategy, as shoppers trust recommendations from those close to them. Additionally, analyze what strategies you can use to encourage brand loyalty and make customers want to return once they’ve arrived through a referral from an influencer or partner.
Most likely, you’ve heard this term before. ROAS measures return on advertising spend and, not surprisingly, is one of the key metrics to monitor within a partnership program. This metric is focused on evaluating which techniques are working best and which ones need to improve for your campaigns to increase in performance. It measures how many dollars the brands that work with digital agencies will receive for each dollar spent on ad Traffic campaigns, which is essential to keep your eyes on.
How to make the most of your partner marketing budget
Learn now →Clicks alone don’t tell you much, but when added to other metrics, such as the number of sales a particular affiliate brings in, this can indicate sustainable growth. On the other hand, too many clicks too few times can signal that your strategy needs to be improved or that there’s affiliate fraud. Luckily, platforms like Affise Performance feature click-level fraud prevention. This means that not only can you prevent your efforts with your partnership program, but if you find any suspicious activity, you can take action immediately.
Your partners are expected to be paid on time, just like in any other job. In addition, it is essential to keep them motivated to continue working with your digital agency and build long-term relationships. Defining the best method to pay our partners for each desired action will depend on your strategies, as payment methods and commission structures vary. But in any case, ensure to pay your affiliates and influencers on time by using suitable affiliate software for agencies.
Influencer marketing has exploded in the last decade and is estimated to be worth $16.4bn in 2022. The industry has been fueled by the rise in mobile usage and social media apps and an unquenching thirst for authentic and entertaining content by online audiences, says Shareasale.
Affiliate marketing also experiences huge growth in recent years. As the field expands, the agencies need more than ever to rely on a solution with an easy-to-use dashboard, fraud detection, granular reporting, personalized dashboard, API Integration, media management, and more, such as Affise Performance.
Finding the right affiliate software for your digital agencies will help track all the indicators you should monitor. Affise Performance enables digital agencies to manage, automate, and control the essential KPIs by having options for defining pricing models, such as CPI, CPA, CPS, affiliate commission, custom reports, fraud detection, easy-to-use dashboards, payment Reports, and more, so you can follow the key indicators smoothly.
Affise Performance is a one-by-one partnership that allows agencies of all sizes to track every touchpoint of their campaigns smoothly and save money by investing in cost-effective channels. The robust solution makes it easy to monitor KPIs, achieve the desired ROI, and establish long-term relationships with partners.
Written by
Affise Academy
Affise is a partner marketing platform for brands, advertisers and agencies to scale via all possible performance marketing channels. Synergy of technology and our long standing experience lets you expand your partnerships, automate every step of the campaign lifecycle and make data-driven decisions.
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