In: Root » Business » Affiliate Advertising » An affiliate program is a vehicle for web sites
What Are Affiliate Programs?An affiliate program is a vehicle for web sites that allows them to offer commissions to affiliates for the clicks/leads/sales they generate on behalf of that company. The program may be geared toward selling products, registering new users, generating sales leads, or collecting consumer information. Whatever the goal, affiliates are encouraged to join these programs and drive relevant traffic to the affiliate program’s web site. What Are Affiliate Networks?An affiliate network doesn’t place ads for companies. It is a company that functions as a sort of go-between, providing services for both the merchants who have products to advertise and the affiliates who advertise them. Affiliate networks offer lots of important value-added services, such as tracking clicks, visits, purchases, and other actions; providing tools for reporting how many people view an ad, or click on it; and processing payments to affiliates. They also help bring affiliates together with advertisers: Advertisers might have to pay a fee to join the network, but they are able to provide the network with logos and other advertising materials, and the network helps by publicizing them to their individual affiliate members. You might hear the word tier used in conjunction with affiliate networks. Some networks are two-tier, some are three-tier, and so on. Atier is a step on a system of sign-ups: If you are a member of a network and you sign up someone else to make a purchase, you are said to be on the first tier, and the person who signed up is on the second tier. You earn a referral fee for signing up the secondtier member. The second-tier member, in turn, can earn a referral fee for signing up someone else, but only if the network allows that number of tiers. Some of the best-known affiliate networks are listed here (this brief list is just a sampling, not a comprehensive survey, of affiliate networks): Commission Junction / BFAST (www.cj.com). Commission Junction is one of the largest, if not the largest, payment network for advertising and e-commerce traffic. Affiliate Fuel (www.affiliatefuel.com). This highly regarded affiliate network offers a variety of tools and reporting options that can be extremely valuable to search marketers. Affiliate Fuel is particularly active in educational affiliate programs and offers some of the highest commissions and conversion rates in that industry. Advertising.com (www.advertising.com). This advertising network primarily uses a pay-per-click model. The network tracks the placement of banner ads on web sites. Advertising.com is notable for its “intelligent modeling system,” which keeps track of the types of ads that have attracted the greatest response on your site. The system then places similar ads on the site. LinkShare (www.linkshare.com. Apioneer of online affiliate marketing that advertises itself as the largest pay-forperformance affiliate marketing network on the Internet. Performics (www.performics.com). This performancebased marketing division of DoubleClick bills itself as an online marketing service for leading multichannel marketers. eAdvertising (www.eadvertising.com). This subsidiary of LeadClick Media advertises itself as a “private CPA network.” Publishers can use banners, pop-ups, and search ads. |
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