8 tips for a successful CPA offer

Today, affiliate programs generate nearly 10% of total E-commerce orders. Your affiliate channel must have the same attention as you pay to your other paid marketing channels.

Because a competitive context exists. Certainly lower than the SEA on the short tail, but nevertheless important enough to require a time investment in order to manage your Affiliation channel effectively.

Indeed, the number of offers in CPA networks is growing faster than the number of major publishers. It is therefore important that your offer to publishers stands out in order to be as attractive as possible for high value-added publishers.

Below are 8 tips to help you achieve two objectives:

• that your CPA offer is adopted by the publishers of your platform,
• that your Affiliate channel contributes to increasing your sales.

Prepare a description of the offer as complete as possible and highlight it

The description of your offer is a presentation of your affiliate program that will be published in your CPA platforms for its network of publishers. They will then judge whether your offer is attractive enough to allow them to generate more revenue than with a competing offer.

The quality of the description is essential, as it will determine the initial commitment of affiliates. In an extreme case, if no publisher wants to participate in your program, you will not generate any sales.

Your offer must contain 4 parts:

• The description of your E-commerce site: who are you, what product lines do you offer, how are you different?
• Description of your core audience: age group, gender, socio-professional categories and any other information that may be relevant
• Your competitive advantages: why your customers prefer you to your competitors – price positioning, guarantees and services offered
• Your benefits for affiliates: commission levels, types of marketing materials offered, frequency of events

You can write your description in a text document, but it is preferable to do so in the form of graphics. The impact will be all the better.

Share useful links or lifehacks with publishers

Think about orienting your publishers, sharing with them the best way to present your products or services. Tell them the best landing pages on your site to send traffic to in order to maximize the conversion rate.

These can be links to popular sections of your site or to product selections (Best Sellers, Sales, etc…), attractive offers or simply advice from you.

These inputs will allow publishers to increase their revenues with your offer and build their loyalty. No one knows better than you how to sell your products!

Update your banners and coupons regularly

As with any other channel, your publishers must have quality promotional material to direct as many visitors as possible to your site. These are your banners, emails, or coupon descriptions.

Regular updating of these elements will ensure consistency between the initial offer offered to your visitors in the banners and the information they will find on your site. The conversion rate will be even better.

It should also be noted that each update of your marketing material will be an opportunity for your publishers to communicate again with their audience.

Communicate on your promotions in advance

When you organize a promotional action, you must systematically inform your publishers. This allows them to communicate it to their audience.

However, your editors need time to prepare the integration of this information on their media: banner integration, text writing, webmastering. On average, it takes one week from the receipt of the materials to the start of the action.

Ideally, the delivery of a quarterly promotional action plan greatly simplifies the work of your publishers.

This will allow you to anticipate peak periods – for example Black Friday or Sales – and not to fall into a bottleneck of requests to your publishers.

Control the location of your actions on your publishers’ sites

Due to lack of resources, it often happens that your publishers do not apply enough control to the quality of the publication of your marketing materials, miss the launch of a promotional action or forget to stop it at the end of the agreed period.

Visitors sent by these affiliates may be confronted with outdated or misrepresented information. They must therefore devote time to understanding your offer or researching its existence.

The consequences are a deterioration in the conversion rate of visitors sent by these affiliates, but above all a negative perception of your brand.

It is impossible to control all your publishers if there are dozens of them. We recommend that you select the top 10 of your publishers – in terms of turnover volume or strategic interest – and check the information published on their site before and after each transaction.

Organize at least once a month a special action for your best publishers

In general, your 10 largest affiliates generate more than 70% of the sales of your affiliate channel. It is essential to have a particular focus with them.

First of all, by maintaining regular communication. Then, by organizing personalized special operations.

Indeed, these publishers have a wide audience. They can send significant traffic to your site with dedicated newsletters and banners on their homepage.

Feel free to ask them what they need to promote you to their audience and what they can offer you in return.

Both parties will benefit: you will have a significant influx of traffic and the publisher will have additional revenue.

Check the quality of publishers’ traffic

The vast majority of your publishers are honest. Unfortunately, dishonest publishers come to mix with them within your affiliate program.

By using techniques to mislead your analytical solutions, they capture the sales of other traffic channels but also the sales of other publishers of the program.

This can lead to a situation where your best affiliates do not generate enough orders for the traffic they send you. From then on, they will leave or deprioritize your program for a competing offer.

In order to ensure regular monitoring of fraud, the following measures should be applied:

• Define a tracking code for each publisher of your affiliate program
• Use an analytical solution that allows you to analyze the performance of each publisher
• Focus your analysis on the following KPIs: new visit rate, bounce rate, conversion rate
• Repeat this analysis twice a month to disable dishonest affiliates

Get to know your best publishers and communicate with them

Focus on the human relationship to strengthen your relationship with your best affiliates.

First of all by creating a personal contact with them. Then, for example, by organizing mini events where you can invite them all together to present a new product line or a major special action.

This will encourage strong collaboration and allow you to discuss orally what common actions you can take.