Coined by your parents’ favorite workout guru Jane Fonda, the expression “no pain, no gain” is definitely a rallying cry when you are struggling during a 5k, climbing the last hill in spin class, or trying to stay awake to binge a whole Hulu series in one night.
While it’s generally motivating, the phrase “no pain, no gain” is one that you never want to hear attached to your affiliate marketing platform.
No matter which affiliate marketing platform you choose, it should be packed with useful features, be easy to operate, and drive value. It should never be a source of frustration or stand in the way of your program goals.
Unfortunately for the nutra affiliate network FanFuel, their affiliate marketing platform was causing a lot more pain than gain through platform inadequacies.
Let’s set the stage for how Everflow helped transform FanFuel’s platform pain into massive gains with a quick overview on FanFuel.
FanFuel needed a change to scale, so they made the switch to Everflow and began a total program transformation through first-touch attribution, powerful smart links, and easy integrations.
FanFuel: Chock Full of Essential Program Ingredients
FanFuel is a complete nutra affiliate network with direct offers in all the key niches, including bodybuilding, weightlifting, and weight loss.
These in-house offers are a product of the experienced FanFuel team, who built each campaign with their own custom brands.
The FanFuel team knows each brand intimately, including which features will be most effective in generating brand interest.
Beyond quality offers with higher payouts, the FanFuel affiliate program is built to give affiliates and influencers the best possible chance to maximize their revenue.
Here’s just a quick sampling of the many perks of being a FanFuel affiliate:
- Live performance reporting
- Higher referral bonuses
- Weekly payouts (with no minimums!)
- Repeat commissions
- Affiliate earning contests
As you can see, FanFuel provides some serious benefits to their affiliates. (Note: you can get more info on their legendary program here).
Although thriving today, their program wasn’t always reaching its full potential. The reason? An outdated affiliate marketing platform.
Everflow:A Stronger Program Deserves A Stronger Platform
The FanFuel team is well versed in performance marketing, especially as it relates to the health, muscle, and fitness spaces. The team has been actively working with many of FanFuel’s brands, affiliates, and influencers for the last few years via Wolfson Brands, FanFuel’s parent company.
With such vast experience, the FanFuel team knew what their affiliate program was capable of, but they were running into roadblocks with their tracking platform.
The platform (which shall remain nameless, but rhymes with “Rake”) lacked key functionality in the areas of traffic attribution, optimization, and localization.
FanFuel knew they needed to make a switch if they wanted to grow their program.
In August 2020 the pros at FanFuel made the switch to Everflow, and through the introduction of three key platform features, saw their program expand exponentially.
Let’s dive into the first difference maker for the FanFuel affiliate program: First Touch Attribution.
First Touch Attribution: Getting Affiliate Rewards Into Shape
“It’s Huge, It Completely Changes The Way You Think About Affiliate Marketing”
The quote above was provided by Daniel Lawman, Head of SEO at Wolfson Brands (FanFuel’s parent company--shown on right), when asked about the impact that first touch attribution has had on the FanFuel affiliate program.
It’s definitely not an exaggeration, as enabling first touch attribution is a game changer for affiliate programs that rely on content affiliates and influencers.
Affiliates typically receive a commission when their ad was the last thing a customer clicked on before completing the required action on a campaign.
This model is known as last touch attribution and it is the default setting for most tracking platforms.
Last touch attribution can easily lead to a phenomenon known as coupon poaching, in which an affiliate provides an introduction to a product or service, and/or compelling reasons for the consumer to make a purchase, and then loses out on commission when the consumer visits a coupon site right before making the purchase.
Just like that, the affiliate who created the momentum for the sale loses out, while the coupon site receives the commission for simply being in the right place at the right time.
Being industry veterans, the team at FanFuel was well aware of the deflating impact that last touch attribution can have on affiliates, especially affiliates in the nutra space -- where product recommendations and introductions from influencers, bloggers, and other content affiliates carry even more weight.
Thus, one of the key factors in choosing their new platform, according to Daniel, was the ability to track first-touch efforts, which can be easily done with Everflow.
“It’s all about introducing people to brands, and that’s where first touch attribution shines,” states Daniel.
By switching to Everflow and utilizing first touch attribution, FanFuel quickly began to create a program where content affiliates and influencers can thrive.
Upon the many program benefits FanFuel realized through first touch attribution:
- Increase in influencers applying to their network
- Greater recruitment of stronger influencers
- Increase in active affiliates and influencers generating monthly commissions
Beyond those benefits, FanFuel account managers noticed a shift in higher quality content since introducing first touch attribution.
“They start thinking more about creating content and generating an exposure,” adds Daniel regarding the impact for program affiliates and influencers of first touch attribution.
First touch attribution wasn’t the only change that FanFuel made at the campaign level to better suit affiliates. They also began utilizing another feature that became available with the switch to Everflow: Smart Links.
Allowing affiliates to generate conversions from more of their traffic, Smart Links were another key addition for strengthening program appeal for affiliates and influencers.
Smart Links: Taking The Heavy Lifting Out Of Global Monetization
FanFuel features top affiliates and influencers from around the world, who spend countless hours creating quality content to promote FanFuel brands.
Due to the universal nature of exercise and fitness, FanFuel customers are located around the world. These customers rely on FanFuel affiliates, influencers, and ambassadors to give them timely advice and let them know which products they can count on.
With orders coming in from across the globe, the FanFuel team knew that capturing conversions from as many relevant geos as possible would be huge for their affiliates. To maximize revenue from more countries, FanFuel began using Everflow’s Smart Link feature.
With just a few steps, Smart Links allowed FanFuel to automatically redirect a consumer to a suitable campaign when the consumer clicked on a campaign that he or she was not eligible for.
For example, if a consumer located in the UK tries to access a FanFuel campaign based in Germany, a Smart Link will send the consumer to the FanFuel campaign that targets UK users.
With Smart Links, FanFuel campaigns are routed to landing pages in localized language, too.
Once they enabled Smart Links across their campaigns, FanFuel began to notice an increase in affiliate success across the board.
“Through Smart Links, you get an instant conversion lift, and you don’t need your affiliates to do anything extra,” states Daniel.
The team at FanFuel heavily utilized another key Everflow platform feature to help increase conversion rates: Everflow Shopify integration.
Everflow Shopify Integration: Like Going To Your Local Gym!
As mentioned above, FanFuel loves to make things easier for affiliates. For this reason, they created niche stores for their campaigns in localized languages. Basically, FanFuel wants customers to have the most “local” experience possible.
These stores are set up via Shopify, allowing for quick campaign setup and easy promotion. One of the challenges that comes with owning so many stores is cohesive tracking.
As with first touch attribution and Smart Links, FanFuel knew they could strengthen their program, they just needed a smarter tool to do it.
Keeping up with dozens of offers, in multiple languages can quickly become a daunting task. Fortunately by utilizing the Everflow Shopify Integration, FanFuel was able to automatically set up click and conversion tracking in each of their Shopify stores directly in Everflow.
For affiliates, conversion rates continued to rise with each new store integration, as they would be armed with access to optimized sites with localized language, products, and ambassadors.
Localized stores help deepen customer connections to brands and are a great example of FanFuel’s commitment to strengthening their affiliate program.
One More Rep: The Future Of FanFuel
With Everflow removing so many pain points, FanFuel was able to scale up their migrated program to seven figures in record time.
Daniel further credits Everflow for a 130% increase in business revenue!
The FanFuel team continues to grow their program even further and plans to continue optimizing toward maximum brand and publisher gains through the Everflow platform.
Whether it’s providing recurring commissions for affiliates, further optimizing their conversion funnels, launching more quality campaigns, or any other program initiative, the Everflow platform and the Everflow team will be there to help FanFuel crush it.
"Everflow made setting up our own affiliate network easy, the support we received whilst getting started was outstanding and the team consistently went above and beyond even helping us make further customizations to our tracking," -states Daniel.
For more information on the FanFuel Affiliate Program, please visit: https://fanfuel.co/.
To learn more about Everflow, schedule a demo today.
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