The post below is the second step of the 7 Steps To Upgrade Your AffilIate Program For 2021 series, providing actionable strategies to build a stronger affiliate program.
Check out the other steps in this article series:
- Step #1: Monitor and Stop Coupon Poaching
- Step #3: Track Both Purchases And Events
- Step #4: Track Influencers Through Coupons and Coupon Site URLs
- Step #5: Use QR Codes to Track Offline Affiliates & Partners
- Step #6: Drill Down Into Affiliate Placement Reporting
- Step #7: Catch More Fraud & Automate Prevention
With loyalty affiliates driving high-intent traffic, email affiliates delivering well-crafted messages to targeted consumers and search affiliates turning product interest into sales, each type of affiliate in your program has a unique set of skills (please read in Liam Neeson voice).
To grow your program, understanding how you can help each type of affiliate to succeed is absolutely critical.
Content affiliates with blogs or review sites, for example, spend countless hours creating stories to sell your products. With most partner platforms built to assign commission to the last click before a sale, content affiliates often go unrewarded.
Fortunately, first touch attribution features in a partner platform can help solve this issue. Let’s dive in!
The Value of Content Affiliates for Your Program
Though traffic volumes aren’t as high as other types of affiliates (e.g. coupon, social, and search affiliates), consumers driven to your site or app from a content affiliate are highly motivated to make a purchase, as these affiliates do most of the “heavy-lifting” in the sales cycle.
Through higher quality promotional methods with well-articulated opinions, detailed product feature descriptions, and compelling product imagery, content affiliates deliver consumers to your products.
Some quick stats to illustrate the power of content affiliates:
- 93% of consumers read a review online before making a purchase
- 56% of consumers make a purchase after reading a blog post about a product or service
- 82% of consumers have a better image of a brand after reading customized content.
As illustrated, content affiliates have tremendous power to generate more qualified, “ready-to-convert” sales for your program. Helping content affiliates succeed only further strengthens your program.
Last Touch Attribution: Why It’s Kryptonite For Your Content Affiliates
For most performance marketing campaigns, the standard setting for conversion attribution is to credit the last affiliate placement reached by the consumer before campaign conversion occurs.
Known as “last touch” attribution, this is the most common attribution path in performance marketing. Though this type of attribution works for most affiliate types with a primary objective to generate more revenue, last touch attribution is particularly damaging for content affiliates.
With thoughtful introductions to products and long-tail commitment to facilitating decisions, content affiliates prime the consumer to take action. However, content affiliates do not always receive the fruits of their labor, as consumers typically need to see an ad up to seven times before they make a decision.
Added to the obstacle of required repetition, consumers are likely to head over to a coupon site or app right before making a purchase (check out our previous post on coupon poaching for more info). The content affiliate would once again not receive credit for this conversion.
Yikes!
Rewarding Your Content Affiliates with First Touch Attribution
Though last touch attribution puts content affiliates at a disadvantage, many partner marketing platforms now allow first touch attribution!
With first touch attribution, content affiliates receive commission when they introduce a campaign to a consumer who converts, even if the conversion occurs at a later date.
First touch attribution restores credit to deserving content affiliates.
Setting up first touch attribution with Everflow is simple and can be implemented at either the campaign or advertiser level.
First touch attribution at Everflow allows you to track and credit affiliates for introducing a consumer to your brand up to 90 days after first visiting your campaign.
Once integrated, first touch attribution will allow your content affiliates to finally be rewarded for their hard work.
We’re more than happy to show you how to set up first touch attribution in Everflow. Book a demo today and we’ll walk you through it.
Ready for Your Next Step in Upgrading Your Affiliate Program?
Check out: Step #3: Track Both Purchases and Events.
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