There are 3 different types of advertising options to consider when managing an affiliate program.
1.Standard banners and emails - These are industry sizes for banners for affiliates to place on their site and email templates which can be used by affiliates to send to their own lists.
2.Product feeds - A product feed is either an XML or CSV file of all your products with prices and links to your product. Affiliates can use this to create a product catalogue on their own sites.
3.Text links - This is a text based link that goes to your site. Affiliates can use this to add text links to their site or to run their own search engine pay-per-click program using these links.
Your affiliate program is competing with other programs for the affiliate's resources and your banners are competing with other content for attention so your advertising creative needs have to be perfect to get the best results. The more options you offer in terms of advert design and advert sizes the better.
Affiliates can then select the ones most appropriate in relation to the other content on their site. It is also vital to keep your adverts up to date; an out-of-date advert could promote a sale that has already finished or an item you no longer stock, possibly boosting your clicks but at a low conversion rate which adversely affects your EPC. An additional opportunity is to create landing pages for your top performing affiliates, as the click-through from the advert to the landing page will help conversion rates, in turn boosting your EPC.
Mechanics
When you sign up with an affiliate program, the merchant provides the means for you to create special links, coded with your account number. You place these links—which may be in the form of banner advertisements, buttons, text links, or even turnkey stores— on your Web pages.
Once you've uploaded the Web pages to your Web server, your visitors are able to use the affiliate links. When a visitor clicks on a affiliate- linked banner, button, or text link, special software takes note of the coded link as the new page is served. If a visitor makes a purchase or fulfills a lead as a result of the referral, your account is credited with the appropriate amount.
Payment terms vary from program to program. Most merchants pay their affiliates monthly or quarterly, once the affiliate has reached a prespecified balance in their account. If an affiliate fails to reach the payout level, the funds stay in the account until the level is reached.
Merchants provide affiliate account information via email or private Web sites. Amazon.com, for example, provides weekly and quarterly email reporting, while barnesandnoble.com provides daily reporting via their password-protected affiliate Web site (www.affiliate.net).
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Frequently Asked Questions
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