Affiliate Marketing in 2021 – The Need for an Improved Ad Tracking System

    Affiliate Marketing in 2021 - The Need for an Improved Ad Tracking System-01

    Brands have increasingly started adopting affiliate marketing strategies, with consumers now shopping online more than ever. But, issues like fraud ad clicks, conversion tracking and click attribution are common in the affiliate industry. So, in order to take advantage of the potential that affiliates bring, businesses must find a genuine and effective way to track conversions and assign them to the right channel.

    Affiliate marketing has become a popular strategy to drive sales and generate online revenue. According to a Forrester report (February 2016) commissioned by Rakuten, 84% of publishers and 81% of advertisers leveraged the power of affiliate marketing.

    In fact, according to Statista, affiliate marketing spending in the US alone is projected to reach $8.2 billion by 2022, triple of what it was a decade earlier. Yet, the affiliate advertising tracking technology available today is legacy tech.  It has become crucial that the advertising tracking technology that is available right now reflect today’s ecosystem with more publishers and advertisers now turning to alternative advertising inventory to diversify their traffic and revenue.

    Also Read: The Future of Affiliate Marketing – Beyond the Covid-19 Pandemic

    Let’s look at a few essential ways tracking platforms should innovate to help affiliate marketers achieve their targets:

    Critical Analytics

    Tracking platforms should display all of the critical data on the dashboard. This includes performance metrics, gross profit, and quick access to the progress. Marketers should also be able to view top offers and bottom offers performance by offer level, advertisers, publisher, and by country, so that they can see the critical areas that need immediate action. But, most tracking platforms fail to display everything that may be needed.

    Analytics software can solve this issue by presenting the essential data on a dashboard, making it easier to view performance and take action when needed. In the case of marketers with varying data mining skill levels, it’s critical that the most crucial information is available without having to use CSV files.

    Best Performing Publishers

    Limited data insights can affect the ability to make critical decisions. It can be difficult to confidently make investment decisions without knowing who the best performing publishers are. These insights can be accessed by pulling CSV files from the tracking platform, but it takes time and resources that could have been spent on analysis and optimization.

    Therefore it is crucial to have a transparent solution that lets marketers select what they want to filter and measure in order to gain critical insights and optimize.

    Innovative automation

    A critical component of tracking platforms is automation – simplifying processes will allow marketers to spend more time on analysis. Automated processes are becoming more advanced and it is crucial to utilize them to have the competitive edge over adversaries.

    Tracking platforms can help affiliate marketers by automating everything related to daily operations. They need to set conversion budgets, click budgets, approve and block publishers, and plan payouts – and all of these tasks can be done autonomously with the right technology.

    Also Read: Affiliate Marketing and Performance Analysis – A Fair View to Measure Marketing Success

    Network Integrations

    Another major issue with tracking platforms takes place during network integrations and offer approvals. When integrating a network, there may not be an option to select certain offers, therefore, the marketers are required to select them all and put them on their platform. This can be too limiting, especially if they want to be selective about the offers they want to advertise.

    Affiliate marketers need the ability to integrate networks to decide if they want to automatically approve offers for that network. This will give them greater visibility and transparency and empower them to be selective with the offers they approve.

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