For many online businesses, working with affiliates and publishers is a norm. Especially when working with a multi-channel strategy, which includes content, search and partner networks. All these channels actually serve the same purpose: They strive to impact existing and potential customers at the right phase of their decision-making process.
While there are various strategies in having your own network in-house and attracting the best publishers, ensuring you have a good commission model in place is absolute key in motivating your partners. So what goodies should you prepare for your partners?
Dangling the carrot
Commission models determines the financial reward your partners receive for the conversions or sales they generate. They are either based on traffic volume or on conversions. In each case, there are different ways to incentivize your partners.
“Thanks for generating traffic!”
Your partners generate traffic via ad impressions and clicks (on banners and links). To thank them for it, you can choose between a CPM (where they receive a fixed value for every thousand ad media views generated) or CPC model (where they received an amount for every click generated).
With Ingenious Enterprise, it is also possible to set a limit to the commissions your partners receive, e.g. to ensure they will not make more commission per hour than the value you have defined. This isn’t a measure to be stingy with your partners, but rather a precaution to reduce click fraud.
“Thanks for generating conversions!”
If your goal is to reward your partners based on conversions generated, such as newsletter signups or placing an order, then you could also consider basing your commission on post click or post view conversions.
Typically, partners are granted commission for conversions that have taken place after a customer clicks on an ad media, i.e. post click. However, a customer might also merely see a banner on your partner’s website and visit your website later, i.e. post view. Enabling post view tracking will make your partner programme more attractive for publishers capable of generating a lot of traffic. And this can be a highly effective tool particularly for those interested in branding campaigns.
Drawing the boundaries
Defining the commission period
Every commission model contains at least one period, which can have an unlimited or a specific timeframe. This allows you to adjust commission easily by creating a new period to replace the old one. This is useful when you wish to raise your commission temporarily, e.g. to motivate partners to generate more business during the holiday season.
On the Ingenious Enterprise platform, the commission periods are displayed in a timeline, so you can easily find out what commission values were valid at what moment.
Determining the granularity
Each of your partners may work with multiple ad spaces. If the ad spaces have different advertising strategy, it would make sense to be able to reward them differently. Therefore, it is important to be able to determine how granular you would like your commission models to be.
The cherries on top
In every good partner programme, no partner should feel like it doesn’t pay to work harder. Top partners should be rewarded for overperforming, while others should be motivated to try harder. This can be done through commission rules.
Commission rules come in the form of a bonus rule or a model upgrade. For instance, you can create a bonus rule that automatically rewards your partners with a fixed bonus every time they reach more than 100 conversions per week. Or you can create a model upgrade that automatically upgrades partners to your premium commission model as soon as they reach a specific sum of commission per month.
Of course, partners also value transparency in their performance data, regular communication, as well as easy-to-use technology to grab your ad media and tracking links whenever needed. At the end of the day, partners should feel comfortable in your partner programme, and feel like they will continue to be rewarded the amount of effort they put in. When your partners perform, you reap the benefits!
