How Affiliate Programs Can Improve Their Results

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: How Affiliate Programs Can Improve Their Results
Host: John Wright
Published: Thu, 30 Nov 2023 11:37:00 +0000
Duration: 10:29

Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.

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[00:00:00] John Wright: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcasts. Today, I'm going to talk about all the things that affiliate programs can do to improve their entire affiliate program. I want to talk about things that where affiliate programs, they simply don't look at data. They rarely focus on conversion rate optimization. And I also believe that many affiliate managers, they lack training of different types of tools so they can actually do their job better. So all of this comes at a time when I've recently done three different audits of affiliate programs and each audit was different, but they still had a few things in common.

[00:00:39] John Wright: And I just come back to a question that I believe affiliate programs, they don't do enough for affiliates. And I think affiliates almost need to take some of this responsibility as well, whereby asking the affiliate program going, what are you doing to help ensure that retention and acquisition are top of mind? I think a lot of affiliate programs, they focus on sales, but they don't focus on quality. They don't focus on value.

[00:01:08] John Wright: They don't focus on retention for products that have revenue share. And I think if affiliates were to actually ask affiliate programs for more of these things, you're going to get two different types of answers. One, an affiliate manager or an owner that's actually going to perk up and listen to what you're saying. They're going to have an interest and realize they're either working on these things, which is probably not the case, or they're not working on these things and you're opening their eyes to what is possible.

[00:01:38] John Wright: I do believe, unfortunately, that the majority of affiliate managers you would get a reply back to you would say something along the lines of like, we just have like the best games, the best this, we're just the best. Without any regard to knowing what they're talking about without actually looking at any data and they don't realize that sometimes these products, I mean, they're indistinguishable from each other.

[00:02:03] John Wright: Just simply having the best product on the market doesn't mean you've got the best landing page.

[00:02:10] John Wright: You know, there's just so many different factors that contribute towards having a good converting product and something that retains and delivers good value for affiliates. So I want to talk about the three things that affiliate programs simply aren't doing. And I'm going to start first by saying they don't look at data and what kind of data. Well, it's all over the place.

[00:02:32] John Wright: They don't know when good or bad things are happening. I think most affiliate programs, they rely on affiliate program software if they haven't done this in house and the affiliate program software does its job, but it's not really meant to be a pure analysis tool. It's not going to help you find revenue leak where if you're an affiliate manager, if your earnings per click has dropped by a factor of 25% across the entire affiliate program, there is a major problem there.

[00:03:02] John Wright: And you as an affiliate are going to suffer from that pain, but you're not really going to know anything about it unless you as the affiliate actually stay on top of data and you're able to identify something's happened. Like, hey, the program has actually taken a bad turn and everything's converting at a worse rate.

[00:03:21] John Wright: I think there's just so many aspects of data that affiliate programs and affiliate managers could look at, but they simply aren't doing it. And I think the proof is kind of in the pudding in terms of like which affiliate companies actually hire the right people for this. Like who actually hires data analytics, business intelligence, data science professionals, people that know how to use Power BI, Tableau, Looker Studio or any other advanced data visualization tool. I think you'll find that some of the biggest affiliate programs and operators in the world will have this department.

[00:03:58] John Wright: But then once you start going below that, which we're talking like maybe 1% of affiliate programs even do these things. It's the majority of the industry that are not doing those things. So simply not looking at data is always a critical mistake. And I think money is being left on the table in every aspect. I'm going to talk about next that I believe affiliate programs don't focus on conversion rate optimization. And in particular, when I started looking at these three audits, I only felt one of the three programs actually did a good job of having a solid landing page. But the other two, it was very easy for me to critique right off the bat.

[00:04:36] John Wright: I could just look at the pages and go, I believe that there's not enough contrast. There's not good messaging. There's not a good call to action to help the traffic that's being sent to by affiliates and converting it. So I think when you when you're an affiliate and you're sending traffic to a brand, you do want that brand to convert it as best as possible. And I think programs are just leaving money on the table by not looking at their landing pages.

[00:05:02] John Wright: It's quite easy to tell who actually uses any type of software to track user engagement, whether it's tools like Hotjar, anything that does ABA testing or heat maps. And I think this is an easy way of getting some wins and going, let's take the landing page and let's see how we can optimize it and try to get some wins here. Because you have most affiliate programs that their mindset is sales. Like if I just double the number of visitors and traffic and sales coming through the door, then everything's going to be great. But no one really thinks that that's a lot of effort. Like what if you just say, I'm going to double my conversion rate.

[00:05:42] John Wright: And if you can do that in a shorter period of time on a lower budget, then you're going to have some powerful breakthroughs, which could actually lead to getting more traffic. If any of your top affiliates see that you're converting at a higher rate, they might actually pay attention to it and say, you know what, this program is trending up for us and we're going to send them more traffic and the rewards are going to start taking care of themselves. And last but not least is affiliate managers. I think most of them, they're lacking different types of training tools. I commonly like to ask affiliate managers direct or even do polls and start asking what tools do you use?

[00:06:21] John Wright: Who uses Ahrefs or SEMrush for trying to just analyze what affiliates you're working with or knowing what pages that affiliate has that are valuable. And I think in the last few years, and I think this is going to remain this way, just from having previous affiliate sites, most affiliate managers approach with the mindset that I just want the number one spot on your homepage. Which is not a bad thing to ask for, but when everyone asks for it, it's you pretty much are guaranteed not to get anywhere on the homepage.

[00:06:56] John Wright: It's a great way to turn off a relationship when you could have said, you know, the best thing an affiliate manager could have done, and it just never happens, is if we were to work together, where do you have, where's some of your best traffic? Is it on the homepage? Is it somewhere else on the website? Is it in a different geo, different markets? Like where are all your players coming from? They will ask like, you know, okay, where are your geos? That's great. But they really won't ask like, okay, am I missing something? Is it not just the homepage of where you can deliver the most value? Is it your newsletter? Is it your comparison pages? Is it your blog? Like what's powerful and what works for you?

[00:07:35] John Wright: affiliate managers simply don't ask these questions. And I think, you know, when it comes to just knowing some of the basic tools that you can use, there's just lots being left on the table. So it's kind of painful. I believe in the next few years, affiliate management and affiliate programs, things aren't really going to change. And it's going to take a couple of years before things maybe get better. And I think the only way they're going to get better is when you have affiliate managers and owners of the affiliate programs that are going to be a bit more proactive and say, you know what? We're going to look at data a bit more. We're going to invest in this program and see how we can get more out of the same traffic that you already have.

[00:08:15] John Wright: Or with the same number of affiliates you already have. So I think there's just so much more room to grow in affiliate marketing. And I think at some point, the bigger affiliates might be able to actually influence these affiliate programs by saying, hey, if you really want more of our traffic, I want to see you meet us in the middle. Our traffic is very valuable. So if we're going to send it over to you, we expect a certain ROI. So it's either you can pay for it with flat fees and upfront money, or you can prove that you're going to go out of your way to do the things that say, well, yeah, we are going to have a superior product. We are going to convert better and we are going to retain better.

[00:08:53] John Wright: So just saying that you're good at these things is pretty much as meaningless. But showing that you're going to do these things, I think there's so many easy ways of doing this and easy wins. First, the easiest thing anyone could do right now is just say, you know what, we're going to create one or two new landing pages and we're going to send some traffic to there. And we're going to see which of these landing pages converts better. Once you have a clear winner, then you're able to basically take that to your affiliates and say, hey, we have a landing page that now converts that 26% more than the current landing page that you're using.

[00:09:27] John Wright: So it goes without saying that when you have these quick wins, you basically want to use that as part of your marketing saying, hey, can you change the landing page because we got something that converts better. So that's all I'm going to say for today is affiliate programs. There's so much money that could be made if the program just amplified and basically spent some time kind of cleaning up and improving their affiliate program. And if they did that, affiliate marketers themselves would be the main beneficiaries. It's I think it's time that some of these things will start to change. So just to summarize these things once again, it's programs aren't looking at data enough.

[00:10:05] John Wright: Programs rarely focus on conversion rate optimization. And I think affiliate managers are just lacking the training and tools to be successful at their job, which translates to the affiliate program making more money and the affiliates making more money. So thanks very much for listening. As always, please leave a comment and a rating wherever you listen to this podcast and we'll catch you next time.