Publishers are constantly finding new, creative ways to use affiliate marketing technology, and we’re hard at work building products and features that improve your ability to earn. These 3 expert affiliate marketing tips will help you improve your monetization strategy as we enter peak shopping season.
1. Create monetized tile placements
One of the most effective ways to incorporate link monetization into more of your content is through tile-based placements. These are visual representations of your affiliate strategy, and are both an enticing feature to share with your audience and a key differentiator for publishers.
Ultimately, they’re an effective means of capturing more revenue from your traffic for two key reasons: they are highly visible and highly engaged with, and therefore merchants love to see them.
Here’s a great example of the tile placements with Sovrn Commerce on msn.com. You’ll see that the tiles are located just below the search bar, making them easily accessible.
Putting these tiles together doesn’t take much engineering work, and since each tile is monetized through Sovrn Commerce, this strategy can bring a huge boost to your affiliate marketing revenue.
Here’s an article that contains more detail on building these types of placements.
2. Activate “Optimize” for your links
If you have an active Sovrn Commerce account, consider activating the Optimize feature. This can be done through the Settings page of your account, and then enabling the “Optimize Links” option.
Enabling Optimize will automatically send every product click to the highest-paying merchant in our system, earning you more through that product link. Optimize only works if it’s linking to the exact matched product at a different merchant, and if that merchant is paying more. There’s no need to worry about redirects to the wrong product.
If necessary, you have the option to exclude the page title. This ensures that when checked, Sovrn Commerce will not Optimize clicks to merchants mentioned in page titles (for example, “Top-selling eBay products”).
Additionally, you can make sure that the anchor text of the link is excluded from being read by the Sovrn Commerce tech. When this option is selected, Commerce will not Optimize merchants mentioned in anchor text (for example: “Click here to purchase on eBay”).
You can also Optimize your Anywhere links, which means that if you’re primarily active on social media, you can still ensure you’re getting the highest return from every click. This setting is enabled by default in the dashboard.
Please note that you cannot automatically Optimize links built with our Chrome extension. To Optimize links built with the extension, you’ll need to manually change the end of the full-length (unshortened) link from “opt=false” to “opt=true.”
In addition to maximizing your revenue, Optimize is the best way to protect yourself from fluctuating merchant rates.
3. Create EPC-focused content based on your merchant performance data
EPC stands for earnings per click. Because of the wide range of CPA (cost per action) and CPC (cost per click) programs that Sovrn Commerce offers, EPC should be the main performance metric for your affiliate marketing efforts. This is because it represents your revenue performance while taking into account metrics such as conversion rate and commission rate, making it the primary indicator of the ‘value’ of any given merchant program.
Closing the loop and being able to determine exactly how much you’re able to earn from each click is incredibly valuable. Instead of guessing which merchants bring you the most value, you can rank the exact merchants generating the most revenue (or sales volume) for you on a click-by-click basis.
Once you have that information, you can optimize your content accordingly—such as by creating a gift guide that focuses on links to your top-performing merchants. This article offers some more insight into the importance of understanding affiliate EPC, but ultimately it’s a metric that’s simple to understand, simple to act on, and crucial to affiliate marketing performance.
