There are major benefits for an advertiser's affiliate program to be trusted by publishers. Achieving trust will depend on how affiliate tracking and user consent are approached and prioritised within the wider ecommerce business.
For agencies and Outsourced Program Managers, this means that it is critical to understand how tracking is actually implemented and if it's working as intended, something that often doesn't show in usual BI metrics. Clarity regarding affiliate tracking can often be masked within an advertiser's reliance on other reporting metrics used across its portfolio of marketing processes.
An Example of Solving Tracking Issues
UK agency Scale Digital, managing a major retail brand, was experiencing low tracking efficacy. Despite several investigations and tracking tests to identify which scenarios were causing the decline in tracking, a cause could not be determined. The frustration leading up to the peak period caused the client to pull back on spending and consider changing networks to solve the problem.
Jason Codrington of Scale described the effect: "Within a week of onboarding with Moonpull, Scale was able to process the links of the top partners in Moonpull audits and identify the cause of the tracking blockage. This saved the client a huge migration and disruption during peak and finding the root cause of the issue in the process."
For affiliate management agencies, it is vitally important to maintain an ongoing understanding of the status of each client's tracking implementation and user consent mechanisms in place. This enables account managers to have proper control of their programs, to be able to promote effectively to the wider publisher base and recruit new partners.
Benefits of Managing Tracking
Benefit 1 -- be the preferred advertiser
When a program is trusted by affiliates, there is a greater likelihood of being featured or taking precedence on a publisher's site and in promotions. The same will be true for most publisher activity, email, search, loyalty or content.
Trust that the conversion is more likely to happen will result in an advertiser being promoted over competing brands. As a leading loyalty publisher shared "we are moving to prioritise advertisers that have a clear and sensible strategy for working with us, over those that don't".
Benefit 2 -- premium brand positioning
When a program is trusted, there is a higher likelihood of being featured in remnant inventory with the big publishers where other brands would have to 'pay to play'; the trusted advertiser will also be more likely to achieve premium positions with content publishers.
Benefit 3 -- transparency leads to trust
As Awin's Adam Ross said at PI LIVE 2024, there's no such thing as free sales. Ignoring issues with a tracking implementation will result in declining EPCs and a program being less attractive. Every sale generated while not being tracked, is one less payment for a publisher who may eventually stop promoting and switch activity by sending future traffic to a competing brand.
Benefit 4 -- build trust with brand ambassadors
A major advertiser's attitude to tracking accuracy should align with core brand values. Where brand trust is important, attention to trustworthy tracking ensures that the advertiser will retain the right relationship with publishers and partners; these are ultimately, key brand ambassadors for the long term.
Benefit 5 -- achieve stronger overall metrics
A successful affiliate program represents part of an overall advertising strategy across all channels. An affiliate commission structure should work for both parties; combine that with a strong conversion rate, it drives strong metrics -- including EPCs for publishers -- to help grow the program and profitability for the advertiser.
A telecoms publisher used Moonpull reports to work with an advertiser to see the advertiser fix an issue quickly, resulting in 38% increase in publisher conversions. The resulting increase in commissions fed into improved EPCs and a 60% increase in overall sales via affiliates. See more in the APMA case study.
Moonpull Certification Delivers Benefits
Moonpull is working with an increasing number of leading agencies to deliver many of these benefits strengthening their clients' affiliate programs. Many are including Moonpull Certification in their strategy for their advertiser clients.
By running a scheduled program of link audits each month, it enables the trusted Moonpull Certified badge to be activated. This can be placed on affiliate program recruiting pages, or other listings where the facility can be provided.
This gives publishers peace of mind that the advertiser takes tracking seriously -- and that the program is more likely to deliver the commissions advertised.
Direct Benefits for the Agency
Where advertisers operate with transparency in their tracking, programs perform better as shown above. This has additional benefits for the agency.
Agencies and program managers are measured on what is actually being tracked -- and if a program is under-reporting due to a tracking matter that will reflect partly on how the agency performance is appraised. Where an agency operates on a performance basis, partially or fully, that has implications for its bottom line and profitability.