There are many ways to expand your brand’s reach and grow product sales through marketing and advertising. One method that can be incredibly effective for brands is affiliate marketing, where your product or service is marketed and promoted by a network of websites, individuals, and other entities in exchange for a commission on each sale.

In this article, the first part of a 2-part series on successful affiliate marketing, we’re going to explore the fundamentals of affiliate marketing, and what is required to position your brand for success.

 

What exactly is affiliate marketing?

Let’s start at the beginning, with defining what exactly we mean when we refer to affiliate marketing? While your brand has numerous outlets for promoting your products and services, you may choose to offer referrers and resellers a commission to reward them for driving customers to your brand.

Most brands offer affiliate programs free of charge, creating a low barrier to entry for those interested, and they provide the affiliate with tracking links and codes that are to be used in order to ensure a sale is attributed properly.

Payouts are then made according to the schedule and terms that you dictate as the brand, and the size and scale of those payouts, as well as the sales made through the program are a matter of how large your affiliate network is, and how much traffic (and ultimately, customers) they drive to your product or service.

 

How do affiliate marketers make money?

While the range of income that an affiliate marketer can make varies widely, these affiliates make commissions based on sales generated through their efforts. The payout structure, the thresholds at which they get paid, and many more factors depend on the brand, but they can include any (or some combination of) the following:

• Payment per sale of a product or service, usually via ecommerce
• Payment per action, like an email signup or form submission
• Payment per installation of a mobile app or other type of software
• Payment per lead, paid every time a potential customer signs up for something
• Payment per click, which is more rare, but is simply when a potential customer clicks on an affiliate link

How this is set up is dependent on the brand and the product or service sold, and the method and frequency of payouts also varies widely.

For your brand, this means that you have a motivated salesforce that is only paid if they are successful in their sales. This “commission-only” method means that the only costs to you as a brand are the time and fees associated with running the affiliate program itself.

Ways to get started

If you haven’t started an affiliate marketing program and are curious if it could be right for your brand, one simple thing to do would be to check and see if any of your competitors are doing something similar. In that case, you can do research on how you can structure your commissions and payouts.

As mentioned earlier, the barrier to entry is usually pretty low (most often it is free) for affiliate marketers to get started with a brand, so you want to make sure that your affiliate program is also easy to join. You will need to determine things such as your commission structure, what products or services you want to offer to affiliates, the materials you want to provide to the affiliates.

Then, you will need to recruit affiliates to your program and manage them once they sign up. Depending on the tools and platforms you use, this can range in being easy to do, or difficult if you are managing your affiliates and payouts using spreadsheets and other less than optimal methods.

Conclusion

We hope you’ve learned a little more about how your brand can use affiliate marketing to expand your audience, reach, and ultimately, your sales.

Join us for the next and final part in our series as we discuss some practical tips to be more successful with your affiliate programs by increasing your efficiency, keeping your affiliates happy, and more.

For more information, read more about Attribution or contact us.

Specific tips for B2B marketers

Google’s approach to advertising has been intended to simplify and streamline several aspects in order to make it easier for non-experts to get good advertising results. This approach has relied more on Google’s artificial intelligence mechanisms, which work well at large scale and when presented with a great set of data in order to work with. When one or both of those is not true, advertisers can run into some challenges.

In the first two parts of our 3-part series, we talked about the evolution of Google’s approach, some of the challenges that this poses for both B2C and B2B advertisers, and what you can do about it in order to get the best results. In this article, and the third and final part of our series, we’re going to focus on B2B advertisers, who may run into some unique challenges based on Google’s evolving approach to advertising.

 

The unique challenges for B2B advertisers

As we explored earlier, Google’s combination of privacy mitigation and increased usage of automation through its Smart Bidding features has made it more difficult to target granular keywords and audiences. Because B2B marketers generally operate in a low-volume, high value sales environment, spending advertising dollars on the wrong sales targets can be extremely detrimental.

Additionally, the attribution methods that Google Ads uses to determine what a “good” audience is for your ads can cause particular challenges for B2B advertisers. Some of this is due to the fact that the time that a lead first enters the sales and marketing funnel to the time they end up becoming a customer can be a long time. This means there are many different touchpoints that a lead may go through. Unless Google is specifically fed attribution information, it tends to simplify based on first-touch or last-touch and misses many points in between.

This also means that some of your B2B marketing may be very good at generating leads that enter the top of the sales and marketing funnel, but are simply not good potential customers for one reason or another. Unless Google knows this, its machine learning will assume that because a user “converts” into a lead, they must be the audience you are after. Only by letting Google know that, despite an initial click on an ad, they turned out to not be an ideal audience can you get better results.

Additionally, and to make matters more challenging, Google uses a lookback window with over a given period of time which may also cause conversions to be left out of its determinations. This is particularly problematic if the sales cycle for your B2B customers is particularly long, and may fall outside this window.

What is the solution to this, then? Use a tool that allows you to get better customer insights, and helps provide guidance on what campaigns are performing best for awareness, consideration, and conversion stages. While this is also true for B2C marketers, those in the business to business market will find that data hygiene and data quality are absolutely critical to success with Google Ads. Because there is a lower volume of data to begin with in B2B marketing (versus Business-to-Consumer), the quality of the data becomes that much more important in order to steer Google’s artificial intelligence in the right direction. Additionally, our ‘Marketer Spend View’ is based on when the ad spend occurred and what conversions were caused, based on the ad spend. This means that Attribution won’t cut out any conversions based on an arbitrary lookback window.

 

Solution for B2B Marketers

There isn’t a simple fix for B2B marketers to just get more volumes of data in order to illustrate what an ideal customer behaves and looks like. Instead, as mentioned above, the solution for B2B marketers to have greater success with Google Ads is to increase the quality of their data, not the quantity. This is where tools like Attribution can be incredibly helpful. By providing the best possible information to Google Ads regarding multi-touch marketing attribution and what successful customer conversations look like (not just initial clicks on ads that turn into bad leads), you can feed high-quality data into their platform and get better outputs.

As you can see, there are challenges for B2B marketers in having success with Google Ads, but, savvy advertisers can still find success by getting access to the best possible attribution data and feeding it into Google’s platforms.

We hope you enjoyed this 3-part series, and got some valuable insights in the process. Being successful with Google advertising is critical to many businesses, and having the right tools at your disposal can help you achieve it. Getting the best possible multi-touch attribution data from your combined channels through Attribution can be a great way to do just that.

 

For more information, read more about Attribution or contact us.

How advertisers can make the most of the platform

As we’ve explored in the last article in this series, Google has been shifting its advertising approach over the past several years. Rather than providing more granular flexibility, they have focused on more automation, and a more artificial intelligence-driven approach, while addressing growing privacy concerns from consumers. Both of these add up to a set of challenges for advertisers and marketers as they use Google Ads to reach their audiences.

In this article, which is the second part of a 3-part series, we’re going to discuss some of the challenges that Google’s approach poses for advertisers, and what you can do about it in order to get the best results.

 

The Challenge for Advertisers and Marketers

As described earlier, both privacy considerations and an increased reliance on AI not user input have changed how Google Advertising works. This gives advertisers and marketers less control how they target their audiences and spend their marketing dollars and puts a lot more control in the hands of Google’s tools.

While Google’s evolution to a more AI-driven approach through their Smart Bidding features has simplified things for many marketers, it has also caused other unforeseen issues because the attribution methods Google uses are only as good as the data sources they receive.

For instance, using a “first touch” attribution model alone won’t take into account anything after the initial interaction that a potential customer had with your brand. In a lot of cases, an advertisement drives a lot of traffic to your site but doesn’t translate into any sales. This could be that the keywords used are bringing in the wrong audience, or because there are other elements in your sales process that might identify a marketing qualified lead (MQL) yet reject them as a sales qualified lead (SQL) once you learn more about their budget or other needs.

As you probably well know, the solution isn’t simply to abandon Google because it doesn’t give you the flexibility you need. Instead, the challenge for advertisers and marketers is to find ways to work with Google’s increased automation and its reduced flexibility. There’s one major way you can do this, which we’ll explore next.

 

Better Data is the Solution

One thing is for sure: Google is not going to go “backwards” and offer less consumer privacy to third parties, nor will they rely less on AI and other automated solutions. It stands to reason that they will only continue to move in both of these directions.

While for some marketers, the remedy to this solution is to simply let Google do its thing and automate all of your advertising on their platform, but that doesn’t work for everyone. If your advertising needs and audiences are nuanced and require a greater understanding of details, you can’t simply let Google’s automated solutions spend your advertising dollars without having a little more control.

The way to get better results as a more sophisticated advertiser is to have strong data that can provide Google with the best possible conversion data inputs. This can be more important even than having better keywords or landing pages.

A great way to have better data is to use a tool like Attribution that shows Google where your best traffic is coming from. This lets Google’s AI tool, which is becoming more and more opaque in how it operates, to work its magic. Having the best possible data hygiene is your best bet to get better results from your Google Advertising, though.

The solution to all of this is to get the best possible data in the first place, which includes more than just the first touch or last touch that you have with a customer, but everything in between. This multi-touch attribution is where tools like Attribution can be incredibly helpful, since these tools can give you (and Google) the information needed to feed the most accurate and helpful data, ensuring greater success.

Understanding how Google has evolved, and the best ways to utilize that to your advantage can mean the difference between middling results and thriving in this new world of Google advertising.

Coming up next in the third and final part of this series, we’re going to explore some of the implications of Google’s changes on Business to Business (B2B) advertisers, where some of the challenges can be most extreme.

For more information, read more about Attribution or contact us.

Important changes to Google Ads since its inception

In case you haven’t noticed, Google has been shifting its advertising approach over the past several years. Rather than providing more granular flexibility, they have focused on more automation, and a more artificial intelligence-driven approach.

In this article, which is the first part of a 3-part series, we’re going to discuss the evolution of Google’s approach, some of the challenges that this poses for both B2C and B2B advertisers, and what you can do about it in order to get the best results.

 

Google Ads Has Evolved

It’s hard to believe that it’s been over 21 years since Google AdWords first launched. On October 23, 2000, Google unveiled the first-ever online advertising platform that was self-serve. This revolutionized the way marketers reached people digitally and drove us towards a $356 Billion industry. Over the time since launch, Google AdWords (now Google Ads) has evolved quite a bit.

While there are many components of Google’s evolution, there are two primary ones that have had the biggest impact on the way advertisers place ads and measure their effectiveness.

 

Consumer privacy

The first component we’ll explore is privacy. We can all agree that greater consumer privacy has benefits for the consumer. While this is good, it can also have an adverse effect on the way marketers and advertisers get the data they need to do better work and provide more relevant ads. Regulations such as GDPR in the European Union or California’s CCPA privacy regulations are behind much of this, and other jurisdictions are currently drafting and approving their own versions of these. Thus, companies like Google are needing to address them meaningfully.

First, Google stopped showing individual organic keyword search results for most users, and now similar things are happening with its paid advertising. Advertisers are getting less than half of the original signal of how audiences are finding them, and what queries are driving them.

 

Increased reliance on Artificial Intelligence

Second, let’s talk about AI, or artificial intelligence, often referred to as Smart Bidding within the Google Ads interface. In order to make buying ads through their platform, Google has increasingly automated parts of the process by adding machine learning functions to maximize conversions, reach a target cost per acquisition (CPA), and other features. For more novice advertisers, this has made the platform much more accessible and easier to get a campaign up and running, and has also helped advertisers with small budgets maximize their ad spend. For more advanced advertisers, however, this has been a source of frustration, as the ability to more specifically target users has been deprecated in favor of easier-to-use methods that appeal to a broader user base of their tools.

As an example, Google has progressively used its automation tools to evolve how it handles match types, such as matching a word like “software” to “tool” or similar replacements. Increasingly, however, these matches are expanding in order to incorporate more related queries (at least from the standpoint of Google’s AI and machine learning), and while this can be good for some larger B2C advertisers that can benefit from the greater volume and diversity, it can have detrimental effects for more niche advertisers, including B2B advertisers (which we will explore in more detail in the next article in this series).

Because of these changes, there have been some benefits for advertisers and marketers that are less knowledgeable about the intricacies of digital advertising, but more sophisticated advertisers, or companies that target niche audiences, or even business to business (B2B) marketers that don’t often have high volumes of customers. We’ll explore some of these challenges as we continue our exploration of Google’s advertising evolution.

Coming up next in the second part of this three-part series, we’re going to explore what  evolution means to advertisers and marketers, the challenges they face, and the best solution to these challenges.

For more information read more about Attribution or contact us.

Your marketing efforts may be measured on a specific set of outcomes, such as more marketing qualified leads, increased sales, repeat sales, or many other potential metrics. Unless you’re looking at the entire customer journey you may be missing out on some key opportunities to grow customer revenue, loyalty, and referral opportunities.

Let’s explore a few reasons why it is so important to understand the entire buyer’s journey.

A single point in time doesn’t show the whole picture

What a difference a phone call can make. Have you ever loved a product or service all through the sales process, but as soon as something goes wrong, the customer support function completely fails you? If that company were to just look at a single point in time, they might think you are a happy customer, but in reality, you’re unlikely to buy their product again, or recommend it to others after your most recent experience.

If you look at your marketing and sales process alone, you might see some similar things. For instance, do you do a great job of educating your customers, only to then have a hard time differentiating your product from your biggest competitors? This is where multi-touch attribution, combined with a more holistic approach to evaluating your customer journey can pay dividends.

Make sure that customers are moving seamlessly from point to point during the marketing and sales journey, and identify points of friction to improve them once you have a big picture view. Start from the outside in, because often the things you know how to improve, or can most easily improve, may not be the areas that actually need the most attention.

While single interactions can make a big difference in whether or not you make a sale, keeping the whole picture in mind by understanding and improving the customer journey will pay great dividends. Customer satisfaction is made up of a string of experiences throughout the journey. Therefore, success at a single stage in the customer journey doesn’t guarantee success. Looking at the customer journey as a whole will help you avoid problem areas that take otherwise happy customers and turn them away.

A holistic customer experience is key to long-term success

It is well understood that customer experience is now a primary point of competition and differentiation among businesses. According to a recent study, 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a great customer experience. This includes having a great overall experience, as well as a more tailored one, where 49% of buyers have said they made impulse purchases when receiving personalized offers.

Customer experience is defined as the overall perception of their experience, not the experience at a single point in time. While you may be laser focused on increasing conversions at specific points in time, make sure you can see the forest for the trees. Short term gains can be good, but thinking holistically about building long-term customers, as well as building marketing and sales funnels that perform as a whole can provide even better returns over time.

Make sure that, for all the work that you will do to create a robust customer journey, you always keep the customer first. This helps ensure that you get long-term results, not simply a short-term gain.

Taking the entire customer journey into account can translate into more meaningful, long-term results. This means that customers will appreciate the thoughtfulness you put into making their entire experience easier and more rewarding, and your team will reap the benefits of that through increase sales, better word of mouth, and more repeat purchases. As they say, “it’s the journey, not the destination.”

Attribution can help you take a bigger picture look at your advertising and marketing efforts to make sure that you aren’t losing sight of opportunities to make a bigger impact on your customers’ needs. For more information read more about our product or request a demo.

What would you do differently if you only had the right information within instant reach? Understanding what marketing and advertising campaigns and channels are making the biggest impact is one of the major benefits of multi-touch attribution.

Attribution provides you with a report that takes into account all of your marketing channels, including digital advertising, offline channels like direct mail or in-store touches, organic SEO, and more. You can then see the return by channel, campaign, and more in comprehensive and easy to view reports.

With all of this valuable information at your fingertips, where should you start? In this article, we’ll explore some ideas of how you can make the most of your multi-touch attribution reports.

Having all of your data in one place means you can easily compare performance and ROI between channels.

What to Look for When Reading Your Reports

Your Attribution reports will give you insights into many important things such as your return on investment by individual channels or campaigns, your return on ad spend, and even give you insights into individual customer touchpoints to better understand typical and non-typical journeys to conversions.

If you are new to multi-touch attribution, or our Attribution product, it’s a good idea to familiarize yourself with the different types of reports available. From your Dashboard, you have several options available to you, including reviewing campaign or channel performance, customer paths, and more.

You will quickly see that there are a lot of great insights you can gain, and since the data from all your marketing and advertising channels is in one place, you don’t have to switch between platforms and reports to get the valuable information you need in order to make more strategic decisions.

Prioritizing Your Findings

As you can see, your multi-touch attribution report has a lot of valuable information in it. You might find many things that you can use to help your marketing and advertising efforts perform better. In some cases, it may be hard to prioritize your next steps.

Because there is a wealth of information available to you through Attribution, it’s important that you prioritize what you want to do with the insights it shows. For instance, there are a few ways you could start, including:

• Discovering return on investment by campaign or channel in order to make budget and resource adjustments
• Creating a plan to reduce cost per acquisition in order to hit new marketing or sales targets
• Analyzing the customer journey using the detailed user history in order to optimize key customer touch points and improve the customer experience

Prioritizing the findings from your multi-touch attribution report will help you take the best first steps that will make the biggest impact on your marketing, as well as on your bottom line.

Taking Action and Optimizing Your Marketing

Once you’ve prioritized your next steps, it’s time to take action to optimize your efforts. With the data that Attribution provides, you have a window into attribution and performance across all channels, whether they are online or offline.

Implement your campaign or channels according to your prioritization, and you will be able to see their effects within your multi-touch reports. Then, create a plan of action to regularly review and make adjustments to your performance where necessary. Knowing that the wealth of information available to you from Attribution is only a click away, doing so won’t require hours or even days waiting for data to be compiled from multiple sources. This lets you focus on making strategic decisions that can move the needle for your marketing efforts.

By taking smart steps to utilize the insights in your multi-touch attribution report and create a plan to optimize them over time, you can set your marketing efforts up to be successful now and well into the future.

Understanding your multi-touch attribution reports, prioritizing what to do next with them, and creating a plan to continually optimize and improve your efforts will make sure you achieve higher and higher returns on your marketing investments. Having valuable attribution data at your fingertips gives you more time to spend on creating and executing the best strategy. For more information, read more about Attribution or contact us.

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