The history of Affiliate Marketing, Affiliate Marketing was first known in the mid-1990s of the last century. A British music website called Cdnow.com came up with a new idea, through a program called Buywebprogram, which allowed other websites to link to Cdnow.com. With every album sold, those sites that link will share a portion of the profits. In 1996, Amazon officially launched its own Affiliate program and it still has succeeded up to now.
What is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is a form of promoting products or services of the supplier. They are companies, whose products or services want to promote goods and services to the end user through the websites of partners. Partners that are making money online receive a commission when users visit the Partner’s website to manage and perform actions that the supplier wants from the end user such as: Purchasing, registering to use services, fill information, …
Advertiser: Known as someone who has a product / service and they are willing to pay people to promote their products through online marketing channels.
Publishers: An individual or company promoting Advertiser’s products via social networks, websites or blogs and getting a commission from the Advertiser
Affiliate network: Acting as an intermediary partner to connect product suppliers with affiliate marketers.
The affiliate network will provide technical platforms such as advertising links, banners, statistics, click-through rate, conversion rate, commission … And they will be the ones to resolve disputes, collect money and pay commission for Publisher
Customer: The person who directly sees the Publisher ad and performs an action (purchase, fill out the registration form …)
How does work?
1: Customer visits the Publisher website
2: Customers see the banner or link of Publisher and click on the tracking link of the Affiliate network. However, customers will not realize that they are clicking on the affiliate link.
3: Click to be tracked by the Affiliate network and the device user cookie will be saved.
4: Customer completes online order
5: The advertiser receives the report of the Affiliate network on the order that was recorded.
6: The affiliate network informs the order to the Advertiser and the Advertiser will agree to pay a commission for the recorded order.
7: Affiliate network pays the commissions to Publisher
Most advertisers often work with affiliate networks to track how their affiliate campaigns. The affiliate network will provide technical platforms for tracking affiliate links that are placed under banners or text links on affiliate websites. When customers click on those links, there is a cookie that is attached to their device and recognized by the Affiliate network. When the customer completes an order on the Advertiser website, the Affiliate network checks the cookie if it is one of the network’s Publisher or not then the order will be recorded on the network’s platform. From the network platform, both Advertiser and Publisher can track orders and commissions.
Affiliate tracking
The hardest part of Affiliate Marketing is tracking exactly every website visitor as well as the orders that are recorded.
Advertisers have 2 options to start their affiliate marketing program. Firstly, advertisers can develop or buy an affiliate platform and manage it on their own hosting or rent it from different vendors. Second, advertisers can partner with affiliate networks. The network will act as an affiliate tracking platform. Both of these options work on the principle of creating and tracking the unique IDs assigned to each banner or affiliate link. Each time the Affiliate’s affiliate link that leads to the Advertiser’s website is clicked, the Affiliate network will monitor and notify Publisher that there is a visitor. Advertiser order processing is also integrated into the network to see when a customer from Publisher completes an order.
Models of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate Marketing is a type of marketing based on the CPA (Cost per Action) advertising fee model. CPA is the most optimal advertising model currently based on user behavior. Suppliers only pay fees when customers perform a specific action such as purchasing goods, registering for services, filling information … CPA is superior to traditional advertising fees such as fee by turn Click CPC (Cost per Click) or CPM (Cost per Thousand Impression) impressions like posting banner ads in magazines and newspapers because of the risk reduction for advertisers who have to pay for website traffic but do not revenue generated due to the amount of virtual clicks, virtual access.
Cost Per Sale (CPS): Publishers receive commissions only when orders are received from the Advertiser.
Cost Per Lead (CPL): Publishers receive a commission when a customer completes the registration form. The advertiser accepts to pay for receiving information from their potential customers.
Cost Per Order (CPO): Publishers receive a commission when a customer orders successfully on the Advertiser website.
In Vietnam, if you want to do affiliate marketing, you can join some affiliate networks like ACCESSTRADE. ACCESSTRADE has more than 80 campaigns to help publishers comfortable in choosing products to advertise. The current ACCESSTRADE community with over 80000 publishers is currently the largest network in Vietnam.
Source: Affiliatemarketingvietnam.com