FAQ’s Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is a means of making money by promoting the products and services of other people and companies. As an affiliate marketer, you don’t need to create your own product or service; you simply promote existing ones. This ease of entry makes affiliate marketing attractive to many people.

An affiliate program is a marketing strategy that employs other businesses to promote your products or services for a commission. Affiliates typically receive a percentage of the sale price when they send customers to your site. We can manage your affiliate program on your behalf, and we work with all of the affiliate networks to make sure you have access to all of the best – and only the most productive – affiliates who can help your business grow.

Affiliate networks exist to act as a platform to connect publishers to advertisers. We work with all the major ones, including ShareASale, CJ Affiliate (formerly Commission Junction), Awin, Rakuten Marketing, and Pepperjam. The networks make money through fees charged to the merchants they work with. These fees are negotiated with each individual advertiser based on a percentage of each sale made. We negotiate the best deals because we bring them lots of business .

The Global Affiliate Marketing Industry is Worth Over $17 Billion. The current global market size of affiliate marketing is over $17 billion. That’s up from $13 billion in 2016. The American affiliate marketing market alone is worth over $6 billion

Affiliate marketing can help you grow your business by increasing the number of referrals you receive and the amount of revenue you bring in.
It allows you to save time and money on marketing, which is time you can dedicate to focusing and spending on other aspects of your business
It gives you access to professional marketers (affiliates/publishers)
It exposes your products to new audiences through promotional efforts by your team of publishers (affiliates)
It’s cost effective and has unmatched ROI

Use an affiliate marketing agency that has access to all the networks. Networks provide vetted affiliates, who had to be accepted through a lengthy application process. Rather than guessing which networks are best for you, leave the vetting to an expert who has years of data and expertise on their side.

Affiliate marketing offers an opportunity to boost sales without disturbing existing advertising efforts. Affiliate partners are unique, so you can find companies that align with your brand without overlapping in benefits with other tactics you may have in place.
The Transaction Detail report can provide you with crucial information about the IP address of the purchase, browser used, time of purchase, and other information that can help you ascertain why a customer purchased your product.
At EDS, we have a team of data analysts who can track all of this information for you easily. Our team will make sure you’re not double charged when a sale could possibly be attributed by, say, social media for example, if there also was an affiliate link.

Incremental sales are units sold through a specific marketing campaign. Affiliate marketing, as well as influencer, social media and other channels, can create incremental sales. Such sales occur when someone outside the company (not the company itself) drives the lead that results in a purchase.

The merchants we work with are eager to learn why and how we develop the strategies we recommend. We have a great deal of data on almost every vertical you could think of, because we work with so many clients.
We have a good track record with clients, and we know what it takes to make an affiliate program successful. We don’t work with a client unless we are pretty close to certain they will see success.
We perform our due diligence when we look at your brand, truly soak in as much information as possible about your business model, look at comparable brands we’ve worked with, optimize and perform split-tests on different campaigns. And having done all this, if we did our job right, we should see results in the form of incremental revenue within the first 90 days of working together.

Performance marketing—also known as performance-based marketing, performance-based advertising, or performance pricing—is a type of marketing that uses different price structures dependent on the results obtained. Examples of such results include how many times an ad is viewed or clicked or how often a sale is made. It includes methods like pay per click (PPC) and display advertising.
Affiliate marketing falls under the umbrella of performance marketing because affiliates are typically paid on commission; this happens when a sale is made. 
So, they are not exactly the same thing, but if you refer to your affiliate strategy at any point, then you will likely hear someone use the term “performance marketing” to describe it.

A super affiliate is someone who has developed a large following and consistently drives a large majority of sales from any program they promote, compared to other affiliates involved in the program. They make a large income from affiliate marketing, which is usually in the range of five or six figures.

When a reader visits a website for a brand that’s running an affiliate program, a disclosure statement is necessary to reveal to the reader that a commission may be paid to the publisher if the reader clicks affiliate links or makes a purchase.
On social media, sponsored content is marked as such by a tagline that discloses the advertising nature of the content. The goal of this disclosure is to be transparent with the reader and potential purchaser.

Publishers have unique publisher IDs, which are used in tracking cookies to record publisher sales. This activity can then be viewed within the network dashboard.

The beauty of the internet and our globally connected world is that affiliate programs can be promoted in any country. If you are working with affiliates in multiple different countries, it’s important to tailor the content to those differing sub-groups. Tailoring the language of your marketing messages to match the language of your target market is key.

Affiliate marketing only pays out commissions on sales, which eliminates most of the risk involved with promoting your product through an affiliate network. It also exposes your product to new audiences and taps into the different skills of your publisher network, who can be hired for different tasks.
Budgets are easy to manage and maintain due to the visibility and transparency an affiliate network offers. If you use an affiliate network, managing your program is straightforward; if you lose a sale, customers can contact customer service or ask for a refund.