No successful business can work without a well-thought-out marketing strategy. Over the past half-century, methods of promoting products and services have evolved rapidly. Some classic types of advertising are still popular in different niches, while other business owners prefer digital technologies to popularize their products.

The selection of communication channels and advertising tools depends on many important factors, including:

  • The target audience of the product,
  • Features of the product or service,
  • Budget for promotion,
  • Sociocultural features of the region.

Given these and other parameters, many business owners are increasingly interested in the possibilities of affiliate marketing. This is a relatively inexpensive method of promotion, which, nevertheless, can significantly expand the brand’s audience and increase the company’s profits. Therefore, for some types of businesses, cooperation with an affiliate program can become not only an additional but also the main method of promoting products.

An affiliate program is a format of cooperation where the advertiser hires an intermediary, an affiliate, to promote their product or service. The affiliate places information about the advertiser’s product on various sources, redirects buyers to the client’s page, and then receives payment from the owner of the company.

In this case, the advertiser is often faced with a choice: open their own commodity affiliate program or contact an existing CPA network. It will take a lot of time and resources for a company to create its own program from scratch, so it all depends on the capabilities of the business owner. But, it is worth noting that well-known CPA affiliate programs on the market have several important advantages:

  1. Saving budget. The advertiser does not have to create a platform from scratch, recruit staff to work in an affiliate program, spend resources on promotion, or look for affiliates.
  2. Saving time. Usually, the process of signing an agreement with a CPA network and discussing all the conditions takes a little time, after which the client will be able to promote their products and services through affiliates.
  3. The number of affiliates. Existing affiliate programs have a huge number of experienced affiliates who are ready to promote the advertiser’s offers, so the advertiser does not have to independently look for them or sign an agreement with each of them.
  4. Minimization of risks. Working with affiliates directly, a business owner may encounter scammers or unscrupulous people. Cooperation with CPA affiliate programs helps to avoid risks and receive transparent statistics in the course of work.

Based on these advantages, many business owners prefer to work with affiliates through an affiliate program with a good reputation. This significantly saves company resources and helps to achieve the best result.

What is an affiliate program?

Promotion through affiliate programs is gaining more and more popularity due to the effectiveness of this method for many business niches. The essence of such promotion is the use of platforms and resources of affiliates to advertise the client’s products.

The scheme of working with a commodity CPA network depends on many factors and conditions of a particular AP, but in general, such cooperation includes several main stages:

1. Choosing an affiliate program. At this stage, it is important for the advertiser to choose the right affiliate. To get started, you should look for information about the program, read reviews about it, and find out the terms.
2. Signing an agreement. When the choice is made, the advertiser signs an agreement with the network, and the network, in turn, takes responsibility for communicating with affiliates.
3. Creating offers. The business owner provides detailed information about the products or services they will promote through the affiliate program.
4. Drawing up a list of conditions. This is an important step that gives the advertiser an advantage: the business owner has the right to provide a list of conditions for promoting each offer. For example, they can create a list of allowed and prohibited traffic sources, limit the geolocation for promotion, and set a rate they are ready to pay for the target action performed by the user.
5. Promoting offers. When offers are created, affiliates start attracting users to the site or landing page of the client. In most commodity affiliate programs, the advertiser has the opportunity to track transparent and convenient statistics on the results of the work of publishers in order to avoid fraud.
6. Payment. If the publisher has fulfilled the conditions of the advertiser, they receive a reward at a fixed rate. The amount of remuneration directly depends on the target action determined by the business owner.

One of the advantages of this method of promotion is the flexibility of affiliate marketing because with its help advertisers can achieve different goals. Most often, working with an affiliate CPA program is an effective way to increase sales.

At the same time, the results of cooperation can be tracked using various indicators. So, in affiliate marketing, cookies can be used. This is a code that allows you to recognize the affiliate who brought the visitor to the advertiser’s site. Also, the affiliate can link their account to the client’s email so that the advertiser directly receives information about the results of the promotion by a specific affiliate.

Why do we need affiliate programs?

One of the main goals of affiliate programs is to make a profit. All parties in this scheme benefit: the advertiser increases income by selling a product or service, the affiliate receives a reward for attracting users, and the commodity CPA network gets a percentage of a successful transaction.

But, in addition to increasing sales, other important goals can be achieved with the help of affiliate marketing:

1. Attracting a new audience. Affiliates drive quality traffic to the advertiser’s website.
2. Increasing brand awareness. This occurs due to the frequent display of advertising on various resources.
3. Budget optimization. The client pays only for targeted actions and can more accurately predict marketing costs.
4. Attracting influencers. This happens if affiliates collaborate with reputable resources or famous people for promotion.
5. Popularization of new products. Quite often, affiliate marketing is used to draw attention to a new product.
6. Research. The advertiser has the opportunity to attract a large audience to a survey or questionnaire, as well as analyze consumer habits.
7. Audience loyalty. Through affiliate marketing, the business owner can communicate important non-direct selling information to their target audience.
8. Database collection. If the advertising campaign uses a special form that the user must fill out, this will help to collect the contact database of potential buyers.
9. Search engine optimization. This takes place if the affiliate uses SEO promotion to promote the advertiser’s landing page or resource.

Types of affiliate programs

The type of affiliate program that best suits an advertiser depends on several parameters, including:

  • the type of product or service being promoted,
  • advertising campaign goals,
  • the rate the client is willing to pay.

But the main criterion for classifying CPA affiliate programs is the target action that the user must take. It is for this targeted action that the affiliate receives a reward, so their profit directly depends on the effectiveness of the advertising campaign.

Depending on the form of payment, the following types of AP are distinguished:

1. CPS (Cost-per-Sale)

In such affiliate programs, the affiliate receives a reward for each purchase made by the user whom they brought to the advertiser’s site. Most often, the affiliate in this case receives a percentage of the check amount, but sometimes the client and the affiliate can agree on a fixed cost of services for a certain period of time.

2. CPC (Cost-per-Click)

The affiliate receives payment for the user’s transition to the advertiser’s site which often occurs with the help of banners and referral links. The affiliate places the link on their resources to draw the attention of the audience to the client’s offer. To analyze the effectiveness of this promotion method, the CTR indicator is used. This payment method is rational to use when the purpose of an advertising campaign is, for example, to increase brand awareness and improve the company’s image.

3. CPI (Cost-per-Install)

This form of payment provides remuneration to the affiliate for each download and installation of software on a PC or smartphone. Such affiliate programs are effective for promoting video games, mobile applications, and special programs.

4. CPA (Cost-per-Action)

In order for the affiliate to receive a reward, the user must not only visit the site but also perform an action specified by the advertiser. This target action directly depends on the goals of the client. For example, the affiliate may be paid for filling out a form, providing contact information, posting a comment, submitting an application, downloading a file, viewing content, or any other user action.

In addition to the form of payment, there are other criteria for dividing affiliate programs into different types. There are, for example, universal and niche CPA programs. In this case, the type of affiliate program depends on the category of offers that affiliates work with. Programs can also be classified according to the traffic sources used and other criteria.

Types of businesses that can be promoted through AP

Today, affiliate marketing is an effective promotion method for many types of businesses. Company owners can seek help from universal affiliate programs that promote many offers at once.

But sometimes it is best to contact a niche network that specializes in specific types of products or services. In this case, experienced affiliates who are familiar with the peculiarities of promotions in this area of business will work with offers.

Here are just a few types of popular niche affiliate programs that company owners can use to advertise their products and attract a huge audience:

  • Commodity CPA networks are effective for distributing offers of a huge number of goods: beauty and health products, clothing, appliances, electronics, and household goods. Online stores and marketplaces often cooperate with such APs.
  • Affiliate mobile programs are suitable for business owners involved in the development of games, mobile applications, special software, and other software.
  • Financial affiliate programs help to promote financial offers. Advertisers in such networks are banks, insurance companies, and companies that provide loans, loans, and mortgages.
  • Gambling and betting affiliate programs promote gambling, including online casinos, poker, sports betting, lotteries, and other sites.
  • Real estate programs help distribute offers related to the rental and sale of real estate.
  • Dating affiliates help to advertise various types of dating applications, including those for adults.

Thus, through an affiliate program, you can promote different types of businesses. This format is suitable for company owners who want to increase sales of their product or service, boost traffic, increase brand awareness, and achieve other business development goals.

Affiliate programs as an element of a marketing strategy

Today, affiliate programs include both small companies and world-famous brands in their marketing strategies. At the same time, there can be several ways of interacting with affiliates.

For example, in a single-level commodity affiliate program, the advertiser interacts with a specific site without intermediaries. Multilevel programs provide for the participation of several affiliates at once. In this case, the profit is distributed among all participants.

When choosing an affiliate program to promote your business, you should pay attention to the following criteria:

  • the number of affiliates in the program,
  • the reputation of the company and reviews about it in open sources,
  • types of offers that affiliates work with,
  • features of the geolocation where the offer will be launched,
  • payment format and average rates,
  • sources of traffic used by affiliates,
  • possibility to track statistics in AP.

If the business owner pays attention to all these criteria, they will be able to choose a good and reliable partner to promote their products and services.

Every year, affiliate marketing keeps developing, so many companies include this type of promotion in their marketing strategy. Thanks to working with an experienced CPA network, an advertiser can significantly save resources, attract a new audience, receive stable income, increase product awareness, and dynamically develop their business.