In a business world that is rapidly becoming dominated by digital procedures and advertising avenues, ensuring your website performs well is critical for any business, especially affiliate marketers. A few things need to be achieved for your website to be successful, with getting people onto your site in the first place being the most important. Think about it, if people aren’t looking at your site, then what’s the point of it?
What is affiliate marketing?
Affiliate marketing is currently a business that is booming. In essence, affiliate marketing is one business promoting another company’s product or service and then collecting a fee from that company based on specific performance metrics. These metrics are often either website traffic generated or, more popularly, conversions.
With affiliate marketing software, there are 4 major players; the merchant (the brand or large companies whose products and services are being promoted), the network (includes offers for the affiliate to chose from and also handles payment), the publisher (the affiliate), and the customer. Over the years affiliate marketing has evolved and there are even more sub-layers, however the above are the core four to take note of.
Affiliate marketing is present across all industries including fashion education and technology; however, its most significant impact has arguably been on the online gambling industry. Affiliates can exploit the market by adding value.
Why do affiliates use PPC?
For affiliates, dominating the search results is a must. Without good standing within Google, Bing etc, any affiliate website will likely fail. So how can these affiliate companies ensure they’re attracting enough good website traffic?
Of course, natural search results are something that people put a lot of effort into. This is because it’s perceived as ‘free traffic’; however once you factor in the time and effort to create a solid content strategy and implement it correctly, is it really free?
Another way for sites to drive traffic is through paid ads (PPC). PPC is a great way to drive traffic as you can essentially hand-pick who visits your site by producing well targeted campaigns based around a number of carefully selected keywords. PPC is an extremely important tool for affiliate marketers, allowing them to jump to the top of the search results quickly. The most popular PPC platform is Google AdWords.
Return on Investment with PPC
Another great feature of the major PPC platforms is that they allow you to track your return on investment accurately. This is crucial in the world of affiliate marketing. With PPC, if you’re making more money through it than you’re spending, it’s worth it; however, just because your campaign is making money, that doesn’t mean it still can’t be improved. The danger with PPC is when it’s not making you money. If this is, the campaign signs need to be intensively looked at and a potentially new strategy will need to be devised.
