Is a Shift to Big Data Performance Marketing the Cure?

Every marketing programme experiences a few growing pains in their lifetime. These are moments of opportunity to re-examine the status quo and re-energise your campaigns. Affiliate marketing is no different. As the industry moves away from costly legacy networks and toward a Big Data-based performance marketing model, how does your approach measure up? Would your program get a clean bill of health?

Time for a check up

The modern marketer is constantly challenged to identify areas where their affiliate marketing program could be smarter and faster, finding new opportunities for cost savings and increased revenue. Here are 10 questions to help you assess your current performance marketing efforts.

  1. Which affiliates deliver the most sales through mobile devices?
  2. Do you know which affiliates optimize your return on ad spend?
  3. Do you have affiliates with no referring URL driving sales from software and toolbars?
  4. How often are your affiliate partners relying on coupon codes to drive sales?
  5. Are some media partners leapfrogging over others to get the last click and commission?
  6. Which affiliates are repeatedly contributing to the sales process without being compensated?
  7. How many affiliates generate a lot of single influencer sales?
  8. Which media drive the biggest proportion of new customers (versus re-selling to existing buyers)?
  9. Are your affiliates leveraging social media or other sites to promote your brand?
  10. Can you accurately track placement buys on top media partner sites?

What’s your diagnosis?

If these questions were easy and the answers came quickly and clearly, congratulations! For a business that lacks the data insight to answer these questions, this is a wake up call. The harsh reality is you are at risk of falling behind, and you cannot afford to wait any longer to find the cause of your symptoms.

For example, a legacy network’s opaque methods may make it impossible to extract the actionable information needed to truly evaluate and optimise strategic partnerships. They can be difficult to wade through and too expensive. Worse, they may have a conflict of interest and inhibit the ability to monitor, measure, and evaluate program effectiveness.

The good news is there is a simple cure. Modern performance marketing is all about effective data visibility, management, and leverage. Getting up to speed with Big Data and affiliate partner management tools is a lot easier than most think. And, making that switch quickly delivers two key benefits:

  1. Increased revenue: Identifying high-performing partners and understanding how they contribute to sales allows an organisation to tweak and tune each programme component to optimise spend and drive greater ROI.
  2. Significant cost savings: A centralised, multidimensional platform enables the effective assessment and management of key marketing partnerships and functions, and eliminates high network fees charged by increasingly obsolete affiliate networks.

Big Data insights help optimise marketing performance. Those insights can completely shift the way marketing and media partnerships are designed, built and managed to maximise the impact of channel investments. Data for data’s sake is not enough, however. You need the tools that turn that information into meaningful business insights. A performance marketing technology platform can be just what the doctor ordered.

The right turnkey programme management solution that employs Big Data analytics to help intelligently account for and compensate every marketing conversion – including those that occur through mobile and in-app platforms – will do the work for you. Vital processes must be automated, including contracting, onboarding, tracking, reporting, and payment. And it must be done while providing the data insights required to interpret which functions are performing optimally and which need to be modified to maximise return.

If a traditional affiliate marketing program is hurting your bottom line, why wait? Join the performance marketing movement and take charge of the health of your program.