Just like any other business, affiliate marketing professionals are constantly under pressure to keep up with the industry that never sleeps, where new products and features are popping up like mushrooms and where businesses come and go with every blow of the wind. However, whenever money and personal wellbeing are involved, people tend to get very creative. Here’s where automation comes into play!
“Automation” has been a buzz word for a while. We all strive to have machines do the work for us or at least part of it so that we can spend our time on things that bring real value. Once a luxury, it’s almost impossible to imagine any industry running the multitude of tasks and operations manually anymore. Automation is what every business has implemented to some extent by now and more and more tasks are performed automatically every day.
Now, how does this relate to the affiliate industry and does this famous “automation” really deliver on its promise or is it only suitable for large corporations with a big budget?
Before we can answer this question, let’s have a look at what tasks people in the affiliate marketing space would like to automate and why:
- Save time by automating routine and monotonous tasks
- Save money by reducing manpower as well as fraud
- Improve performance by allowing your employees to concentrate on strategic tasks
The three points above are what drives most businesses in the affiliate industry to invest in tools that could help them achieve these goals. To explore more, let us look at an example of a tracking platform, mainly vene dash. vene dash is used by affiliate networks, media buyers, content providers and advertisers. This platform provides a fair share of automation to enable its users to run their business more efficiently.
Below are just a few automated tasks to give you a sneak peek into the platform and how it can help you save time & money, whilst allowing you to focus on what really matters.
Intelligent Smartlinks
Ad networks create hundreds of ad campaigns day by day and as many links to direct traffic to. This task can be very tedious and extremely time-consuming. By introducing Intelligent Smartlinks, vene dash allows you to create only one link for a variety of offers that will recognize your traffic and show each user the best performing offer. This is how you can always know you get maximum revenue for your advertising investments, thus increasing your ROI exponentially.
Extensive API integrations
If you are running offers from other affiliate networks, you surely know how time-consuming it is to create them, configure all the parameters correctly (including checking if the promoted offers have the correct payout setup as well as checking with your advertisers whether there have been any changes) and then unify them all. We offer an extensive set of API integrations ensuring these tasks get automated so that you can lean back and let the API do the work. In addition, you minimize the risk of promoting inactive offers as well as the wrong targeting criteria. Furthermore, you no longer need to analyze and transfer offers manually, eliminating the human factor after the initial set-up.
Built-in fraud protection
One of the most challenging factors in affiliate marketing is knowing that some of your hard-earned revenues can go down the drain due to fraud. With vene dash, you will no longer need to worry about that. Not only does it come with built-in fraud protection, but you can also set up strategies that will flag or directly block fraudulent traffic even before it reaches your offers. This means your hard-earned money stays in your pocket and can strengthen your advertiser relationship and secure more budget.
Destination Site Monitoring and URL Checker
This is probably one of the top automations that will help you sleep better at night. With the Destination Site Monitoring and URL Checker offered by vene dash, you will no longer need to wonder whether your traffic is reaching its intended destination and can be monetized. The platform informs you if an LP changed and shows you how many redirects it takes to the final offer page.
Billing feature and cryptocurrency payments
How much time do you spend on the financial management of your affiliate business? Juggling Excel sheets between your account managers and the finance department, making sure you get paid by the Advertisers, transfer money to your Publishers and calculate your earning in between? vene dash is one of the companies whose state-of-the-art Billing Feature is not only reducing unnecessary steps in the process, but it also allows you to never wait for invoices again! All financial management happens within the platform.
In addition, should your publishers wish to be paid in crypto, it is now possible with vene dash and does not add extra work to your account managers. Everything stays automated!
Built-in notification system
Everyone will agree that efficient communication is one of the pillars of any business and the affiliate marketing business is not an exception. The vene dash built-in and improved Notification System helps you streamline communication with your advertisers and publishers alike. Both event-based and template-based systems are offered and provide various options to efficiently deal with your most common tasks – staying connected with your partners!
Having set these up and making automation the rule, rather than the exception, you can orchestrate the core components of your business in a way that will provide a basis for higher revenues and will allow you to concentrate on tasks that will help grow and scale your business. We do need to bear in mind that automation, even in its most sophisticated form, cannot substitute an affiliate manager or let alone replace relationship management that is THE component that makes or breaks an affiliate program.
Automation is here to take care of routine and repetitive tasks and to help your team focus on creating value where the human component makes a real difference.