This is a concept all digital marketers and everyone for that matter is familiar with in both our online and offline lives. Think back to elementary school when we received report cards and had parent teacher conferences to review our performance and learn areas we can improve upon. We performed, received a benchmark for our work and were then taught how to improve from there. Essentially we learned the concept of OPTIMIZATION early on, even if we knew it as something else. While we anxiously waited for the mail to deliver those dreaded report cards, looking back on it can you imagine if we never had some sort of metric in place to determine our success? How discouraging it would be to go a whole year thinking you were performing at your best, only to find out that your grades reflected otherwise.

Now apply this basic concept of performing, optimizing and improving to your online marketing initiatives. What steps can you take to ensure success to maximize your greatest potential?

1. Innovate Your Offerings​​- Provide your end users with an innovative offering that matches their need. Research your audience and tailor your offering in a unique and creative way to capture their attention.

2. Track Performance- Leverage flexible technology to track all of your online results. For years there was a history of throwing money at a marketing campaign and simply hoping for the best. Those days are over. Stay on top of your campaigns and analyze everything. 

3. Make Metric Driven Decisions- Don’t set it once and let it run. As the fastest growing segment of online advertising, affiliate marketing has the potential to immediately contribute to new revenue opportunities. Over the last 5 years the Affiliate industry has been experiencing a paradigm shift from a once clouded and cluttered infrastructure to an evolving ecosystem with greater transparency where marketers can have immediate and quantifiable results. Agencies, Advertisers and decision makers are now equipped with a holistic perspective and greater transparency to not just understand the performance of their multi-channel operations, but to make real-time decisions to better target their digital spend and measurably improve ROI.

4. Optimize Results- With increased visibility across all of the digital channels, affiliate and performance marketers can now better target prospects, rely on high quality data and make informed, metric-driven decisions.