Have you ever struggled to make your affiliate program perform? Wondered why your affiliate program is under performing?  Why other affiliate marketing efforts are more profitable than others?  Why some marketers are making affiliate marketing work while others not?

Though affiliate marketing may not be a perfect science, successful digital marketers can agree that by understanding your traffic, having increased flexibility with testing sources and developing direct relationship with your affiliates can greatly increase the success of your affiliate marketing campaigns.

What do I mean by “understanding your traffic?”  As an online marketer one should ALWAYS leverage reporting to understand the behavior of their traffic sources. 

Ask yourself a few questions:

• What time and where am I getting the best conversion rates?
• Are certain browsers converting better on specific offers?
• From what device is my mobile traffic coming from and where is it converting?
• What sources can I attribute my conversions to?

Once you have collected your data from various traffic sources, and analyzed the validity and success of that traffic you should now retarget the traffic.  Utilize your real-time business intelligence to make informed, metric-driven decisions for greater return on investment and higher conversion rates.

There are many different traffic sources available, email, display, search, mobile, etc. As a marketer you should always be flexible, agile and willing to test new sources.  By leveraging technology, marketers have the necessary control to manage all levers of their business and scale their business to explore these new channels. With reporting and validation marketers can now make informed decisions with regards to their traffic and can track the lifetime value of a single customer.

Developing direct and trusted relationships with your affiliates is invaluable.  Understanding the traffic they provide will increase conversions and better target your digital spend.  This direct relationship bridges the gap and allows for increased visibility across all of your multi-channel marketing initiatives.

In affiliate marketing, if you understand your traffic, test new traffic sources, and know your affiliates, you are likely to see success across all of your marketing efforts.

The golden rule of affiliate marketing: TEST, REPORT, OPTIMIZE and REPEAT.