Affiliate Marketing Agency
Build your brand with Affiliate Marketing
- Performance based commission accounting
- Target group-oriented partners for your business
- Discover the underrated online marketing channel for growth
Affiliate Marketing Agency
Our services at a glance
- Setup of the affiliate marketing program
- Planning of affiliate marketing campaigns
- Provision of advertising material (banner formats, text links, vouchers)
- Attractive commissions
- Affiliate applications processing
- Creation of affiliate campaigns
- Customized advertising material for campaigns
- Network newsletter
- Cancellation processing
- Transparent reporting
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Frequently Asked Questions
Short answers to your questions
Who is behind SaphirSolution?
Since its founding in 2012, SaphirSolution has grown steadily. We are currently a team of 60 people spread across two countries with plans for further expansion in Europe. We provide multiple performance marketing services to small companies and big corporations.
Which projects are you particularly proud of?
Here at SaphirSolution, we are proud of all our projects, small and big.
We support a variety of clients: startups that just started and want to scale up and grow, established companies that want to digitalize their marketing, and big players such as Volvo, Polestar or Peugeot that want to optimize their digital marketing performance.
What services does SaphirSolution offer?
We are a full-service performance marketing agency.
We offer assistance throughout the entire customer journey: from concept, to building a website, to running marketing campaigns, to increasing sales and leads.
Our services include: SEO, paid ads (search, social media), social media management, affiliate marketing, web development, web analytics, marketplace optimization.
Our teams work together on identifying problems and developing solutions not only within their own field of work but also in other marketing channels. We build up synergies between departments.
What does a collaboration with SaphirSolution look like?
We consider ourselves your partner, an extended arm of your marketing department. Much more than a client – service provider relationship.
We offer you support wherever and whenever is needed. Here our full-service approach becomes important as we have specialists for every online marketing field in our team.
Our goal is for you to focus on the strategy and growth of your company and outsource operational tasks to us. Together, we set up the correct online marketing strategy for you.
Why Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is an important online marketing tool for advertisers to grow sales and leads in a performance-oriented manner. Strong sales partners make your target group aware of the products or services thanks to individual advertising services. As an affiliate marketing agency, we make affiliate marketing profitable for your business. We take care of your campaign with a full-service approach, from set-up to ongoing management.
Benefits of Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing is an additional advertising opportunity that creates high reach and helps you address your customers in a target group-oriented manner.
- Higher reach
- Minimal risk because of the sale-based cost transparency
- More conversions
- New customer acquisition
- Branding promotion
Advantages for shops and service companies
Measurable performance – The biggest advantage of affiliate marketing is that you always have an eye on the costs of advertising and no unforeseeable surprises can be expected. Performance-based marketing is based on the sales (cost per order – CPO) or leads (cost per lead – CPL) that are generated by affiliate partners. The advertiser sets the conditions for the affiliate campaign. Costs are transparent with the success-based payment.
What is affiliate marketing?
A type of marketing in which an agent sells insurance for an insurance company. The agent is remunerated by the insurance company. Independent commercial agents sell insurance services and are remunerated via commission by insurance companies. Affiliate marketing relies on the same principles, only digitally. Websites and online shops connect advertising partners to their affiliate marketing program and pay a commission for every successful conversion. You can connect a lot of various advertising partners to your own affiliate marketing program and so improve the variety of your goods and services while minimizing risk.
Who are the stakeholders in Affiliate Marketing?
There are three types of stakeholders in affiliate marketing who benefit from the program. The affiliate merchant is the advertiser who runs the affiliate program. Its partners are affiliates or publishers. An affiliate network provides the tracking and manages the settlements with the affiliates. In the following, we would like to deal with different affiliate stakeholders and their tasks in affiliate marketing.
The Merchant
The merchant is the program operator in affiliate marketing. As a merchant, you use affiliate marketing to get new customers to your website or online shop, or to reactivate existing customers. The interest of the merchant is to commission his conversions as cheaply as possible and thus make more sales. The performance KPIs should be improved and the cost per KPI should be as cheap as possible.
A merchant is usually not alone. Several merchants compete for the attention of top affiliates and their marketing opportunities. This area of tension triggers competition in affiliate marketing on the merchant side, to which the merchant can react with the following adjustments:
- Payout higher commissions
- Better product offering
- Better advertising media
- Better communication with the affiliates
- Access to exclusive content or products
The more attractive a merchant designs his affiliate marketing program, the higher the chances for further partnerships with affiliates. For this reason, the merchant should have a strong interest in making his program as attractive as possible in his affiliate marketing program. Ideally more attractive than the competitor’s program.
The Affiliate
The merchant’s counterpart is the affiliate or publisher. He usually has a platform with good reach to a specific target group and monetizes the reach by displaying advertising material. The publisher’s interest is to monetize his reach with the highest possible ROI. For his affiliate program, this means he has to look for partners who have the following qualities:
- Attractive commission terms
- Good advertising material that is well received by the target group
- Actions controlled by agreement with the merchant
- High converting landing pages
- Merchants with low cancellation rates and high shopping carts
When choosing a partner, affiliates focus in particular on merchants, with whom they can make money in the long term. Not all affiliates have the same model and they can differ significantly.
The network
You don’t always need the affiliate marketing network, but it is recommended. It is the intermediary between affiliates and merchants and, in addition to tracking and billing, provides several benefits for the other affiliate stakeholders.
An affiliate marketing network is financed by the affiliates’ commissions. Here, in addition to the affiliate commission rates, a network fee of up to 30% is usually charged on the affiliate commission. The interest of the affiliate marketing network clearly lies in strengthening and intensifying the relationships between affiliates and merchants. Affiliate programs that are successful in the long term are exciting business cases for affiliate marketing networks.
The advantage for merchants lies in the huge reach of the networks. A large number of affiliates, who can apply for the affiliate program, are connected. This is how you can quickly get on the networks with your affiliate program and connect to the first affiliates without having to do affiliate outreach yourself.
Another advantage is the native fraud protection. Unfortunately, sometimes money imply fraud. Affiliate marketing networks take measures to prevent fraud and monitor anomalies.
The Affiliate Marketing Process
Nothing works without processes and it applies to affiliate marketing as well. There are many recurring activities that need to be organized. Process is crucial for success.
Optimization includes continuous analysis and testing of the existing affiliate program and its optimization levers. Competitor analysis should also be part of this ongoing process, since important market insights can be generated and accelerate your own affiliate marketing program.
Why is affiliate marketing management important?
Affiliate marketing is important, but unfortunately it is not a surefire success. It is not a module that you can build into your online marketing and expect corresponding sales. Rather, affiliate marketing is a process that requires maintenance, and program management is critical to the success of the affiliate marketing program.
Comprehensive management is the right lever for a successful campaign. Relationships with affiliates should be established and maintained. In addition to the daily maintenance of the affiliate program, strategic decisions are also important in order to set up the affiliate program in a goal-oriented manner.
How do you start with Affiliate Marketing? – Setup
What do you need to start with Affiliate Marketing? The technical integration depends mainly on whether the affiliate marketing program is mapped via an affiliate marketing network or whether you set up your own autonomous program.
In the following we will concentrate on network integration. For the set-up, the condition model should be first available. The following points should be considered when starting the affiliate program:
- Detailed description of the program and benefits
- Tracking integration to measure conversions
- Creation of advertising material (banners / HTML5 banners / product data feed)
- Creation of condition models
- Definition of the affiliate marketing strategy
- Processing of first affiliate applications
From a strategic point of view, the setup is an important undertaking, as it lays the foundation for a successful affiliate program. Therefore, we recommend making a few considerations.
Condition Models
The affiliate condition models regulate the commission conditions for the services of the affiliates and are therefore an important parameter for your affiliate marketing. However, the condition model should also be thought through, as not every affiliate brings the same value from a company.
For example, you have an online shop for terry goods and two different affiliates. On the one hand a voucher platform and on the other hand a YouTube channel that specializes in terry goods. While the voucher platforms appeal to users in the lower funnel (the customer was already in the ordering process and is looking for the last incentive), the YouTube channel aims at the upper funnel, which is more difficult to optimize. According to this weighting, the condition model and the campaigns can be controlled according to performance.
In addition to specific condition models for the affiliates, a popular method is the establishment of a scale, which encourages high-performing affiliates to become even more active in the affiliate program and thus generate additional performance. Due to additional commissions when certain goals are achieved, the leverage is correspondingly high in order to motivate the affiliates and bind them to the program through the staggering.
Cancellation Management
Depending on the condition model, only valid conversions are remunerated. Thus, there must be a comparison between completed and measured conversions and valid sales. The comparison can significantly reduce the risk costs in the acquisition and avoid paying for invalid conversions.
Affiliate marketing cancellation management should be part of every affiliate marketing process. It helps you prevent invalid conversions, possible fraud processes such as cookie dropping or brand hijacking.
Acquisition
In addition to the publishers who are already connected to the affiliate marketing network, there are other advertising partners who are eligible for the program but may not even know what affiliate marketing is and what are the opportunities for their business.
For this reason, outreach should be part of operational affiliate marketing. Outreach recruits affiliate partners who are eligible for the program. Here the affiliates are contacted via email or phone and are convinced to take part in the affiliate marketing program. This way you get more relevant partners for your own program.
Advertising Materials
Another decisive factor for the success of affiliate marketing is the advertising material used by publishers. A basic distinction is made between banner formats (dynamic or static), text links, product data feeds (for eCommerce companies) or video ads.
Advertising media are very important, as they determine the click rate. Advertising media with good interaction rates are very popular and prioritized in terms of integration.
Banner Ads
You should consider the following formats for advertising banners in affiliate marketing:
- Skyscraper: 120 x 600 Pixel
- Wide Skyscraper: 160 x 600 Pixel
- Half Banner: 234 x 60 Pixel
- Medium Rectangle: 300 x 250 Pixel
- Mobile Banner: 320 x 50 Pixel und 300 x 50 Pixel
- Full Banner 468 x 60 Pixel
- Leaderboard: 728 x 90 Pixel
Dynamic HTML5 banners achieve a significantly better interaction rate than static banner types. In addition, you should always provide at least two logo banners. These usually have the sizes 88 x 31 pixels and 120 x 60 pixels. Below you can find out more about different placement of banners and other advertising media in affiliate marketing.
Pop up
Pop-ups are placed on websites like banners and can serve as advertising space. As a rule, pop-ups “jump up” in a separate window, remain on the side and partially cover the content of the respective page. Banner usually have to be clicked away to disappear.
Pop under
Unlike pop-ups, a pop-under opens in the background, making it unnoticeable at first. You only see the pop-under when you close the browser, as it is “below” the open window.
Layer ads
A layer is an advertisement that covers the content of the website.
Layers are similar to pop-ups, but are more an integral part of the web page, obscuring the content so that parts of the page are still visible. The website should still remain recognizable for the user. The layer ad has to be clicked away in order to disappear completely.
Text links
A text link is a link that presents a connection between two files or websites. This can consist of a word or a text passage and is usually connected to a landing page to which the link leads.
Video advertising
A pre-roll video ad is a video advertisement that plays before the video content and thus has to be viewed almost completely. If the video ad appears within the video content, this format is referred to as a mid-roll video ad. There are also formats that appear at the end of the video content (post-roll video ad) and many more.
Video content is particularly suitable for emotional advertising messages and to generate awareness. Appropriate advertising formats should be made available to marketers for display. Video ads are also suitable in the PPC area, for example to display YouTube advertising via Google Ads. Here the advertising material can be recycled accordingly.
Newsletter Templates
A newsletter template can be used by email marketers to deliver their message to address recipients. In affiliate marketing, newsletters can be sent to both consumers and active publishers of a campaign. Publisher’s newsletters for reactivation are particularly interesting when there are new promotions in the affiliate campaign.
Customized advertising material
Depending on the affiliate, customized advertising material may also be required. This should be included in the program description so that it enables an agile creation and integration of the advertising material. Customized advertising media offer publishers additional incentives and increase the attractiveness of affiliate marketing campaigns.
Fraud Protection in Affiliate Marketing
Unfortunately, scams can be found anywhere money is made. In rare cases, this can happen in affiliate marketing. As an affiliate marketing agency, we have the ability to identify various potential sources of fraud and take action to prevent them from taking place. We would like to give you an idea of potential fraud methods that can affect merchants and affiliates.
Brand hijacking
When it comes to brand hijacking in affiliate marketing, SEM affiliates book themselves on your brand name and try to monetize valuable search traffic in relation to your brand. SEA ads are usually placed on brand-related search queries. The fraudulent affiliate copies the merchant’s ads and outbids them with a higher click price, resulting in a better ranking. For the merchant, this means a double loss, since their own SEA brand campaigns are less effective, the affiliate commissions are lower, and the overall performance is affected.
Fake Transactions
The cancellation management recognizes fake orders at an early stage and prevents you from paying commissions. Therefore, the pending commissions should be compared early on with the orders in the shop.
Cookie stuffing, cookie dropping & cookie spreading
With cookie stuffing, also known as cookie dropping, cookies are enabled even though the user has not clicked on an affiliate link. This is possible through the integration of an iFrame. The cookie is already set when you visit the website and not when you click on the affiliate advertising material (as it should be). Cookie spreading in affiliate marketing works in a similar way, but the fraudulent affiliate overwrites existing cookies and receives the commission based on another affiliate’s advertising performance. Fraud protection should be an essential part of affiliate marketing management in order to avoid unjustified commissions.
What are the challenges in Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing Competition
Competition is a crucial factor. If competitors have had relationships with affiliates for years, it is difficult to position yourself. You need to have a competitive commission structure and make the program as attractive as possible.
How do I convince affiliates of my campaign? Affiliate Marketing networks
The success of your affiliate marketing campaign stands and falls with the attractiveness of your program to the publisher. The monetary aspects of the cooperation are particularly important. After all, the advertiser wants to be paid as best as possible for the advertising service provided. But even before you start your affiliate marketing campaign, you should get the best out of your website or shop. The commissions for the publisher are calculated from the orders or leads actually generated. Therefore, make sure that your shop converts optimally and picks up as much traffic as possible.
In the next step, the affiliate should be provided with high-quality advertising material. It is important to communicate with the affiliates, to inform them about current campaigns and to provide specific advertising material, especially during campaign periods such as Christmas and Easter or during seasonal campaigns.
You can benefit from a large number of different publishers. Depending on the affiliate marketing model and the individual advertising performance of the affiliates, you can adjust the commission conditions. For example, particularly active and high-quality publishers can be remunerated with high commissions or even special conditions according to the effort they put in. Therefore, always actively search for new publishers, catch the attention of your affiliates with campaigns and closely monitor the activities of the active affiliates. This is how your campaign becomes and remains attractive for the affiliates.
Common attribution models in Affiliate Marketing
Which affiliate has which value for the customer journey? As a merchant, a particular challenge is managing the campaign with the aim of achieving the maximum return on investment (ROI). As known from the condition models, affiliates are not commissioned the same way. The analysis of the entire customer journey and the synergies between affiliate marketing and other online marketing channels can be very useful.
Multiple Affiliate Marketing networks
It gets exciting when several networks are involved. The same affiliates from both networks generate commissions and it is not clear which affiliate is entitled to the commission. The challenge can be the programming of a cookie switch that regulates the traffic of the cookies.
As an experienced affiliate marketing agency, we are happy to assist you with the implementation and setup of cookies, tracking switches and other challenges.
What are the costs of Affiliate Marketing?
How much does professional affiliate marketing actually cost? Due to the commission payment, affiliate marketing has a high variable cost component. This means that costs only arise when measurable corporate success is achieved.
Affiliate marketing does not work without fixed costs. You need an affiliate marketing manager or an affiliate marketing agency to oversee the program and master its challenges. Depending on the affiliate marketing model, you can decide which commissions a publisher should receive. Variations are possible and should match the different affiliate marketing models accordingly.
Which affiliate models are there?
Different affiliate marketing models influence your success as a merchant. We have listed the most important ones below and would like to show you what added value individual models bring to your business.
Coupon or Voucher Affiliates
Affiliates who advertise with vouchers and promo codes attract customers who are in the lower sales funnel. These affiliates should be remunerated with a lower commission. Voucher portals usually target users further in the customer journey. Therefore, you should think about how to integrate the voucher marketers into your own affiliate marketing or if it’s the case to exclude them.
Loyalty & Cashback Affiliates
From our perspective, cashback publishers do not bring any direct added value in the acquisition of new customers. However, cash backers have a wide reach and can draw attention to promotions.
Content Affiliates
The most relevant affiliates are content affiliates. Content marketers are like high-reach publishers who deal with specific topics and reach suitable target groups. High-quality content publishers should therefore be rewarded with correspondingly higher commissions for their great effort.
Blogger Affiliates
Similar to content affiliates, bloggers bring added value to the advertising company. Bloggers have the opportunity to generate reach through different media. The bloggers usually assume a recommending position and use their basis of trust to bring your shop and the products closer to the consumers.
PPC Affiliates
PPC affiliates can be integrated into your project if they will not trigger a competitive situation with their own advertising material. Especially if you are working in the SEA area, you should exclude PPC affiliates, as they only have a negative effect on the click costs and worsen your own performance in the SEA channels. If you work with PPC affiliates, you can provide a blacklist of keywords used for your ads in order to avoid competition with your own advertising media. However, you can expect fraud or unclean working methods by some publishers. Therefore, you should monitor these closely or entirely exclude PPC affiliates.
Email Affiliates
Large mailing lists are also a way to bring more traffic to the website. When acquiring affiliates, you should carefully examine how affiliates generate email addresses and how much importance is given to qualitative characteristics. Only those who distribute high-quality content via email newsletters will bring in conversions. Therefore, you should pay great importance to the qualitative selection of your email publisher.
Social Media / Influencer Affiliates
Influencers and social media channels can be meaningfully integrated into affiliate marketing. You should focus on partners who address similar target groups. In the SMA area, followers of social media affiliates can be addressed with the appropriate advertising material.
How can you make money with Affiliate Marketing?
You can earn money with affiliate marketing as a merchant or as an affiliate. You need to think about how to reach the right audience. If you have a large audience, monetization of this audience can be achieved through various affiliate programs. There is always marketing potential in affiliate marketing, especially for high-quality and problem-solving content.
How do you become a successful publisher in Affiliate Marketing?
Do you already have a large reach and want to use your time to earn money with relevant content? Then you should take advantage of the benefits of affiliate marketing. You decide for yourself which products and brands you want to promote and share with your community.
First of all, it is necessary to consider whether to search for advertisers alone or to use a network. If you are new to affiliate marketing and have no experience as a publisher, a network can help you to establish contacts with shops and brands and build up a certain reach.
To successfully start your affiliate program, you should consider the following steps:
1. Create an engaging publisher profile. Your publisher profile is where advertisers first find you and where you can connect with them. Pay particular attention to your website statistics, i.e., traffic, target group and conversions. The more detailed and specific, the better.
2. Find advertisers and products. The next step is to apply to the advertiser’s partner programs. You should consider which target group specific products you want to offer your community.
3. Advertising the selected products. If you apply to advertisers, they will tell you if they want you to put their ads on your site. You have to put the ads on your site and make sure they look good. You have to put the ads on your site so you can get paid. The display and type of advertising material depends on the type of advertising you choose: coupons, banners, product feeds or custom links are among the options available to you.
4. Track your performance. Only those who properly track user behavior can optimize results. Therefore, use tracking to build and optimize your affiliate marketing strategy. This is how you can get the most out of your affiliate marketing.
If you follow the individual steps and build up an attractive program, nothing can stand in the way of your success as a publisher. The higher the quality of your work as a publisher, the more attractive you are to advertisers.
How much money does an affiliate make?
It is not particularly difficult to leverage the reach you already have and monetize it using affiliate marketing. But how much do you end up earning as a publisher? It all depends on the quality of your content, what you offer your community and the advertiser. The higher the quality of your content, e.g., a very target group-oriented blog that describes products in great detail, the higher the commission.
The remuneration you receive as a publisher therefore depends very much on your advertising channel. Whether PPC, social media, blog or voucher page – the higher the quality of your content and the greater your reach and traffic, the higher the conversions and therefore your remuneration. According to surveys, affiliate marketing can generate an income of 200 to 3,000 euros for a publisher.
Cooperation with Affiliate Marketing agencies
What is the first step when you want to start affiliate marketing? It doesn’t necessarily have to be a phone call to us as an agency. You can set up and manage a program yourself. However, do not underestimate the effort of such a program.
Affiliate marketing is a people business – you have to communicate and exchange ideas with the affiliates on a regular basis in order to develop such a program accordingly. As an agency, we have a number of advantages that allow us to work more efficiently:
- We are already in contact with the most important affiliates
- We know the affiliate networks
- We are trusted by affiliates, and our recommendations are implemented faster
- We develop the right affiliate marketing strategy for your company
- We know the downsides of the industry
- We know the processes for efficient affiliate management
- We have expertise in Affiliate Outreach
- We have an all-round view of online marketing and constantly monitor the market
You can build on our experience and use it to set up your affiliate marketing program quickly and effectively.
Conclusion on Affiliate Marketing
Professional affiliate marketing offers companies numerous opportunities to generate performance and bring their business closer to the intended goals. Especially in the area of eCommerce, the leverage effects of affiliate marketing on sales and growth should not be neglected. Affiliate marketing should belong to every online marketing mix.
Take the first step towards success. We would be happy to advise you without any obligation in an initial consultation. Get in touch with us. We look forward to supporting you as an affiliate marketing agency!
Affiliate Marketing for qualified contacts and more sales
Affiliate marketing is a marketing channel with a low investment risk. Marketing programs (partner programs) enable efficient use of your advertising budget for performance goals. Especially for ecommerce companies, affiliate marketing offers great potential within high reach, since the affiliate only earns a commission if the advertisement is successful. Thus, the advertiser only pays for qualified conversions or leads. Affiliate marketing in suitable networks enables you to advertise without wastage and generate sales and new contacts.
Affiliate Marketing agency for more performance
Together we integrate affiliate marketing into your online marketing strategy and ensure the optimal success of your affiliate campaign. As an experienced affiliate marketing agency, we create your individual partner program and identify ideal sales partners who are able to optimally market your products and services. We also create attractive advertising media in the form of advertising banners, text ads and vouchers to be advertised by affiliates.
As an affiliate marketing agency, we evaluate the publishers for your affiliate campaign and rely on affiliate partners with high sales potential. We review orders and look at the customer’s journey to verify that the affiliate partner is providing a real advertising service.
Contact us now and grow your customer base with targeted affiliate marketing. We are happy to support you in developing the right online marketing strategy for your company.
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