4 reasons for auditing the publisher composition of your affiliate programme and why you should engage more.

For many, auditing an affiliate programme means culling publishers who aren’t driving engagement for the advertiser, however it’s also an opportunity to explore new partnerships and review your approach to existing ones. First off though it’s important to ensure you're giving existing publishers every chance to contribute to the programme.

The checklist below is to ensure publishers have everything they need. Once this checklist has been completed and necessary actions taken you should wait a few months to allow these actions to take effect before removing any publishers from your programme. It’s important to do these checks regularly and build them into your weekly routine

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Let’s start with the reasons you might have for examining the composition of your publisher portfolio. 

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1. Explore opportunities

To explore opportunities that might currently be passing you by. The world of performance and affiliate marketing is fast evolving and it can be a challenge to keep up with the latest trends such as influencers, 3^rd party tech and brand to brand partnerships.  

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Actions to take

This is where running a gap analysis can be helpful – to identify publishers driving comparatively more engagement for competitors or similar advertisers.

As an agency immersed in the affiliate marketing industry Engagemore can help you identify suitable new publishers who can make significant contributions to your programme.

Of course, due consideration should be given to whether new publishers fit with your brand values and programme objectives.

2. Too many publishers

You may feel your programme is bloated with too many publisher partners live, with many not driving any type of engagement.  It’s difficult to know which publishers should be performing better and which are unlikely to. 

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Actions to take

Again this is where a gap analysis can be used to identify publishers under-indexing on your programme vs that of your competitors.  Some publishers you’re looking to potentially remove from the programme may be performing well elsewhere.

However, ask yourself why you feel you have too many publishers on the programme.  Is it just a sense of being overwhelmed or do you have a specific issue?

It’s a useful exercise to group publishers by type to better understand the makeup of your programme.

For instance, It makes sense to have many content partners as you need to cast the net wide to achieve a good volume or clicks and sales.  However, depending on how each individual publisher generates traffic it might make less sense to have many discount code publishers live.

Also, you may have a number of publishers joined to the programme who haven’t necessarily added your brand to their site so this is worth checking if you’re seeing zero clicks from partners you assume could perform better.

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3. Incrementality

You have concerns about incrementality.

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Actions to take

‍Firstly, you should define incrementality, specifically for you.  Is it new customers, sales volume that wouldn’t have occurred otherwise, bigger basket values, or something else?

Secondly, it’s important to accept that no advertising channel is entirely incremental.

And thirdly, appreciate that in working intelligently with publishers you can significantly optimise a publisher’s incremental value.

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4. Being misrepresented

You worry that your brand is being misrepresented across the web via affiliate partners.

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Actions to take

Ensure the programme terms and conditions are clear and up to date. Carrying out regular random spot checks of publishers on your programme will give you peace of mind. Also do weekly brand + voucher term searches in Google to check publishers aren’t bidding on your brand terms if this practice is restricted in your programme t's and c's.