Affiliate Portal Whitepaper talks about a dedicated platform for collaborative communication between affiliates and enterprises to drive their operations better.
3. Contents
Introduction 5
Reason to Have a Affiliate Portal 6
Problems Transformed to Solutions With Affiliate Portal 8
The Global Market 6
Small Role of Affiliates in the Business Process 6
Why Not Managing Affiliates with CRM? 7
Security and Safety Concern 7
Merchants 6
Publishers 6
End users/customers 6
General Problems That Organization Face: 9
Fraud Clicks 9
Building Trust 9
Sign-up fees 9
Disputed payments 9
Broken offers and Voucher Codes 9
Unique codes 9
Poor matches 10
Solution That Portal Renders 10
Fraud 10
Trust 10
Sign-up fees 10
Late and Disputed Payments 10
Broken offers and Voucher Codes 10
Unique codes 10
Smart matches 11
Vision Document 3Partner Portal
4. How Advertisers Currently Use Data 14
Objective of The Affiliate Portal 19
Affiliate Data Futures 18
Pre-sale 15
User Profiling 15
Post Sale 16
Consumer insights 18
Understanding Data Path 16
Product Level Data 17
Geo Targeting 15
Personalization 15
ISP 16
Prospecting & Pre-Targeting 16
Core Features of Affiliate Marketing That a Portal Checks 11
Performance Marketing 12
Affiliate Marketing 12
Affiliate Networks (Cost Per Action Networks) 12
WebMaster, Publisher, Advert 12
Advertiser 12
Tracking 12
Fraud 13
Shave 13
Lead 13
Offer 13
Vision Document 4Affiliate Portal
5. Fueling Revenues with Affiliate
Programs Through a Secure Portal
Everyone is familiar with services such as Uber and Booking.com, but few people are aware that they
are affiliate programs. An affiliate program is a marketing environment, where an affiliate mediator
is involved in driving a promotional campaign while an advertiser pays for the end results.
Any advertiser can create their own affiliate program. They can create it independently or by using
existing affiliate channel programs. In the latter case, the advertiser is subject to the affiliate's costs,
along with that, it also needs them to to cope up with potential fraudulent actions on the part of affili-
ates.
Moreover, the affiliates lack trust in the advertiser, as they find it difficult put their trust it will not
results in being concealed or tampered with. Such shortcomings can be eliminated with the estab-
lishment of an affiliate network that can manage all roles of both publisher as well as the parent
website. An affiliate portal is the perfect solution for both as it combines the benefits of both, mer-
chants as well as affiliate.
It helps an advertiser to easily create an affiliate offers and turn them into profits through affiliate
advertising campaigns. This will be stored in distributed registries of the portal at enterprise end and
would be released the affiliates.
These rewards can be paid through smart payment gateways that guarantees security with policy
honesty and transparency for the productive engagement affiliates generates. It works as a smart
anti-fraud system developed to bring more transparency and efficiency in the affiliate program. It
will also prevent the affiliates to engage in fraudulent activities with an independent, decentralized
system that will be manage everything from both the ends.
Vision Document 5Affiliate Portal
6. Vision Document 6Affiliate Portal
Merchants
These are Parent Website,
which have their products or
services to sell. Using an Affiliate
Portal, Merchants will be able to
market their offerings and
services through a affiliate or a
network of affiliates.
The Global Market
Publishers
These are businesses, websites
and individuals that publish
products and services of some
other companies. Affiliate Portal
will use advance CRM features to
match Publishers with Mer-
chants.
End Users/Customers
These are the buyers and visitor
who visits the merchant website
through the affiliate. They make
purchase on these websites
and generate the sales for
merchants.
Reason to Have a Affiliate Portal
Small Role of Affiliates in the Business
Process
Affiliates program might be having less roles and
scope of features but it has a broad criticality that
stands out to be outmatched with an important
feature. The portal can help the organizations to
build a dynamic solution that will help them to
streamline their engagement with their affiliates.
Thus, they require less features and more snip-
pets. But managing these features is a tough task
as the data they process is critical and possess
numerous complexities. It is also difficult to go
manage all these information sharing and han-
dling with emails.
Affiliate programs are more specific towards
products and centred around the commission
generation.
7. Why No to Managing Affiliates with
CRM?
It is also a bad practice to manage all your affili-
ates and communicate with them via CRM. As
your CRM is already managing all the employees
and other important business officials, adding
more users will loaden it up with more users.
Inclusion of affiliates will also make your CRM
messed up with such additional information
overload that your affiliate program possesses.
Another issue with this is the addition of extra cost
with your CRM licencing. As the major CRMs are
paid and accessible with user licence, which is
necessary for every CRM user. So, when you
include affiliates as CRM user, there would be
requirement for more licences. And this will
increase the operational cost for the organiza-
tion.
With more number of users in you CRM, ERP of any
other business software, system also becomes
insecure and unsafe. Affiliates have very limited
role the parent organizations and it often hap-
pens that they pay less attention to the user
manuals, training programs and other guidelines
related to your tool. It makes them handy with
your critically important business software. Such
handyness of business management tool to
mass number of affiliates creates threat to the
system, which can result in losing or misplacing
crucial business data. Their carelessness in man-
aging your business processing software can
also cause system errors.
Vision Document 7Affiliate Portal
Security and Safety Concern
The quantum amount of affiliate is quite high in
numbers. When an organization manages all
these affiliates through a CRM, ERP or with any
other business software, the flow of information
from a mass users loads your business software.
It messes up the information sharing base espe-
cially when they work without a role specified
accessible. In such an environment, the informa-
tion also becomes difficult to arrange and sort,
resulting into a messed up data loop.
9. Disputed Payments
As affiliate marketing has a complex process and
require a transparency with precision. With an
ordinary and messed up system, it becomes diffi-
cult to track record of every single link. Such
system often misses out links and clicks lead
them to have disputes. Affiliate have issues with
Merchants in such cases as they do not pay them
leads, which miss out from their system.
Broken Offers and Voucher Codes
It is big problem for affiliates and especially for
websites that offer coupons and vouchers. As
most of the offers codes, vouchers and coupons
affiliates redirect, are broken links or expired
offers. This happens due to lack of a streamlined
system between affiliates and parent website.
Unique Codes
Another problem that enterprises face is gener-
ating unique codes for the affiliates. It also cre-
ates a need for them to check that they do not
provide same link to multiple affiliates. Affiliates
also have to cross check the links codes and
proper way of reusing these links.
Fraud Clicks
Bot and spam programs also generates clicks
and creates bogus traffic. Both partners and
merchants have to keep track of such clicks
through daily, weekly and monthly reports. Man-
aging these reports in daily monthly reports is a
tough task and also end up with confusing report.
Building Trust
Studies says that industry is suffering from affili-
ate mistrust as almost every one out of four traffic
redirection is fake. An affiliate must trust that after
they redirect the traffic to the parent website and
it successfully accomplishes a visit, it will result in
them receiving the payment.
Sign-up Fees
Both Merchants and Publishers have to spend
thousands of dollars for sign ups in the CRM or ERP
software to manage their business roles. This cost
further increases when there comes a recurring
monthly fee. This is one of the reasons that restrict
small to medium enterprises to and dissuade
them to stay away from affiliate marketing as
they cannot afford to incur expense more than
their earning.
General Problems That Organization
Face.
An affiliate program has a critical process to deal in context with publishing links of numerous prod-
ucts with a unique id that is trackable. In this process, there are certain points, where it is necessary to
store and share information. Sharing this information becomes difficult for both organizations as well
as affiliates. Hence, it often creates miscommunication between both. Some of these issues are as
follows:
Vision Document 9Affiliate Portal
10. Vision Document 10Affiliate Portal
Fraud
Using an affiliate portal, there can be a track of
each and every single click. The portal will store all
the data and share it with both publisher as well
merchant. This way, both can track and see which
user was redirected, which reached them and
what purchase they did.
Late and Disputed Payments
A portal tracks and maintains information in real
time. It enables the enterprises to add credits to
their affiliates, which can be encashed by fund
transfer whenever affiliates wish to withdraw
them. Portal works on an automated process,
which eradicates the payment disputes. Payment
history and confirmation reports also keep the
system confusion-proof.
Broken Offers and Voucher Codes
An affiliate has the ability to send alerts and noti-
fication to the affiliates for their latest offers and
notifications for removing the older ones that has
expired. Affiliate portal can also automatically
remove outdated offre codes and coupons from
the affiliate dashboard. It will also disregard leads
for discarded offers and would not count com-
mission for them.
Unique Codes
Affiliate portal will automatically generate the
unique codes in the system and assign them to
affiliates. It will track these link and will also verify
that every affiliate is using different codes. The
portal eliminates the cyclic usage of same link
and will reward affiliates only on the codes that
are issued to them.
Trust
A portal saves all the data and make it visible to
affiliates. It also bring utmost efficiency in the
system, which help them to gain trust. With this,
they would be able to track in real time, where a
successful task completion triggers the system to
execute credit in their account and release funds
with intervention of any middle man.
Sign-up Fees
Affiliate Portal will work on single license and
comes with a one time fee or monthly recurring
fee, which includes single licensing cost and does
not ask for separate license per user. This takes
down the barrier for entry of small to medium
enterprises. This creates a collaborative environ-
ment where more businesses engage with each
other.
Poor Matches
Publishers drive traffic and leads for the merchants that are of less use and renders less productivity. To
maintain a performance analytics record of affiliates, merchants need such data of theri productivity.
Generally normal accounting softwares fail to provide such reports.
Solution That Portal Renders
11. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 11
Smart Matches
Based on high end CRM technologies,
affiliates portal generates analytics
reports that are useful for affiliates. It will
generate useful recommendations for
both Publishers and Merchants. Such en-
gagements will also better their relation-
ships and drive higher ROI.
Core Features of Affiliate
Marketing That a Portal
Checks
12. Vision Document 12Affiliate Portal
Performance Marketing
It is a marketing industry, whose goal is to
achieve concrete, measurable results. Its
distinctive feature is the ability at all
stages to see a specific, quantitative indi-
cator that reflects the outcome of each
individual marketing activity (e.g., site visi-
tor cost, application cost, call cost, order
cost, and end cost of attracting the cus-
tomer who has carried out the target ac-
tivity).
WebMaster, Publisher, Advert
A professional marketer or a group of
marketers within a single account in an
affiliate network) who advertises the
product or service for advertisers and
receives a cash reward for the target
action of the client.
Advertiser
In this context, Advertiser is the one who
incentivizes affiliates to engage custom-
ers by creating offers and paying the
affiliates (often through affiliate net-
works) for targeted customer actions that
match the conditions of the offer. Often,
advertisers describe possible ways of
attracting customers by providing mate-
rials, ready-made templates, scripts, and
so on.
Tracking
Tracking of many different campaign
metrics in the affiliate marketing process.
For example - time, source, or number of
target activities.
Affiliate Marketing
It is an internet marketing industry that
works on the basis of a payment model
for affiliates (web-masters) for each tar-
geted action by their customers (order,
purchase, install, etc.). Advertisers often
do not work directly, but through affiliate
networks (CPA Networks).
Affiliate Networks
(Cost Per Action Networks)
Services in the sector of affiliate market-
ing, offering affiliates remuneration on
the basis of the CPA model and providing
advertisers services necessary for the
establishment of affiliate programs. Affili-
ate networks charge advertisers for cus-
tomer actions, pay commissions to affili-
ates and charge commissions for the ser-
vice.
13. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 13
Fraud
In terms of affiliate marketing, different
ways of deceiving the affiliate advertisers
and their network, in order to obtain a
monetary reward. Varieties of fraud may
be: Emulation of target actions, spoofing
the source of introduced clients (cook-
ie-stuffing), deceiving customers by
using misleading ads to increase the like-
lihood of target action (for example, by
using a significantly lower price than the
offer of the advertiser) and others.
Shave
A deception of the affiliate network or the
advertiser by an affiliate, which down-
plays the performance of an advertising
campaign in order to pay less.
Lead
It is a target based action program that
intend to generate a response from the
towards an ad campaign. It drives traffic
in form of registrations, application
installations, calls, sales, orders etc.
Offer
It is an advertising proposal that attracts
the targeted activities from advertisers
along with other affiliate networks.
Fraud
Shave
Lead
Offer
14. How Advertisers
Currently Use Data
Awareness to Post-Purchase Data Cycle
Tracking data and using data are two very different things. The
customer journey is not simple and ensuring that brand en-
gagement is created along all touch points – including post
purchase (how valuable was the final customer) – is key to any
marketing campaign.
Looking more closely to the system we can examine the different
types of data that are useful for each stage of the customer
journey in more detail.
14
15. Pre Sale
A key stage in the customer journey is initial brand awareness - first impressions count
and are proven to lead to conversion.
The affiliate channel uses data in a number of ways to maximise the efficiency of brand
awareness. The main way is through the abilities of various tracking solutions to analyse
the customer journey from first click to final conversion. In addition various partners can
target users according to the demographics. More examples are detailed below. It’s this
stage in the journey where affiliate data delivers back high value to other marketing
channels by providing sales data to add to the fully integrated marketing programmes.
User Profiling
A few attributes that you must go through before adding any affiliate are:
Geo Targeting
Delivery infrastructure, physical store locations or propensity to purchase based on
geographic demographic; the ability to pinpoint a customer’s location at home
and at work are core drivers for the majority of advertisers.
This could be using data to target a specific location. For instance, take a retailer
which has a low physical presence in a large city centre. Online is key to acquiring
a new, affluent customer base. Or for an advertiser with a limited delivery infra-
structure – it may be more cost effective to deliver customers direct to a store in a
particular location. Affiliate data is ideal to use to isolate both objectives.
Personalization
Customer profiling is a key attribute to successful campaign management. What
sets affiliate data apart from other forms of online advertising data is that the final
conversion factor is based on actual and not modelled sales data. This is unique to
affiliate acquired data and contextualises the range of other behavioural analytics
in a completely fresh framework whether producing single customer views or ag-
gregating years’ worth of consumer data.
Vision Document Affiliate Portal 15
16. ISP
If specific IP ranges are known to apply to specific broadband suppliers, for exam-
ple, it’s possible to build targeted marketing campaigns to just certain broadband
users. This is ideal for the Telecoms and media markets.
Prospecting & Pre-Targeting
As customers connect with brands, the ability to capture their information and
engage with them is key.
For example, when a new product is due to be launched, there’s often a stage
where targeted customers are given the opportunity to place a pre-order. This
early adopter approach – typical in the telecoms, media and publishing industries
– gives marketers advantages in what are often highly competitive market places.
This is data collected by publishers and advertisers and can drive highly accurate
targeting – eg insurance products for women or display advertising retargeting at
customers who have viewed, but not purchased a specific product. This form of ac-
curate targeting is more likely to result in a conversion, thus improving an advertis-
er’s ROI.
Post Sale
Understanding Data Path
The ability to understand the data path your customer took to purchase is complex.
There are wide variety of options is available across the channel. The key is being able
to apply equal as well as quantifiable analysis techniques to be able to interpret the
data in unique ways to make a specific advertiser’s campaign more competitive and
profitable.
This requires advertisers and agencies to draw on the expertise of all channels through
networks, tracking platforms and publishers if they’re to understand optimisation for
future campaigns. This means in many cases – establishing new communications
channels between suppliers and in-house.
Vision Document Affiliate Portal 16
17. Product Level Data
Most affiliate networks can supply advertisers with product level data for their cam-
paigns. This not only allows advertisers to reward publishers with specific commissions
for different items in the basket, but also gives advertisers useful sales data insights. For
some marketers, this kind of evidence can unlock additional funding through internal
budgets or supplier funding, and so open up more integrated campaign development.
Customers
A
Website
Merchants Publishers
CRM WebsiteContact Module User
Authenticate
User
Authenticate
User
Portal Sign Up
Verified User
Portal login
If User is
Merchant
If User is
Publisher
Manage Publishers Account,
Profile Settings, Payments,
History, Reports
Manage Approval/
Rejection of publisher
Manage Deals and Offers of
publisher
Provide Live Support to
publishers
Manage Account Profile
Settings, Payments, History
Reports
Send Request to merchants
Manage store and Products
Revise and Resend request
If merchants accept
request
Yes
No
18. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 18
Affiliate Data Futures
Affiliate data is constantly evolving as more of it is integrated across the value chain. A
brief review of some ways that publishers and advertisers are developing their strate-
gies to make the most efficient use of affiliate data exposes significant opportunities for
now and in the future.
These are specific examples of innovative ways in which affiliate data is being used col-
laboratively to drive advertisers’ marketing plans forward and improve customer/brand
interaction. Most of these innovations are not yet standard but demonstrate the impor-
tance of integrated thinking, planning and execution when maximising online perfor-
mance spend.
Consumer Insights
Publishers have a unique insight to your customers – much like shop owners have
across physical footfall. Many publishers have been collecting data from their cam-
paigns with advertisers for over 15 years and have amassed a significant amount of
insight into consumer behaviour over that time. Top-tier publishers provide additional
insight into an advertiser’s through purchase activity across multiple brands.
Publishers such as cashback, voucher code, comparison or closed-user-group models
such as loyalty and ‘club’ models possess unique consumer data, spending habits,
income, brand preference, demographic and more. These publishers are expert in
compiling this data into actionable insights.
For instance, portal segments its database of 4 million members by demographic, pur-
chase behaviour and channel engagement to enable the right message to be dis-
played at the right time. This segmentation across channels (online, mobile and
in-store), has already demonstrated that members targeted this way spend and trans-
act on average 3x more than a single channel message.
19. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 19
Objective of The Affiliate Portal
1. Create an affiliate network that
supports the advanced Pay Per
Action model
Our highest priority is to offer Merchants
and Publishers complete confidence in
Affiliate Marketing schemes. By creating
an environment in which trust is not
required, Merchants will rest in the knowl-
edge that they only pay for the comple-
tion of clearly defined end user tasks, and
Publishers will rest knowing they will be
paid for their efforts.
subscription costs are unreasonably high.
Small businesses are forced to find alter-
native marketing strategies, but this need
not be the case. The Partner platform will
be able to assist small businesses in
achieving their marketing goals by signifi-
cantly lowering the barrier to entry.
3. Remove the high barriers to entry for
small businesses
Running Affiliate Marketing campaigns for
small businesses is often not financially
viable because entry fees and monthly
4. Increase network wide ROI by
intelligently pairing Merchants
with Publishers
By building a self-learning AI capable of
providing recommendations, we aim to
increase ROI for all customers on the net-
work. Pairing Merchants with Publishers
and achieving consistently high success
rates is difficult, especially when left to
humans. However, with such vast
amounts of historical data we can anal-
yse trends to determine what works and
what does not. By using modern machine
learning techniques we can provide rec-
ommendations to Merchants and Pub-
lishers, resulting in higher rates of suc-
cessfully completed end user tasks, ulti-
mately generating more revenue all
round.
2. Eliminate fraudulent Affiliate
Marketing activity
The industry is plagued with issues
around trust, disputes and fraud. By using
Smart Contracts on the Blockchain and
moving away from the Pay Per Click
model this will be effectively eliminated,
creating better relationships between
Merchants and Publishers. This relation-
ship is critical as in most affiliate pro-
grams less than 10% of affiliates drive 90%
of traffic and conversions.
20. Vision Document Affiliate Portal 20
5. Decrease end user frustration by
purging inactive Voucher Codes
Many Voucher Codes on the web are
inactive and do not work, either because
they have expired or were never activat-
ed. An invalid Voucher Code is a source of
immense frustration for the end user and
has a negative impact on their E-com-
merce experience. Using our plugins for
3rd party platforms, Merchants can
import their Voucher Codes directly into
the Affiliate portal dashboard and have
them stored on the Blockchain, ready for
distribution to Publishers. Should a Vouch-
er Code expire or be altered this will invali-
date the Smart Contract, be removed
from the platform and the feeds across
the network updated. As a result there will
be no invalid Voucher Codes anywhere
within our network.
6. Support exclusive offers and
Voucher Codes
Current systems make it impossible to
assign Voucher Codes to a Publisher
exclusively. This is often attempted but
breaks down because the Voucher Code
is essentially public information and can
be used by other Publishers. With Smart
Contracts and Blockchain technology we
can ensure the correct Publisher receives
the reward even when exclusive Voucher
Codes are used.
7. Utilise Affiliate Marketing in new and
emerging technology
With a steady increase in people access-
ing the internet through smart devices,
wearables, virtual/ augmented reality
and the IoT, there is a gap in the market
for Affiliate Marketing that we will look to
occupy. Our goal is to stay one step
ahead of the industry and offer unique
ways to use Affiliate Marketing with
emerging technologies and sectors.1
21. Engage
Smarter.
Add Value to Your
Affliates Program
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