The affiliate medium has been alive for about as long as online shopping has been a thing, but it’s always been underinvested in when compared against its more traditional brethren. 

It’s hard to say exactly why this is, but the prevailing theory is that it’s more difficult to prove that conversions tracked through the channel were truly influenced by an affiliate placement.

In other words, the C-Suite wants to see that they’re not paying extra money on advertising to customers that would have purchased anyway. There’s extra scrutiny around coupon affiliates, who get credited for last second clicks on purchases where a customer noticed the coupon field in the middle of their checkout session.

When purchasing ad placements through DSPs in the display industry, brands can usually clearly define audience segments that are targeted by their ads, which makes it much easier to direct ad budgets towards incremental revenue.

Because you can’t completely control where affiliates place their ads, incrementality has to be controlled on the attribution layer. Unfortunately, the vast majority of affiliate platforms do not offer the correct tools to accomplish this. 

ReferZone was built to fix this problem.

When measuring incrementality for individual affiliates, we need to look at a few factors:

1. The frequency in which the affiliate was the only click
   An indication that the affiliate is able to reach audiences that your other affiliates aren’t.
2. The percentage of new customers they referred
   The affiliate is able to obtain net new customers to your brand.
3. The average order value originating from the affiliate’s traffic
   On all tracked sales (new or returning), the affiliate is able to convince buyers to spend more.

It isn’t overly difficult to measure affiliates’ AOV on any affiliate platform if you pull your reports on the commissions they receive. You can use this data to bucket your affiliates into different groupings based on the value they add to your brand.

On ReferZone, you can create different labels for your affiliates, which can then be used to prioritize, or more importantly deprioritize, their clicks in your attribution model. For coupon affiliates that you may have concerns with about their incrementality, you can put their click priority at the bottom of your attribution model.

By prioritizing clicks from your more trusted partners, you can guarantee that the affiliates at the bottom of your attribution model are only getting commissions on sales in which they had the only click.

Lastly, ReferZone’s attribution allows clicks to be suppressed if certain conditions are met. Importantly for working with coupon affiliates, you can toss clicks if the customer did not use a coupon code. If a coupon affiliate receives commission on a sale where no code was used, it’s not likely they influenced the purchase at all.

Clicks can also be tossed on sales made by returning customers, which can be done globally or to affiliates assigned to certain labels. This is a feature that should be used situationally, but it can be a powerful tool in ensuring incrementality from certain segments of affiliates. For example, some brands might only want to award cashback affiliates with commissions on these types of sales.

The affiliate marketing space is arguably the most powerful advertising channel when used properly, but proper usage can only be achieved by using the right tools for the job. If you’re looking to revamp your affiliate program for the future, or if you’re looking to get it right from the beginning, you can reach out to us at info@referzone.io