Currently, there are more than 780 thousand publishers in Admitad. And every time an attractive and profitable offer appears in the system, all publishers get notified via email and the advertiser gets plenty of applications for joining their affiliate program. But how should advertisers choose the appropriate publisher who will bring profit? Let’s figure it out in this article.
We have already discussed how advertisers should start working with affiliate networks, how to make an appealing offer and how to attract publishers. But attracting publishers is not the final destination as advertisers need also to cooperate with them. Advertisers are able to select publishers both in the beginning (via manual or automatic moderation) and while working with them. Some advertisers don’t set up moderation giving a chance to all publishers to try driving traffic to the offer and depending on the results of a trial period they decide whether to disconnect the publisher or to keep working with him. Now let’s see which parameters are essential to check while selecting publishers.
Levels of publishers
So what are the levels and how do publishers reach them? In Admitad they are called “trust levels” which publishers achieve while working with the network. The longer and more profitable their wor is, the higher level they have. There are 4 levels:
Moderation
Moderation is the process when advertisers choose which publishers they are going to work with (or at least try). There are three kinds of moderation:
Advertisers have several ways of performing manual moderation. First one is to change the application status from «Opened» to «Approved» or «Declined» and click on “Save all changes”. The second way is to set the filter on ad space type, URL or/and account level, tick the needed applications and assign the status “Approved” or “Declined” and then click on “Apply”. If the status “Declined” is chosen, the advertiser will need to specify the reason of declining from the provided list or indicating their own reason.
We recommend to use manual moderation only in urgent cases because of the following reasons: 1) it’s time-consuming, and for publishers, time is very important 2) manual moderation involves human factor and it is unnecessary in the beginning as automatic moderation will be enough. But a person can decline an ad space with good traffic just based on his own taste not expecting that it can drive much traffic. Sometimes it is better to rely on the system as in any case at some point you’ll reach post-moderation.
It is better not to set the strictest rules right from the beginning, especially for arbitrage and contextual ads as it is impossible to predict the effectiveness of these sources without testing them. It is better to try working with publishers and then make a decision on their disconnection only based on cooperation results. Don’t judge the website on its design, it may look like a website from the 90s but still have high conversion due to loyal email subscribers and content of high quality.
Work with joined publishers
In order to properly evaluate the quality of publishers work, you need to check statistics. There are 3 types of statistics in Admitad:
The first thing which you should pay attention to is conversion: in our experience, the average conversion index can vary from 0,5 to 5% depending on the ad space. If you see that the conversion rate is extremely high (over 80%), it can be something to worry about as most likely that the traffic is of poor quality (it can be incentive traffic in mobile offers). But it is necessary to mention that this rule is valid providing that there are many clicks and orders for analysis (if the publisher has only 1 click and 1 action, 100% conversion is not suspicious).
Here you can pay attention to several indicators. Compare the order amount to the average bill and if the difference is huge, it is a warning that something can be wrong — a customer needs many goods, a wholesale order, incentive traffic which won’t be confirmed or maybe somebody just resale your goods. Evaluate the conversion time: if the conversion from click into purchase took just a couple of seconds, it may mean that a publisher drives incentive traffic. Check the average time which an average user spends on your website — it can be more than 20 minutes for a regular online shop. The same thing happens if many orders come from one IP-address or at some unexpected time (hardly will someone decide to go on a crazy shopping at 2 am, if it isn’t a crazy sale). If you need details on each order, you can check it in “Action page”.
One more «trick» is to download all data on the actions on SubID which are added by publishers. It is more relevant to mobile offers while working with which publishers usually add tags. The advertisers can control the traffic quality via SubID. It is impossible to see these data in the account, you need to download a separate file with reports on all actions. SubID provides an opportunity to monitor the traffic quality for each promotional material and they can just ask the publishers to remove ad creatives with these SublDs rather than to block all ad spaces.
For what reason can a publisher be disconnected?
A publisher can be disconnected either by a manager or by an advertiser himself (to get such ability, an advertiser needs to send a request to the affiliate network). The reasons for disconnection are mentioned below:
And in any case, an advertiser can indicate “Other reason” for disconnection and explain why the company isn’t ready to keep working with the publisher.
Any penalties?
If an advertiser isn’t satisfied with publisher’s work, there are several options to do:
In serious cases such as actions harmed the advertiser’s reputation, a publisher can be fined. But the violations must be proven: screenshots, extracts from rules, indicators. Of course, the traffic control department is doing their best to catch the violators but advertisers can be of much help in this process as well.
We would advise to experiment with traffic, join more ad spaces and estimate them upon the results, not their appearance, allocate some time for publishers and don’t forget to check the reports of the affiliate network. Your internal analytics is strong and efficient, but affiliate tracking is also very important, and if publishers have any doubts, they will check reports of the affiliate network as it has been designed in order to emphasize the most important moments of work with affiliate networks.