8 Ways to Sift for Golden Affiliates

As affiliate networks grow, managing new affiliate applications and relationships can get pretty time consuming.  Especially as a network grows in popularity, sifting through the fraudulent affiliates and empowering new affiliates to get up and running can drain a lot of resources.  As the leading affiliate management software, it is our job to provide all the tools you need to simplify the process of working with new affiliates, but tools don’t do a lot of good if you don’t know what they are and how they can save you time.  So, for all you budding affiliate networks out there or networks looking to make improvements, here is a run down of the top 8 ways to quickly increase your efficiency with managing new affiliates.

1.  Auto Approve Accounts

You can streamline the affiliate signup process by using the “auto approve” affiliate setting.  This is an area where many networks waste and incredible amount of time.  By setting affiliate signups to auto approve, new accounts will automatically be set to active and new users are immediately forwarded to their affiliate snapshot page.  This gets new affiliates up and running quickly without waiting days for someone to approve them manually, also saving valuable employee resources.  For many networks, it is better to let affiliates get started and then evaluate the traffic quality they are providing to determine their worth.

2.  Approve or Reject Affiliates Automatically

If you are hesitant to all affiliates being automatically approved, Pro, Enterprise and Dedicated Solutions clients can set their networks to approve or reject affiliates based on a profile fraud score. With profile fraud enabled using Fraud Score, new affiliate accounts are rated based on fifteen different data points relating to their application. Data points include criteria such as duplicate accounts, terminations by another networks, bad account information, etc. By then defining automatic block and approval thresholds, affiliate signups that a score less than the automatic approval threshold will be automatically activated while affiliates that have a score greater than the threshold will be set to pending. Affiliate signups that have scores greater than the automatic block threshold will be automatically rejected.

3.  Auto Approve with Account Manager

If your network has account managers for affiliates, you can set the signup process to automatically assign an account manager to their account. This way affiliates that are automatically approved will be assigned an account manager that they can immediately contact. Affiliate managers will also be notified when a new account is assigned to their management. In account settings, you can specify which employees are randomly selected for these auto approved accounts.

4.  Show Account Managers Pending Accounts

Depending on how you manage you network, you can give account managers the ability to see pending accounts. If you assign account managers to pending accounts, they can reach out to these applicants and investigate them prior to approving them and activating their account. If you don’t want the account manager to view pending accounts, you can disable this feature and have another employee manage the approval process.

5.  Affiliate and Advertiser Sign Up Questions

While the basic sign up process for affiliates and advertisers requires detailed information, it is best to add your own additional sign up questions. These custom sign up questions are included at the bottom of the affiliate and advertiser sign up forms. Depending on how you run your affiliate network, you can gain valuable information about affiliates and advertisers that apply to join. Sample affiliate questions include “Tell us about your current affiliate marketing activities?” or “Is your traffic incentivized?”. Sample advertiser questions include “What kind of traffic are you looking for?” or “What is your target CPA for your offers?”.

6.  Custom Affiliate Referral Links

Most of our clients take the time to create custom signup pages for affiliates. However, if you have affiliate referrals enabled the referral link goes to your HasOffers affiliate signup page. Now you can enable a custom affiliate referral link and specify your custom affiliate signup page. When affiliates refer other affiliates to your network, those affiliates will be directed to your custom affiliate signup page.

7.  Including Tracking Links in Mail Room

It is a great idea to notify new affiliates about high performing offers or featured offers. Use the MailRoom to send out emails to all affiliates, just new affiliates, or other affiliate groups, notifying them about offers. To make it easy for them to start running the offer, you can include a tracking link in the email broadcast. Simply generate a tracking link for the offer and replace the affiliate ID with the variable <affiliate_id>.  This dynamic variable will be replaced with the actual affiliate ID associated with the user receiving the email. i.e.  http://demo.go2jump.org/aff_c?offer_id=2&aff_id=<affiliate_id>

8.  Import Affiliates, Advertisers and Offers

The new HasOffers import features allow you to easily add new affiliates, advertisers and offers, and they also allow you to use the same import function to mass update affiliates, advertisers and offers. There are special download links that export affiliates, advertisers and offers in the proper CSV format. Simply edit the files and then re-import them. After the file is processed, the affiliates, advertisers or offers will be updated in your affiliate network. To update these records, the ID of the affiliate, advertiser or offer must be included in the CSV file.

These are just a few management tools you can use to save your network time and money as you grow in numbers.  Do you have your own ideas about improving affiliate network management?  Be sure to leave them in the comments below.