A look at Affiliate Network Marketing

An affiliate marketing network is a business or platform that aims to help affiliates and merchants increase online sales and revenue. Many of the affiliate marketing network sites that can be found on the internet use different ways to achieve this. The success of any strategies employed by these businesses has also helped to redefine the affiliate marketing industry.

One of the strategies used in affiliate marketing is SEO and SEM integration. This integration of the customers SEM efforts together with the affiliate marketing efforts usually results in significant value to the inbound direct links to the merchant sites. To achieve this, some affiliate marketing networks will make an affiliate site appear more editorial in nature to search engines as well as to users. This, in turn, has the effect of improving the sites standing as an authority site. When this strategy is implemented successfully, then the best possible outcome of organic and paid search results can be achieved resulting in more revenue.

In most affiliate marketing network campaigns, a lot of emphasis is laid on the direct benefits of the merchants. However, some of these affiliate networks have gone a step further and tried to improve the affiliates ability to generate revenue resulting in indirect sales to the merchants too. The affiliate marketing network industry has had a significant impact on the internet marketing and advertising field and in many forms, continues to exert influence in this industry. This has however also come with some setbacks, the major being fraud. There are many systems that affiliate networks use to detect and combat fraud. Some of these may include Source Checker, Front Door fraud Protection, Data Pattern Matching and Click Validation.

An affiliate marketing network can also decide to use a pay Per Sale affiliate campaign to compensate affiliates for any transaction. The sale process is finalized online while a user is still present on the merchant site. Some sales however can be classified as pending for example when credit card processing is done offline, during order verification, when a purchase is made without the use of a credit card or as a result of other post-sale requirements. Once these requirements are met, sale validation is done by the merchant and the affiliate compensated. This method of sale validation allows affiliates to be paid more for each sale and allows even more merchants to return to affiliate marketing. Depending on what technology or strategy used, the goal of an affiliate marketing network remains the same increase revenue for the merchant and their affiliates.