Publishers Have Relied On Fragmented Data For Too Long
Affiliate marketing has consistently implied a notion of distance between publisher and advertiser.
The gap is normally bridged by an affiliate network or agency.
This has caused publishers to operate with one-hand tied behind their backs.
When sending the world’s biggest e-commerce company’s traffic and sales, publishers have constantly relied on pieces of data from affiliate networks about the clicks and sales they have generated. But they have never been able to tie that crucial transactional data back to their own inbound traffic data and on-site analytics.
Publishers in affiliate marketing know how well they are performing for their advertiser partners. However they have lacked the ability to connect conversions with their own analytics and traffic acquisition.
User Journey Visibility Is Broken
Working with this crucial bit of the picture missing means even the industry’s biggest publishers have never been able to confidently assess a user journey in this way...
- User X was acquired through this marketing channel (let’s say a paid Facebook Ad)
- The user was sent to advertiser Y
- The user purchased these 3 products
- And spent £180 on the purchase
Stages 2, 3 and 4 have long been available to publishers via affiliate networks.
How the user was acquired to the publisher’s website in the first place has always sat disconnected from the other parts of the user’s journey. This is the critical starting point. This level of detail that is actually vital for publishers.
The key to helping publishers better optimise their businesses is knowing which traffic sources and traffic generation strategies drive the most conversions and the most valuable customers. Most publishers are only being paid when they drive sale-converting customers. This adds to the importance of knowing where those valuable users are coming from.
Closing The Loop
We have a unique insight into this challenge as we support some of the world’s biggest media publishers. We have witnessed the struggle of publishers with incredibly high traffic volumes. Publishers with a varied range of sources were frustrated by their inability to properly optimize their affiliate campaigns.
When publishers tried to repeat a successful formula for a campaign this problem manifested itself really clearly. Their issue? They didn’t know why a campaign had worked. They had no visibility on how that campaign had generated the specific, converting traffic that made it successful.
To help publishers overcome this challenge, we built Funnel Relay. The goal of Funnel Relay is to close the loop between traffic acquisition and conversions for publishers. This finally helps publishers in affiliate marketing to properly measure their own return-on-adspend.
An Industry First
Funnel Relay is the affiliate marketing industry’s first end-to-end customer journey tool. Publishers of all sizes can use Trackonomics to report their affiliate sales by in-bound traffic source. They do this by integrating a small code snippet on each page of their site where affiliate links are running,
A publisher can now break down their affiliate sales by paid or organic campaigns across Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Search and many more.
Publishers can visualise their traffic acquisition in flow charts using the Trackonomics dashboard. This helps to understand where the traffic acquired from various channels goes once it leaves their website.
Positive Feedback From Publishers
Having trialled Funnel Relay with a focus group of key publishers over the last few months the feedback has been unequivocally positive. Publishers have said:
- The end-to-end visibility on affiliate journeys is unrivalled in the industry
- The data now plays a key role in traffic acquisition strategies
- The information directly feeds into budget and planning for paid campaigns
We're delighted to announce that Funnel Relay is now available as a standard part of the Trackonomics suite of publisher-facing tools, all built with the aim of helping publishers in affiliate marketing make each link worth more.