Exorcise Your Affiliate Marketing Demons: How to Overcome Affiliate Manager Challenges

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Wouldn’t it be great if the challenges affiliate managers face were only a once-a-year deal like Halloween? While certain times of the year definitely prove more challenging than others, unfortunately, the challenges affiliate managers can encounter are a year-round thing. However, identifying the most common challenges and how to overcome them will help lighten your load to take on anything else thrown at you. It won’t always be smooth sailing but weathering the storm never is.

To ensure you’re fully prepared, this week’s newsletter will dive into these common affiliate manager challenges and how to overcome them:

• Disconnection between program and affiliate goals
• Issues during onboarding
• Struggles to keep affiliates motivated
• Staying protected against affiliate fraud

Disconnection between program and affiliate goals

The problem: Misaligned goals between you and your affiliates are going to do more than burn a few bridges. This kind of disruption will lead to inconsistent performances and negatively impact the reputation of your affiliate program. How does this happen? If you struggle to define your program's KPIs (key performance indicators), it’s going to be tricky to keep everyone on the same page.

The solution: Communicate, communicate, communicate. You need to be clear with your affiliates and confident with yourself about what your KPIs are and have a way to accurately track the performance of your affiliates. These KPIs need to be plainly communicated with your affiliates to ensure your program is only ever producing the best performances.

Issues during onboarding

The problem: The increasing popularity of affiliate marketing has flooded the space with eager affiliates in need of affiliate programs and their managers. This has made the already complex onboarding process even more difficult. Not only is it causing managers to sometimes onboard affiliates ill-fit for their program, but it’s leaving even the ones who are the right fit poorly prepared to be effective affiliates.

The solution: You need to ensure the onboarding process is as smooth as possible. This includes, once again, effectively communicating with your affiliates but also ensuring they are properly prepared. Provide them with everything they will need from tracking links to promotional materials. Even after the onboarding is complete, establish open channels of communication to ensure any misunderstandings to miscommunication can be cleared up as quickly as possible.

Struggles to keep affiliates motivated

The problem: Even if you’ve managed to find what seems like the perfect affiliates for your program, this doesn’t mean the hard work is over. Now, you need to keep your affiliates motivated to make sure you’re getting the most out of these partnerships. The challenge of this is what leads many managers to jump ship and start the onboarding process all over again, wasting valuable time.

The solution: A big reason this happens is that many affiliate managers rely on traditional CPA (cost per acquisition) models. When it comes to commissions, you need to be open to being more flexible and consider a model that better suits the affiliates you are working with. People don’t like to admit it but money talks and you should consider what your commissions are saying to your affiliates.

Staying protected against affiliate fraud

The problem: One of the biggest challenges affiliate managers face right now is the persistence of affiliate fraud. From fake clicks to fraudulent conversions, fraud has become a serious threat to affiliate programs and the industry as a whole. As an affiliate program manager, it is your responsibility to ensure affiliate fraud does not impact the revenue and reputation of your program.

The solution: Implement fraud prevention tools to help you monitor and mitigate fraud. However, knowing the signs of an effective fraud prevention tool is just as vital as being able to recognise when your program is under threat from fraud. Fully vet the tools or partners you choose to work with before committing.

Affiliate manager challenges can’t always be avoided but they can be overcome. Even if you have yet to encounter any of these challenges yourself, remaining aware and prepared will ensure they don’t bog you down for long should they ever cross your path.

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