Achieving Consistent Payouts

By AdStation | June 21st, 2012 | Categories: Affiliate Marketing
money

The number one complaint I get from my team of Affiliate Managers is that affiliates are always complaining about the inconsistency of PPC payouts. In the morning they are getting a $2.00 PPC and the very same day, in the very same category, the PPC drops to $0.40. What’s going on?

There are various factors that determine the payout. However, Performance Quality and Bids & Budget play the biggest factors.

Performance Quality: Performance Quality is essentially your Performance Score. Your score is determined by two factors, front-end conversion performance, and back-end post-conversion lead quality. Ten is the highest score you can receive. The benchmark is set by the top-performing quality traffic within that category. If you have a Performance Score of eight this means your traffic performance quality is 80% of the benchmark. This means you will receive 80% of the potential payout.

Your payout will decrease if your Performance Score decreases throughout the day. So how do Affiliates improve their Performance Score? I call this part “Trust and Transparency.” The top Affiliates trust us and pass-through list/sub IDs. In return, we provide them with transparency into performance quality at the list/sub ID level. Basically, send us more of the good stuff and less of the bad stuff and your score will go up. Work with your dedicated Account Manager to educate them on what the list/subs IDs represent. If you do not want to cut out the low-performing list, just tell your Affiliate Manager you would like each list/sub ID scored separately.

Bids & Budget: Bids and Budgets are basically your categories of health. Each category consists of advertisers with various bids and budgets. The higher the bid and budget, the more traffic the advertiser receives. Our proprietary technology routes the click from the category creative to the relevant advertiser.

Your payout will decrease if bids drop or the budget for that category gets depleted. Bids drop when traffic performance quality dips. How do Affiliates make sure they are sending to a category where there’s sufficient budget? I call this part “Supply and Demand.” The top Affiliates work with their dedicated Affiliate Manager to schedule drops on daily basis. Now it’s up to your Affiliate Manager to make sure the demand is there. When an Affiliate sends traffic to a category without notice it might create a condition where there’s more supply than demand. That’s an unhealthy category. Additionally, when an Affiliate schedules a drop then disappears and doesn’t supply the traffic, the demand side will move that budget to a different category or even a different network. This is why it’s very important that an Affiliate and Account Manager communicate and manage each other’s expectations to maximize Supply and Demand.

It’s truly a partnership between an Affiliate and Account Manager, and when they are clicking (pun intended) you will see solid, consistent payouts!