Banner advertisement is an essential part of both advertisers’ marketing mix and of publishers’ activities. The fact that your click-through-rates are declining just means you have to be more sophisticated when creating your ads! Wonderful banners not only draw higher CTR (meaning more incoming traffic to your landing page) but also encourage more publishers to run your affiliate program (meaning more users are exposed to your banners, and your brand in the first place).

I’m going to discuss the most important points to consider when designing the right creatives for your affiliate program.

Intrigue them with text - Keep the content short, clear and appealing. It’s a good idea to promote your brand’s core benefit and get users intrigued about your product. Power words such as “Free!” and “New!” can have a powerful impact on users, but make sure you use words that are right for your product. Moreover, make sure you have a big and clear call to action that conveys a sense of urgency. In fact, the call to action is so important that the whole banner should be designed around it and not the other way around.

A picture is worth a thousand words- Images should be used to send a quick and clear message of your product. Use your brand’s different images and be creative! Be careful, however, not to overdo it with too many images and colors in each banner.

Size does matter- Some of the basic sizes include 300X250, 468X60, 728X90, 160X600, 200X200, 336X280, 500X500 (html email creatives) and 110X80 (for Facebook). You should definitely have these but as mentioned before- the more the better, so feel free to create additional sizes such as 250X250, 550X480, 800X440, 234X60, 300X600, 720X300 and 125X125.

Play with formats

-          Static banners in GIF or JPG are a basic must, and it’s imperative you have a few to offer!

-          Animated banners in Flash or Animated Gif draw much more attention than their static counterparts. Keep in mind they the banners must support clicktags and that Google requires Flash banners to stop after 30 seconds, so you might as well make all your flash banners Google compliant (see full list of restrictions here)

-          500X500 HTML creatives are a must if you’d like email marketers to promote your program. When creating these consider who you want to appear as the sender and what you’d like the subject line to be. To avoid the junk filters beware of words such as “Free” and unnecessary punctuation such as !, $, %.

-          Video Banners drive high CTRs as well as high conversion rates because they allow for more info and are highly relevant to the product promoted. 300×250 is probably the best size but 336×280 and 800×440 are great options as well. In any case, try to limit the size to 40kb.

It’s a matter of trust- People need to feel secure when signing up or paying for an online service. A good match between the banners and the landing page reassures people as to the credibility of the site so make sure your banners match your landing page’s look and feel.

Refresh your stock- Banners lose their effectiveness after a few times, and users will then start to ignore them. This is why publishers love new banners. While you’re at it, check what works and what doesn’t, and apply your newfound knowledge in your next batch. Consider implementing some of your publishers’ feedback which you’ll surely be getting.

By implementing these tips you ensure an optimized and well-rounded creative library for your affiliate program. This means you have a better shot at getting great publishers on board, and more users clicking on your ads and making it to your landing page.

Author Shaked Markovitch manages advertiser affiliate programs as a member of the Affiliate Solutions Department at Matomy Market. You can contact her at shaked.m@matomy.com

Naturally, an affiliate program’s success is largely dependent on its affiliates.  As a result, one of the first steps in any affiliate program is affiliate recruitment (both from within the Matomy Market network and beyond).

As in any conversion funnel analysis, let’s look at the percentages.   A percentage of potential publishers sign up to your program, fewer become active and even fewer manage to bring in a substantial number of quality conversions.   Sounds like a glum outlook; however, by approaching as many relevant publishers as possible and improving the publisher conversions along the funnel, you can meet the challenge of getting recruits that will actively and successfully promote your products.   I’d like to focus on just one of these steps and discuss several ways in which you can boost publisher conversion rates from registered to active, or in other words – how to incentivize your affiliates to bring in more results.

Payouts Payouts Payouts - Publishers love their payouts, and the higher the better! You should be willing to reward top performing publishers with special rates. This is a win-win situation; the higher rates can incentivize and encourage the publisher to send more traffic to the program, and you, in turn, receive even more high quality conversions. The fact that higher rates are available for top performing publishers should be communicated clearly, alongside the currently offered rate. If possible, the threshold for the higher rate should be given as well as the higher rate itself, because publishers are dependent on such information for optimization purposes.

Promotions – Promotions are also a great way to incentivize publishers: winter promotions, summer promotions, holiday promotions, anniversary promotions, there are plenty of reasons to start one!

Don’t know how to set up an affiliate promotion?  A standard formula for an affiliate promotion is this: Offer a prize to publishers generating over X conversions in a specified time period. The prize should ideally be a higher payout (see previous paragraph) but any Apple gadget or Playstation could also do the trick. Keep in mind that the minimum number of conversions to receive the prize should be attainable, otherwise the promotion could not only have no effect, but even work as a disincentive…

Private Landing Pages - As do we all, publishers love to be acknowledged for their efforts and hard work by getting VIP treatment.  Examples of such treatment for CPS offers could be creating a private landing page for VIP publishers, or providing voucher codes for publishers to offer your product or service at a discounted price. Such landing pages obviously help the publishers generate more conversions, keeping everyone happy!

Communication-  You should also reach out to your publishers on a regular basis; welcoming them to their program and notifying them thereafter of any significant change such as new banners, new landing pages, new target areas, new rates etc. Publishers also love getting relevant info that helps them with their optimization such as conversion rates, average sale amount, the time it takes users to go from click to lead to sale, and so on. An email a week is a great way to keep in touch with publishers, and provides an opportunity to ask for their invaluable feedback which in turn could propel more such changes.  For 3 recommendations that will improve your communication with affiliates, read May’s post from last month.

To summarize, here are the 4 things you need to remember:

1. Payouts
2. Promotions
3. Private Landing Pages
4. Communication

Give these a try and you’ll learn that with a little love and attention you can get most all of your publishers heavily invested in your program! At Matomy Market, Advertisers who implement these suggestions see a sharp improvement in the percent of active and highly active affiliates, and as a result, in their affiliate program as a whole.

Author Shaked Markovitch manages advertiser affiliate programs as a member of the Affiliate Solutions Department at Matomy Market. You can contact her at shaked.m@matomy.com

When helping advertisers build their affiliate program, we often talk about how important it is to offer competitive rates, a straightforward user flow, an ample amount of creative materials, and a successful landing page. These are the building blocks of every affiliate program. This list of building blocks is missing one important point, though – communication. Your relationship with your affiliates is just that, a relationship, and like any relationship, it needs to be maintained. Think about it this way: if you have an amazing product and landing page but no one hears about it, does it really exist? Philosophical questions aside, let’s talk about the least-discussed yet easiest way to improve your affiliate program’s performance – improving your communication with your affiliates.

If you are an advertiser managing your entire affiliate program with Matomy Market, the platform allows you to contact your affiliates directly, which allows you to see what affiliates want and need in order to promote your product. From our experience, there’s a fine line between sending your affiliates just enough information to incentivize them to run your program and bombarding them with too many emails. Thankfully, we’ve been tracking affiliate response to our emails for years, and can give you the best recommendations that adhere to this fine line.

Recommendation 1: “Ahem (little wave). It’s me, your Advertiser”

I was shocked to learn what great performance increases my advertisers received simply for sending out a mass email to affiliates reminding them that the program exists. Many affiliates sign up to a program but need a little push in order to start running it. This little email does the trick, and with Matomy Market’s platform, all you need to do is click “Send.”

Recommendation 2: The Haves and the Have-Nots

It’s imperative to know who your top affiliates are, and it’s easy to identify them as well as high-potential affiliates with Matomy Market’s platform – you can see who’s been generating impressions/clicks to your program, and who made their first commission. I recommend sending out a separate mass email to each of these groups, ideally weekly. For affiliates who only generated impressions/clicks, you can find out what’s preventing them from monetizing their traffic. And for those who made their first commission, you’ll see what it takes to get them to increase their traffic. Tailoring your mass emails by publisher potential allows the affiliate to receive the personalized feedback he needs to build a long term partnership. Soon enough, he’ll be your affiliate for life.

Recommendation 3: The Latest and Greatest

Matomy Market saves you time by sending affiliates automatic updates about program restrictions, new campaigns, etc. It’s often helpful, though, to also send a personalized message telling your affiliates about new creatives, landing pages, and restriction changes. In a sea of emails, your personalized message will stand out, and show affiliates that you are committed to keeping them informed of any change in their programs.

I can’t stress enough how successful these simple emails are to affiliates. Communication is key, and with the account tools we’ve mentioned here, you’ll see all the information you need in order to target the right messages to the right affiliates quickly and easily.

Author May Flam manages advertiser affiliate programs as a member of the Affiliate Solutions Department at Matomy Market. You can contact her at may.f@matomy.com