Sustainable Growth through Smart Strategic Affiliate Marketing
You're an ambitious ecommerce brand, and you – quite rightly! – want to expand your digital marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing has huge potential, but you might be little concerned about:
- Your budget and time already being stretched thin.
- Other revenue-driving channels competing for your attention.
- Not having lots of hands-on affiliate experience.
At Genie Goals, we’re only interested in doing what works. That’s why we’ve created solutions that deliver affiliate marketing programmes that are actually effective.
We tackle all these tricky issues above, and get you set up for success. Here’s how.
Jake Newbould - Piglet
More Than Just a Revenue Target: Discover Your Affiliate Potential
Our approach goes beyond simple revenue tracking. We help you:
- Acquire new customers
- Build brand recognition
- Increase Average Order Value (AOV)
- Retain customers
- Optimise your spending
These metrics offer more value than basic revenue figures, helping you maximise your affiliate channel's potential in a sustainable way.
Drive Performance, Compound Your Brand
If you’re looking for quick wins at the expense of your reputation, we’re probably not the agency for you.
As a trusted pair of hands, our goal is steady, thoughtful growth with partners that truly benefit your brand both immediately, and in the long run.
At Genie Goals we are platform agnostic, we work with most major tracking partners and our biggest belief is that the brands we work with own their programme.
Why Work With Us?
Innovative because we know what works, trusted because we challenge you, Genie Goals brings an expert edge to everything we do.
We’re proud to say no when it’s needed, passionately values-driven, and focused on the intersection of technical knowledge and creativity.
When you work with Genie Goals you get:
- A smart, driven, brilliant team with 25+ years of combined industry know-how from a wealth of brand, network, and publisher roles
- Award-winning approaches, and an approach to client relationships that’s focused on creating value
- Access to our deep understanding of multiple channels, for a digital strategy that’s comprehensive and effective
- Programmes built with purpose that grow alongside your brand
Lots of agencies offer affiliates – and that’s great.
But here at Genie, we go about things a little differently.
Our affiliate approach is underpinned by one key factor: a desire to drive your overall brand success.
We treat your resources with the same care as we would our own, making sure your investment is used effectively, with no risk to your budget or your brand.
No more second-guessing or inflexibility. This is affiliate marketing as it should be: clear and adaptable.
New to affiliates or an emerging brand?
We want to help.
Want an affiliate marketing audit?
Maximise Your Affiliate Channel's Impact
Ready for no-brainer solutions when it comes to affiliate marketing that does what it should do? Let’s chat.
Get in touch nowAffiliate Marketing FAQ’s
Affiliate marketing is a process whereby a brand promotes its products or services via an aligned partner site (the affiliate). These sites will promote brands in exchange for commercial payment often in the form of a commission when a referred sale from the affiliate has taken place.
Example: An editorial site features a top 10 pendant lights article and features a homeware brand’s lamp, the link from that article clicks through to the homeware brand's site and includes tracking. If a customer purchases a light from that referred click then the brand gets the sales and the affiliate a commission payment.
Affiliates come in all shapes and sizes therefore affiliate marketing is about building a wide network of aligned partner sites driving traffic back to the brand domain.
This is taking a deep dive into affiliate channel activity within the tracking platform. Affiliate programmes can be vast with multiple partners promoting in different ways and using other methods to gain sales. An affiliate audit should assess the health of your affiliate programme, looking for activities that may be non-compliant and also looking for gaps or opportunities.
Affiliate compliance is a really key part of an affiliate programme audit, as it's important to ensure that the promotional methods of all affiliate partners are transparent and add value to a brand's wider marketing efforts.
Affiliate marketing relies on tracking to facilitate the partnerships. Therefore affiliates promoting brands need to have tracking on the links they promote to ensure that the customer click is recorded and ultimately any subsequent sales and commissions are tracked back to the affiliate. Affiliate networks in their essence facilitate the tracking, payment and discovery of potential partnerships for both parties.
You can read more and watch our video on the role of the affiliate network here.
One sign of a badly managed affiliate programme could be that it is all vouchercode sites, mainly as there are a lot of code sites in the channel and the majority can get up and running very quickly. The key thing to remember is as a brand you or whoever is managing your affiliate activity should be selective in who you approve. We recommend working with a handful of direct voucher code partners only, and only the main ones in the market. This allows you to monitor codes promoted and also ensure that the partner is representing your brand correctly. You should be striving to build an affiliate programme which leverages partners across the marketing funnel and that focuses on quality, aligned partner sites.
You can read more and watch our video on the incrementality of voucher and cashback sites here
Subnetworks are a collection of affiliate sites tracking under one affiliate ID or name, the subnetwork joins multiple brand programmes giving the sites that track under them access to lots of promotional opportunities without needing to join individual programmes themselves.
Skimlinks is the most popular example of a subnetwork, Skimlinks works with most editorial sites to provide affiliate tracking to the thousands of in-article links they have across their platforms and enables the editorial partner to monetise content at scale. Under Skimlinks you can see tracking for The Telegraph, The Independent, Glamour Magazine, Ideal Home and many more!
Skimlinks are an example of a subnetwork that provides transparency on traffic sources with click refs or by requesting reporting. There are however a lot of other subnetworks besides Skimlinks that do not provide clarity on traffic sources and this can leave them open to less favourable activity. At Genie Goals we recommend keeping subnetwork activity to a minute and believe Skimlinks to be the best partner due to the editorial content. If you work with any subnetworks that are unresponsive or who will not share the source of the traffic we would recommend removing them from your programme.