Also available in: Deutsch (German)

CASZIN was able to win over Stefan Mühlbauer to describe some of the problems from the perspective of an affiliate manager. An important task of an affiliate manager is to prevent affiliate partners from dropping out or from no longer advertising their own offers, or from doing so only to a reduced extent. The key here is to always take proactive countermeasures. To be able to do this, it helps to deal with the respective scenarios.

Stefan Mühlbauer:
There are unfortunately some reasons why affiliates stop or reduce traffic, not all of them are in our power. We will illuminate these in their entirety in order to then devote ourselves fully to the points that we can influence. All advice generally applies to any type of affiliate and any vertical and it is important to note that there may be some differences.

Poor performance

This is probably the main reason why an affiliate bounces. If your product is bad, there is little you can do directly at first, but you can prevent your product from being overtaken by the competition in advance, even if you are not the product manager. Proactively gather feedback in the marketplace. Ask your affiliates who is top dog among the other advertisers right now. Check what they do better, which countries work best, conversion flow etc. Share this valuable info with your colleagues from the product department.

Advertising media quality

For many affiliates it is an absolute standard to be provided with advertising material by the advertiser. Especially when affiliates are testing something new, they often rely on the banners and prelander from the advertiser, as it is not yet clear if there is any potential here. Furthermore, affiliates also always want fresh technical ways to send you traffic. A good example of this is the revival of the Lead API and email passing. If you don’t offer that, you can lose good partners even if the rest fits. Again, it’s up to you to provide timely information to the product and marketing department about what affiliates need to continue to keep you as the top advertiser.

Test of another advertiser

No matter how good our cooperation is, sooner or later someone will come around the corner who also has something fancy in their assortment and with whom the affiliate harmonizes. I would even say that it is the affiliate’s very own task to test offers. It will usually not stop traffic completely, but reduce it. If the others achieve a significantly better ePC, however, a complete stop can also occur.

Poor service

No response to requests from the affiliate for a long time, no vacation replacement, etc. are always very harmful, while they should be a matter of course. I recommend always having two team members in each chat. This way you have someone to step in, but also a kind of quality control so that answers are given promptly and correctly. An extra advantage for program operators is that if an employee leaves, it is much easier to take over the partners. Promises that are not kept are also problematic. If a commitment cannot be kept, e.g. for technical reasons, notify the affiliate. The worst thing is to ignore something like this. In most cases, however, you say something and forget about it. This should be the absolute exception. I recommend the use of a CRM system to prevent the whole thing. You just write yourself tasks about what you promise affiliates and get reminders for it. It is also recommended to always be solution-oriented and not categorically say no, no matter what the affiliate suggests. Ideas that are good for one affiliate can also be beneficial for your entire affiliate portfolio.

Proactivity is missing

It’s so simple sometimes: your partner sends you traffic and everything looks great. Why bend a finger? You can’t get that comfortable, though. Affiliates expect you to check in regularly. What is regular is different for everyone and I don’t want to give any binding advice here. But usually, as an absolute minimum, there’s something happening every month that you should tell the affiliate about. New products, promotional materials, lead rallies, etc. should be communicated. Furthermore, you should regularly analyze the affiliate to make suggestions for improvement, such as replacing landing pages or switching from CPL to CPA or Revshare for super performing sub sources. Also, when making suggestions, always make sure to check with the affiliate what kind of traffic they have. Email traffic needs other lander than native!

Payout problems

Nothing is worse than when the payment does not reach the affiliate. The partner has worked for it and in most cases invested money as well as time. Most often this happens to affiliates who have either never been active and have already entered their payout details at signup, or affiliates who have already received payout and have been inactive for some time. Here often takes place a change how the money can be received. Take care to check with this partner in a timely manner to keep the details up to date. Also check in your system who is qualified for Payout but has not yet entered any data at all.

Other Vertical

Perhaps the most common reason for an affiliate’s application stop is to test a new vertical. Almost everything has its high phases and often the affiliate discovers a vertical that is more lucrative and replaces your offer step by step.

Shavings

This is not exactly a topic that an advertiser or network likes to talk about. Shaving is basically always an unfair advantage of the partner. Even if the ePC for the affiliate fits, data is missing as a result. Let’s assume you pay 1 € and the partner has 10% CR. With 100 clicks that makes 10 € with 10 conversions. Now you start shaving and the CR drops to 5% but with a €2 payout. With 100 clicks, that makes 10 € again, but only 5 conversions. 5 conversions is only half of 10 and that means only half as much data to optimize banners, sources, landers, products, etc. It is better to communicate openly and agree in payout somewhere where it is OK for the partner and for you. Professional partners know that payout is not the real deciding factor.

Technical problems

Parallel to the update checks in the financial area, you should also check whether callbacks are still up to date for partners who restart after a break. If your system or products have downtime, inform the partners. They know anyway, but he is always better, you deal with it openly. Otherwise, they will feel like you have something to hide. Too much bugs will damage the trust of partners in you. So always keep track of certificates that need to be renewed and consider switching to a SaaS solution for the network software if you have an internal system that frequently causes problems.

Factors that cannot be influenced

There may always be personal reasons why an affiliate is suddenly no longer active. The reasons can be for example health reasons (I now had a double herniated disc and for the first week the last thing I had thought about was traffic and conversions), family reasons such as family growth but also such things as a sabbatical are not in the hands of the affiliate manager.

I hope the factors addressed will inspire and help you keep affiliates live in the program. Everything you find here has been tested over years and is used in many programs every day.

About the Author:

Stefan “Affpal” Mühlbauer has been working in affiliate management, training account managers and building and managing programs and networks for almost 14 years. Prior to that, he spent eight years in sales and training salespeople in the old economy. Currently, he is in charge of business development at the European dating advertiser “Masters in Cash”. In parallel, he has his own training program for account managers and program operators under the brand “Affpal”. You can order his first ebook on the topic “The Affiliate Manager Starter Kit” here:
https://affpal.net/#newsletter

His YouTube channel:
https://www.youtube.com/@affpal
Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/affpal/
You want top affiliate management combined with excellent dating products?
Write Stefan on Skype s.muehli or Telegram Umbalabob to test Masters in Cash.