When deciding on what to promote look at the commission structure to figure out how many sales you need to make to reach the minimum payout. If you can’t do it in 3 sales then don’t join the program – this applies to in-house programs specifically. In a network you may be promoting several merchants and their products, so getting to the minimum is easier.
Reporting is critical to developing your campaigns and deciding which offer to promote and which ones to get rid of. You need to know what kind of traffic you are sending to the merchant and how it is converting as well as which banner or creative is working well for you. One of the nice features of the ShareASale network in particular is they show you the last 60 days of the affiliate average EPC (or Earnings per Click) of a merchant as well as the return/refund rate and average commissions. So you will know if a program is actively producing revenue and what their return rate is.
Networks, like ShareASale will even alert you if a merchant is running low on funds or not funded at all so you can quickly decide to switch merchants or contact the affiliate manager to see what is going on and when they will fund their accounts properly. This is especially important because some seasonal merchants, like Halloween merchants in particular, don’t fund their account year round. You would be sending traffic to dead links since the network shuts them down as they are no longer funded.
Return days, gap life, or cookie life: is the amount of time the customer referred is still considered yours.
So let us say the return days is 30. This means if the customer comes back on the 30th day and makes a purchase they are still your referral and you get credit for the sale. If they make the purchase on the 31st day you get nothing as the cookie has expired.
In my experience over 95% of the sales are made the same day, so don’t be afraid of a one-day cookie. Keep in mind that your visitor may have different buying behaviors depending on the content you are using to promote a product. A longer tracking gap is always better.
One of the questions most frequently asked is what if the visitor clicks on my affiliate link then later click on another affiliate’s link – who gets credit for the referral? This will vary from program to program. Modern programs have attribution options beyond just the last click. Always check with your affiliate manager on this.
Each merchant will have their own Affiliate Agreement:
Please read these carefully. It will tell you what terms/keywords you cannot go after, usually their trademarks. So don’t try to buy domains that are misspellings or similar to the trademarks as you will get declined and even worse forfeit any commissions earned and be black listed in the network. The agreement will also tell you about payment cycles, and how refunds are handled, guidelines for email marketing as well as return days (cookie life).