Welcome to the second chapter of our two part guide on some of the best practices in setting up an affiliate program. In the first chapter we wrote about how to best select your affiliate network, selecting a commission rate and stopping phone leakage.

Creating Banner ads

It’s fair to say that text links will make up a very large percentage of your click-troughs – looking at one of the programs we manage Text links often make up 80-90% of the unique clicks on a daily basis but this does not mean that banner ads should be ignored – those 10% can still drive a lot of business and it’s important to make sure they are done correctly.

Creative Banner ads: Standard Banner Sizes

Creating banner ads can be quite time consuming and if you are updating your banners on a regular basis then you won’t want to do every size under the sun; with that said however it’s always worth having a standard set in the following sizes:

468 x 60 Full horizontal banner
234 x 60 Half banner
125 x 125 Square button
120 x 240 Vertical banner
120 x 120 Button
120 x 90 Button
120 x 60 Button
88 x 31 Micro button
160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper
120 x 600 Skyscraper

If you are looking to update your banners with the latest creative and don’t have the time to do all of these then we find the most popular are:

120 x 120
120 x 60
120 x 600
125 x 125
468 x 60

Flash creative can work and is used but make sure you speak to your network about finding out what action script is required for it to track correctly.

Creative Banner ads: No Phone Numbers/URL’s please!

It’s important to have some form of call to action in your banners but please make sure that when creating the banners the call to action is not a phone number of a URL! This can encourage users to type in the URL directly or making a phone call and mean that your affiliates could lose out on genuine sales.

Why product feeds are important

If you are launching a retail affiliate program then it really is essential to sort your product feed out before going live! I still find it staggering to see so many new programs going up before sorting out the basics; how hard can it be?

Unfortunately there is a lack of standardisation on the feeds themselves so speak to the network and ask for their instructions on how it should be structured – the feeds will not only help with data feed affiliates (comparison sites, for example) but a lot of PPC experts out there use these to help build their campaigns.

Other feeds

If you have the ability to have additional feeds such as best sellers (overall and in particular categories) then get them sorted – the more information and help you can provide the better your program will perform.

Offering decent incentives

Affiliate Incentives are quite a simple marketing concept but are often either overlooked or under-promoted; done correctly they have the potential to help really drive your affiliate program forward by encouraging new signups and activity. Here are my top three tips:

1) Try to stay away from offering items such as ipods as the incentive – a recent quote from a rather successful affiliate was along the lines of “I now have a cupboard full of them and don’t need anymore!”. The more unique you make your prize the more successful the promotion will be.

2) Use your own stock as much as possible. If you sell T-Shirts then give a bunch of them away every week. Utilise what you have or what you can get.

3) Try and stay away from offering incentives to the “top performers” by default. It’s important to try and make the offer something that is achievable by anyone – be it a brand new affiliate or someone that has been promoting you for years.

Last year I sent an affiliate to Barbados for a break – before the incentive he didn’t promote us and afterwards he went on become one of our biggest affiliates to date.

Understanding the market is your key to success

These are just some of our best practice tips to getting your affiliate program off to a good start. The key to the long term success of your program is to understand the market – if you don’t have the time to live and breathe affiliate marketing then employ an agency like eyefall who specialise in managing affiliate programs. Learn who your affiliates are – build direct communications and try and understand them; if you are able to do this then you will reap the rewards.

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