Affiliate Marketing

The strength and effectiveness of affiliate marketing is based on relationships. CastleWave has years of experience building strong relationships in this space.

Affiliate marketing is based on pay-per-click advertising. You only pay a partner when they have achieved a goal. Your goals could be established on Email signup, acquiring a full registration, a user download, or the sale of a product.

The risk with affiliate marketing is minimized - you only pay out when your stated goal has been achieved.

Given the ease of affiliate marketing why aren’t advertisers shifting their budget from Google AdWords and CPM buys to affiliate marketing? Good question!

Because a publisher has less control over making money with your offer versus a cost per click ad site or CPM ads on their site, they are very cautious about entering into and running affiliate offers.

Given this hesitancy CastleWave recommends finding publishers you have close relationships with. If you don’t have any – we do! We've been in the affiliate marketing industry for many years. We have the depth and breadth of relationships that allows us to find partners based on your vertical. For example, we test an upscale men's retailer with different affiliates than we test a sports fitness product.

After finding the right 3-5 partners to test your offer with, we refine and optimize your offer to maximize the revenue publishers garner from your offer. Once we have successfully tested, refined, and optimized your offer, we will know more about the type of affiliate tracking that will work best for your offer.

Full service networks might be a great fit for some companies. Another fit might be automated technologies dealing with affiliate marketing. It just depends on how much resource you want to focus on the affiliate channel – internally and with CastleWave.

Once your offer as been tested we transition the new affiliate marketing program from beta to full release. We typically use press releases and send Emails out to our network of affiliates to announce the public launch of a new affiliate program.

Unfortunately, once a program is launched there is still work to do! The creative must be changed out frequently. The frequency depends on the type of creative being used. For example if affiliates are driving a lot of sales through banners, to prevent 'banner fatigue' you will want to change your banner creative frequently. In addition, affiliates respond very strongly to exclusive and creative offers that help make your product stand out when compared to your competition. CastleWave can help you shine in this area.

Affiliate marketing is not an easy field to succeed in, but with the right tools it can be one of the most lucrative and risk free sales drivers.