Website owners (publishers) revenue streams:
- Advertising – Google Adsense, Bing Ads
- Affiliations – Commission, Pay-Per-Click
- Products/Services – Marketing retail
Affiliation marketing is an excellent revenue source for publishers*.
*Publisher*
A publisher is a website owner with a sizable audience of visitors.
What Is Affiliation?
An affiliation program is when a publisher promotes a product or service on its website and generates a commission when a sale is made. Some affiliations pay per lead/click but generally affiliation programs are percentage based schemes.
The affiliate embeds html code into a web page that shows the advertising and tracked. When a sale is made, the affiliate is rewarded with an agreed percentage.
Affiliation ‘networks’ manage multiple advertisers’ (merchants/brands) in a trusted environment. The network acts as the connection between the advertiser and the affiliate. It saves affiliates having to manage individual advertisers’ accounts, chase payment or deal with different code and reporting systems.
Affiliation Networks Review
The reviews below are from an Australian perspective, including international platforms and advertisers.
Disclosure: Links may include a tracking code that generate a small return (known as revenue sharing).
impact
impact is one of the best international networks with a huge range of recognised brand name advertisers’ coupled with an excellent management interface.
impact: Automate every type of partnership and scale to all new levels. Partnership automation lets you expand your program and scale every type of partnership, including affiliates, influencers, strategic business partners, mobile apps, publishers, and more.
Grow your business rapidly with the Partnership Cloud
Commissionfactory
In our view, Commissionfactory (AWIN) is the best affiliate group operating in Australia with a slick professional platform.
Hundreds of top Australian advertisers with multiple campaigns across all industries.
Excellent code generation, feeds, reporting, regular monthly payments and publisher support.
Join 500+ brands utilising the power of affiliate marketing
Commissionfactory was created by affiliates for affiliates. This inside expertise lead to the creation of an industry leading platform. The network was built from the ground up with ease-of-use, simplicity and great form and function as its core. The goal has always been about building successful relationships between Affiliates, Advertisers’ and Agencies through transparency, quality and delivering a high level of service.
Awin: Affiliate Window
Part of the Axel Springer and United Internet Groups (Germany), Awin is a global affiliate network.
The Awin group has 15 offices worldwide, 1,100 employees, 225,000 contributing publishers and 16,500 advertisers around the globe.
Awin is considered reputable and trustworthy, with good reviews.
Awin global affiliate marketing network empowers advertisers and publishers of all sizes to grow their businesses online.
ebay Partner Network
Once upon a time, eBay was a fabulous program generating big $$$. But, after doing all the heavy lifting making ebay a household name, they ‘adjusted’ the commission structure that saw our hardwork go from over AU$2K a month to a couple of $hundred a month.
Revenue can still be generated with hard work, targeted campaigns by driving high quality traffic to eBay.
The admin is a bit clunky and slow. eBay can be uncommunicative with new publishers’, so be patient.
ebay Partner Network: Earn money by driving traffic and prompting sales across one of the world’s largest and most diverse marketplaces.
Google Adsense
Thank you, thank you, thank you!
Google’s Adsense program changed our entire business model. We went from a small design consultancy to a publishing network thanks to Adsense.
It’s not a typical affiliation, but PPC (Pay Per Click) and CPM (Cost-Per-Thousand Impressions) advertising.
Simple code generation and Google does the rest by displaying ads based on the page content.
Excellent tracking, reporting and regular monthly payments.
This is not a referral program but a recommendation from a 20+ year partner.
clixGalore
clixGalore have been around a long time. Not the sexiest interface but good advertisers’.
A wide variety of merchants with deep-linking mean you can directly target individual products.
clixGalore: Affiliates, turn your valuable website traffic into money now by joining Affiliate programs and driving customers to the many thousands of Merchants using the clixGalore Affiliate Marketing network to advertise their business.
Start earning commission now for the sales you generate for our Merchants.
CommissionJunction
One of the oldest affiliate networks, US based CommissionJunction is very well known. Once a leader in the pack, it has endured ups and downs and is now largely aimed at US markets.
A huge unwieldy admin interface that is slow and buggy. CJ never really worked for us (US advertisers) but if you’re in the US.. why not.
More Affiliate Networks & Advertisers’ (Merchants)
These platforms work for us:
- affiliate-program.amazon.com: Amazon – growing (fast) in Australia.
- avantlink.com: AvantLink – marketing, multi-channel analytics, referral tracking & technology platform.
- aweber.com: AWeber – Mailing List management – *Highly recommended*
- thebigredgroup.com.au: Big Red Group – RedBallloon, ExperienceOz and TicketMates – Experiences, Tickets & Tours
- Booking.com – hotel reservation network (in our opinion, the best of them!)
- fishpond.com.au: Fishpond – Australian & NZ book sales with deep linking.
- getyourguide.com – Aimed at travel writers but works well for publishers.
- slice.digital: Slice Digital – Fast-growing platform with some very good advertisers’ (New Zealand)
- tiqets.com: Tiquets – affiliate portal with 1000’s of brand name links and widgets.
- viator.com: Viator – Highly recommended affiliate products, experiences (travel & tours).
Advertiser Scrutiny
Every network and advertiser (brand/merchant) needs to be scrutinized. Is it a good fit for your website? Visit the advertisers’ website, take a look around, and verify claims (TrustPilot), delivery and T&C. Remember, you are referring the advertiser to your readers’/customers. Newer, inexperienced advertisers launch programs that may not last, meaning the affiliates’ work and time has been in vain. Do not rely on the network = due diligence!
There is a never-ending list of advertisers offering programs. Before applying, ask yourself: do the products and services relate to your readers. A blog about food, is not going to connect with Car Tyres besides it not being a good look. If your visitors are in Australia, then US and UK based affiliations are unlikely to work. On the flip side, advertisers’ will reject publishers they don’t believe are a good fit.
Monitor sales for approval and subsequently payment. We’ve seen sales rejected/voided with no explanation. Frustrating at best, it can happen but, it should be a low percentage. Advertisers’ that generate lots of click-throughs but not sales are suspicious at best. Beware of advertisers that urge customers to call (telephone) as sales may not recorded as affiliate sales (no commission).
There is little point aligning with an international advertiser if your traffic is from another country. The referrals and traffic won’t realize any sales.
Many years ago, a very successful campaign in the UK which generated thousands of pounds in sales, never realised one penny of the £4,249.25 commission owed.
Beware: Rakuten Advertising
Rakuten boasts a 150k-member global publishing network, yet has little interest in affiliates outside the US. Support for publishers is non-existent and frankly, baffling! Give these time-wasters a big miss. see TrustPilot
Beware: New Networks
In 2023, we saw an influx of new “affiliate networks” that say they work in tandem with Google! They never do! One alarming request from these networks is “Google access” (are you serious?), another request is DNS changes to facilitate live bidding. Not only are these dangerous, they are aimed at US advertisers.
*Strange: Linkby
June 2023, after several emails asking us for data, links, etc we received this… Unfortunately, your publisher application has been rejected for the following reason(s): Not a publisher.
*Shhh.. we better not tell our partners!
Coming Soon
- Cookie Deprecation – the tracking method for most affiliations is cookies. All search engines are deprecating cookies. Without cookies, publishers won’t generate sales.. learn more