RedTrack ad tracker is constantly monitoring affiliate marketing industry changes to provide necessary solutions on time. No matter how hard clickbait titles try to persuade you that affiliate marketing is dying, do not be fooled by it. Just look at this promising graph. Affiliate marketing spend will reach approximately $6.8 billion U.S. dollars by 2020. And it won’t stop.
The reason why people are worried about it is competition. But try to remember your boring economics classes where they said that that competition is an essential part of growth.
You’re probably asking right now if these numbers somehow affect you as an affiliate who just want solid conversion rate and high ROI?
They do. Quite a lot
They cause inevitable market changes. Some of them may not be so good, but we have solutions.
Change # 1: Fraud traffic is coming
Fraud traffic has always been an unpleasant component of affiliate marketing. The affiliate fraud volume is growing even faster than the affiliate marketing industry itself.
In 2018 the loss to advertising fraud was about $35 billion. In 2019 advertisers will have 21 percent more of this flying into the pipe.
Just take a look at the statistics :
- Advertisers will lose $42 billion of ad spend around the world in 2019 due to fraud across online, mobile and in-app channels
- 1 in 5 Ad Serving Websites are Visited Exclusively By Bots
- Over 40% of paid traffic sources are generated by bots, automated clicks, or some type of click fraud.
Until 2018, desktops were much more affected by fraud traffic, while now, this phenomenon has tightly settled in the mobile sector. Only mobile install fraud is going to exceed $13 billion till the end of 2019.
We have to face it: every time an affiliate takes a dollar out of his pocket, fraud squads immediately start to implement their schemes on picking it up.
If talk in details, fraudulent activity may include
- fake leads
- spamming emails from a referral link
- pop-ups and pop-unders opening behind the browsers
- cloning other affiliate site’s content to steal away traffic.
- auto-filling forms with software
and hundreds of others
Affiliate fraud is a well-known phenomenon. However, a lot of traffic providers are still not able to provide a proper long-term solution for filtering fraud activity. Sometimes you can’t filter it by IP on your traffic source side. And even if you can, there’s no 100% guarantee that it will help.
RedTrack ad tracker Solution: Fraud Report
Does any of you want to pay for fraud?
To save your money and help you earn more, we created a Fraud Report – an anti-fraud solution that effectively detects fraudulent clicks and provides you with extensive traffic analytics.
It’s a multi-functional solution that helps affiliates in a complex way:
1) Click checking
2) Advanced reporting
3) Anti-fraud protection
With it on board, you easily get a broad picture of the traffic you buy and can blacklist the sources where your money is draining. You can split your bad traffic data by campaigns, types of fraud, and sources. And all these will be packed in professional reports with 20+ metrics, where various slices and modes enable you not only to see the final picture of traffic but understand the fraud reasons and adjust your promotion strategy.
Request a Fraud Report Demo now
Change #2: market diversification and development
With industry growth and complication, there are more and more solutions introduced to affiliates and advertisers. With 81% of all international brands using affiliate marketing, there’s no surprise that most of these solutions are complex and sophisticated with enterprise-level prices in their proposals. They are implemented on a large-scale basis and sometimes may require the specialized tech attention or an additional employee.
A wide range of features and add-ons are good friends of big companies which have a decent marketing budget. But what about SMBs? The truth is that many of them have very limited financial resources and simply can’t afford the time and up-front costs required by these enterprise-level proposals. Moreover, in most cases, they don’t need even half of the features that are offered to them. Should they part with their limited budget and pay for some of the “high-brow” tracking and management solutions after a free trial period? Or should they continue to work in the old manner, performing all actions manually and losing their time, effort, and, as a result, more money? Sounds like someone is in trouble.
it is quite obvious now that the ad tech market is moving towards understanding the need for more diversified and customer-oriented products. As much of the audience remains untouched and unsatisfied.
RedTrack ad tracker Solution: Publisher Panel
From the very beginning, RedTrack ad tracker was focusing on small and medium affiliate teams and independent affiliates. It left its mark on our culture:
1) careful and attentive attitude to each customer
2) recognized customer care
3) extensive set of features developed specifically to satisfy SMBs needs
4) affordable price for starters and professionals
If compare with big companies, SMBs require a completely different approach and attitude. We always should keep our ears open to understand the newly formed needs and pains of our customers. It’s another way of communication and interaction, which is faster, more trusting, open, and relaxed.
SMBs risk is much more than enterprises. It’s just a rule of thumb. That’s why we feel a special responsibility for all our clients. We take their winning and losing to our account too. As our main goal is to help.
After a long time spent on the market need research, we released a new feature for small and medium-sized affiliate teams with a growth focus – Publisher Panel. We tried to implement all your wishes, guys.
The idea behind it is to expand tracker functionality and create a viable quality tracking and affiliate management solution with robust features and reasonable price. You can do media-buying and manage publishers in one place without workarounds. Publisher Panel relieves the headache of those who manage all analytics and publishers manually, in different tools, or have to pay more for enterprise-level solutions they can’t fully leverage.
Schedule a Publisher Panel demo now
Change #3: Browser-based user privacy
People’s trust in the advertising industry has significantly fallen after the Cambridge Analytics case. Many started to bad-mouth ad executives as much as politicians on the background of a dramatic shift in browser-based user privacy and third-party cookie.
Safari
Safari’s Intelligent Tracking Prevention has already made a lot of noise in the affiliate marketing world. The initial idea back in 2017 was to limit website owners’ ability to track its users across domains, aiming at the third-party cookies that ad tech vendors (including Google and Facebook) place on sites. But with the latest ITP 2.2 update, it transformed into a full newborn anti-tracking feature. Now ITP 2.2. deletes first-party cookies that mimic the functionality of the third-party cookie 24 hours after they were installed on a browser. And makes sure that the companies are not using the workarounds to side-step Safari’s feature and aggressively track people around the web.
Google Chrome
Safari story has brought a lot of attention to Google Chrome, as the most used browser in the world. All quieted in anticipation of its long-awaited release of new privacy tools. According to the company, it will soon make it easier for users to block, clear, and control their third-party cookies in a much more granular way than is currently possible through the browser. On top of that, they are promising to restrict fingerprinting across the web more aggressively.
We have solutions in place to help our clients continue to measure their advertising in accordance with Apple’s policies
Trust has become one of the top buying considerations. Building strong relationships with customers has become a #1 priority for both SMBs and corporations. On this basis today we see a huge number of services that help to achieve it. Among them are different CRMs, email marketing services, and link management tools like Rebrandly that helps users to understand that the link they are going to click is trustworthy.
Transparency, openness, and efficiency are the main trends of today’s digital world. With all obvious double-digit benefits, it makes some business models and tactics counterproductive. So, how to stay whitehat affiliate and not lose money?
RedTrack ad tracker Solution: Postback URL Tracking
Post URL Tracking (aka S2S Postback URL) is a server pixel tracking that is fully independent of the user’s browser and relies exclusively on the advertiser’s servers. It tracks sessions generated on clicks to attribute conversions and passes the transaction ID to RedTrack.
It’s not only the Safari reason that makes S2S Postbacks attractive for affiliates. It has several undeniable advantages over Tracking Pixels:
- It’s a more accurate method for tracking conversions. As it’s server-side, there is less randomness in results
- Users can’t affect the tracking process by deleting their cookies In any browser
- It less prone to fraud and has a wide range of to mitigate fraud
- are various options to prevent postback fraud.
RedTrack enables tracking of 2 conversion events: conversions and transactions.
We tried to make the implementation process as easy as possible. You can find your S2S and pixel templates in your RedTrack account. Just choose “Conversion tracking” in your “Tools” bar. If you want to track your conversions automatically, with Affiliate Networks firing your conversions on their sides, you will need to setup Postback URL.
Change #4: SaaS products rise
More and more businesses prefer SaaS solutions to self-hosted ones.
Choosing a SaaS ad tracker over a self-hosted one, you choose a software and service rent on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.
With this they get
- Lower price
- Less technical requirements
- Quick and effective technical support (including updates and bug fixes)
- Specialized data center services
- Automated backups
- Easy exit option
- IT infrastructure and services outsourced.
- Accessibility over internet
RedTrack ad tracker Solution: cloud-hosted ad-tracker with an extensive set of features and clean interface
When it comes to making an ad tracker choice, it’s better to think from a long-term perspective – which solution will be the most accessible, secure, and valuable one. Based on these points we created RedTrack – a cloud-hosted ad tracking software to manage and analyze ad campaigns.
RedTrack lets you focus exclusively on your business. You don’t have to worry about keeping your technology running, managing your own databases, or being afraid of overcharging. You don’t need to hassle with servers or geo balancing. Everything is handled by RedTrack. Thanks to our business model, we are able to provide impeccable support to our clients and quickly implement necessary changes in their accounts at their request. It also makes it possible to involve your whole team in the process of tracking to have better control over ad campaign performance. You can define the access level for each team member (view, edit, export) or the affiliate as well as limit access to financial data or a particular Network or Source.
We are constantly improving our product and adding new features. Only in the last 3 months, we released 2 big long-awaited solutions to our clients: Fraud Report and Publisher Panel. And you could have immediately seen them in your workspace and started using them in the next second after release. With no additional downloads, updates, software, or add-ons.
Change # 5: Process automation
Effective affiliate marketing is driven by data. We sometimes hear that clicks and costs are the only useful metrics in affiliate marketing that you need to make good decisions. In fact, they don’t give you the whole picture, and apart from the rest important ones, most often lead to erroneous conclusions.
The ultimate goal of any affiliate is to get a high ROI, not to pump over conversion rate. Investing100$ should bring you the amount increased several times. This is what business is about, right? Then you should be ready to do much more ad tracking tasks.
You see how people delegate all their routine and data-related tasks to machines. Affiliates, in their turn, rely on ad trackers. If you track and manage your ads using a bunch of simple workarounds, or by hand, don’t be surprised by mistakes: mathematical, tactical, and strategic ones.
RedTrack ad tracker Solution : 3 in 1 product
RedTrack ad tracker was designed specifically to ease the affiliates’ lives. It collects a large amount of data, analyzes it, and represents it without any delays. RedTrack takes care of all tracking, analyzing, and management routine and repetitive activities leaving you only strategic and creative tasks. That helps to
- increase accuracy
- maintain consistency
- increase effectiveness
Read more about automation solutions in RedTrack guide here
No matter if you have prior tracking experience or not — RedTrack is equally friendly for newbies and advanced users. It meets their needs and requirements at every stage of growth — starting from a solar affiliate with no prior experience to a professional affiliate or media buying team, and ending with the agency needs’ coverage.
RedTrack supports 90+ templates for major Advertising and Affiliate Networks that help to set an ad campaign in minutes. Granular reporting with 30+ data points for traffic monitoring and analysis, including source, network, offers, landers, geo (country, region, city), OS type and version, browser type and version, connection type, date and day parting, IP, ISP, referrer and referrer domain, proxy type, user agent, language, among others. So you can always keep abreast.
Conclusion
Everything changes. And affiliate marketing landscape too. Do you know any other affiliate marketing industry trends that we didn’t mention? Please, drop us an email or share your ideas in our Telegram Community!
