Affiliate marketing (also known as joint marketing) is a pay-per-performance online advertising method. The parties involved in affiliate marketing include advertisers, affiliate members and affiliate marketing platforms. Advertisers pay reasonable advertising fees to affiliate members according to the actual results of online advertising (such as sales, number of leads, etc.), saving marketing expenses and improving marketing quality. Through the online affiliate marketing management platform, affiliate members can select suitable advertisers and increase their revenue by playing advertisers’ ads, while saving a lot of online advertising sales costs and easily turning website visits into revenue. The online affiliate marketing platform provides affiliate members with advertisers’ product sales, member registration and other performance advertising, as well as trustworthy third-party user access tracking, real-time reporting system, commission settlement, marketing and other services. In addition, it also includes a wide range of value-added services such as online marketing consulting, planning, creativity, advertising, and effect monitoring.
Based on the payment method of the merchant website to the affiliate members, affiliate network marketing can be divided into three forms.
(1) Pay per click (Cost-Per-Click, CPC). The affiliate network marketing management system records the number of times each customer clicks on the text or image link (or email link) of the merchant website on the affiliate website, and the merchant pays the advertising fee based on the amount of money per click.
(2) Pay per lead (CPL; sometimes called CPA, Cost-Per-Acquisition). After a visitor enters the merchant website through the affiliate link, if he fills out and submits a form, the management system will generate a lead record corresponding to the affiliate, and the merchant pays the affiliate based on the number of lead records.
(3) Pay per sale (Cost-Per-Sale, CPS). The merchant only pays the affiliate after the customer introduced by the affiliate link makes an actual purchase on the merchant website (mostly online payment), and generally sets a commission rate (ranging from 3% to 50% of sales).
The above three methods are all pay-for-performance marketing methods, which are relatively easy to accept for both merchants and affiliates. As the website’s automation process becomes more and more perfect and the online payment system becomes more and more mature, more and more affiliate network marketing systems adopt the method of paying by sales. Since this method is a zero-risk advertising distribution method for merchants, merchants are also willing to set a relatively high commission rate, which makes this type of marketing system more and more adopted.
Affiliate marketing was first created by Amazon, which launched a “joint” action in July 1996. Its basic form is: a website registers as an Amazon member, and then places Amazon’s advertising link logo on its own website. When other visitors visit this website, they click on these logos and enter the Amazon website to buy certain products. Then Amazon will pay a certain percentage of commission to this website. Now, many Internet companies use this marketing method, such as Google, Baidu, Amazon, and traffic, to create great benefits. In the field of foreign trade, the alliance plan is more suitable for B2C self-built websites (for example, “Lantingjieshi” uses the alliance plan for promotion and pays its alliance members 8%~15% sales commission). Some foreign trade companies also use third-party alliance platforms to promote their own information display websites.