Affiliate Software | Blog

November 9, 2015
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Ding and Share Results Partner and Launch Affiliate Program

We’re Excited to Welcome Ding to the Share Results Family

By | Affiliate Tracking Software, Digital Marketing, Key Features | No Comments

Share Results Has Partnered with Ding

Ladies and gentlemen, get excited – we’re happy to announce our recent partnership with Ding, the world’s largest international top-up provider. Many of you might be wondering… what exactly is top-up? Well, the majority of us in Canada and the United States have cell phone contracts that we pay each month. It’s standard practice for obtaining a mobile device in much of North America, but around the world, it’s a much different story.

Think about your phone like a parking meter; for those of us with contracts, we pay the meter on a monthly basis and that’s it. For people who use top-ups, they put credit into the meter (i.e. their phones) which grants them the ability to make calls, browse the Internet, send texts or Tweet as much they please until the credit (i.e. top-up) runs out. This is where Ding comes in, as their service enables people to send top-ups around the world in just 3 seconds.

Care for another example? No sweat. Imagine that you are originally from China, but have journeyed across the world all the way to Canada in order to find work and support your family back home. Using Ding’s service, keeping in touch with your loved ones is a relatively simple task that’s not bound by distance – all you would need to do is transfer a top-up to their mobile phone.

Company History

Ding was founded in 2006 by Mark Roden, a man on a simple mission – to make the process of connecting with loved ones as quick and effortless as possible.  The inspiration for the company stems from a trip Mark took to Dubai, where he met a waiter who described how difficult it was to send credit to his wife’s phone back home in India. Mark wanted to change this, to make it easier for people to communicate with their families, and as a result, Ding was born.

Mark successfully developed the business which has grown to a network of 350 mobile operators and over 500,000 retailers scattered across the world – it’s an amazing feat by any means.

Looking Ahead

Here at Share Results, we are tremendously proud to lend our top-notch proprietary software to help Ding acquire more customers via the affiliate channel. Using our turnkey software, Ding will be able to reach an entirely new customer base, helping them to achieve continued growth in their industry.

We wouldn’t be so excited if we didn’t believe in Ding’s cause, and we hope you will get excited about it too!

Interested in becoming an official publisher for Ding? Sign up here.

October 30, 2014
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Halloween 2014 – The Spooky Side of Affiliate Marketing (Part 2)

By | Affiliate Program, Affiliate Tracking Software, Digital Marketing, Online Marketing Ideas | No Comments

The Spooky Side of Halloween!

Trick-Or-Treat! – Protect Yourself From Pranksters!

We’re back at it again on Devil’s Day to discuss pranksters. For those of you who didn’t know, Devil’s Day is what the day before Halloween is called, and the day for ghoulish Halloween pranks! So Affiliates and Merchants alike need to be on the lookout!

Affiliates

Beware of any too good to be true affiliate programs. Choosing the wrong program can have some ghoulish side effects, including:

  • A bad reputation. You could risk scaring away your hard earned traffic and you may compromise your own reputation as a quality affiliate.
  • Lost commissions. After sending sales to a merchant you may find that your commissions are scarcer than candy after midnight on Halloween. This is perhaps the biggest risk for an affiliate. You’ll have wasted your precious resources for a payout that will never come.

To protect yourself, work with reputable networks and do your research. Before promoting any merchants check that their checkout process and shopping cart are secure. Affiliating with solid merchants means that you won’t have to deal with angry customer fallout making you look like the boogeyman.

Merchants

It’s not only on the thirty-first of October that you have to worry about little masquerading devils… all year round you need to be on watch for potential partners marketing themselves as affiliate genies when in reality they’re affiliate fraudsters. As a merchant, you need to be on the lookout for:

  • Cookie stuffing - Affiliates taking credit for others affiliate’s referrals
  • Inflating - Affiliates who artificially inflate the number of clicks in a CPC program
  • Spamming – Affiliates who send out misleading emails
  • Squatting – Affiliates who take advantage of typos
  • Cloning – Affiliates who clone legitimate sites

Don’t be a Zombie! Protect yourself!

Monitor and engage with your affiliates closely, enforce your terms and conditions and work with affiliate software that has in-built affiliate fraud detection features. When starting an affiliate program, choose your partners wisely. You can read more on recruiting new affiliate partners here. Keeping up to date with the pulse of your program is the surest way to keep the Grim Reaper out.

If you have any questions about the hair-raising details above, contact us at info@shareresults.com. Here’s to hoping your Halloween is a real scream!

April 26, 2012
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Tutorial: How Affiliates Can Use Custom Tracking in Share Results

By | Affiliate Tracking Software, Key Features | No Comments

Do you follow the affiliate marketing blog of Sugarrae? A little while ago she published an excellent blog post titled How to Add SID Tracking to the “Big Network” Affiliate Links. Well, we wanted to take this opportunity to show you how Share Results’ own custom or sub-ID tracking works. Over the years, affiliates in our network have had specific tracking needs to help them identify key trends and information from the traffic and transactions they generate. We’ve decided to show you how the affiliate tracking link feature functions in our affiliate network.

Firstly, Sugarrae is correct about many networks having different names for their own custom or sub-ID tracking feature. In the Share Results affiliate network, we happen to call ours the Affiliate Custom ID or ACID. Also, affiliates that use custom or sub-ID tracking for their links will have a clearer understanding about which of their marketing tools are converting the best. Having this type of real-time data can give affiliates the necessary information to optimize their campaigns and attain better results.

When you log into your affiliate account in the Share Results affiliate network, you can begin a creative search to look for the type of affiliate tracking link you want to use to promote your preferred merchant. You’ll notice that each affiliate link allows for custom characters to be added to the end of your affiliate tracking link URLs. This is what is known as the ACID feature.

How To Set Up Sub-ID Custom Tracking for Affiliate Links

Click Image for Larger View

To use this feature, you simply add your preferred characters in the ACID field. Your ACID can consist of up to 50 alphanumeric characters. For example, imagine that you want to promote an education lead gen offer for one of your more successful websites or inner landing pages. Perhaps you have decided that you want to promote degrees from a specific U.S. state for your campaign, such as California. You would enter californiadegrees in the ACID field. Your affiliate tracking link would then appear as the following example:

http://shareresults.com/t/url.php/cid/010101/sid/010/acid/californiadegrees

Should your affiliate tracking link with the ACID characters be used to trigger a transaction, then you will see those same alphanumeric details when you generate a transaction report.

As mentioned earlier in this post, custom affiliate tracking links are a major benefit to affiliates. Therefore, we strongly encourage you to use this feature as a standard method for setting up campaigns. In doing so, you are already steps ahead of other affiliates in terms of mining better data. Moreover, when this information appears in your reports, you are working with more compelling real-time statistics, which is essential for optimizing your future campaigns. What better way to quickly identify your most effective links than to include unique sub-ID tracking to your affiliate links.

We hope this helps you understand a bit more about how Share Results’ own custom affiliate tracking feature works and the benefit it offers you when wanting more real-time data. If you have any questions, email us at affiliates@shareresults.com, or feel free to leave us your comments below.

April 4, 2012
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3 Tracking Software Considerations For Fashion Retail Brands

By | Affiliate Tracking Software, Online Marketing Ideas | No Comments

Yesterday, we explained a bit about how fashion retailers can use affiliate tracking software to manage primary and secondary retail brands. If you missed it, click here to view the post.

When it comes to adopting an affiliate marketing channel for a fashion e-commerce business, there are several thing to consider, especially when starting your own affiliate network. Here are three issues we think are important if you’re thinking about launching a fashion retail affiliate network for your various online businesses.

Consideration #1: Budget And Launch Date Of Network

Always set up your custom affiliate network of affiliate programs for your primary and secondary brands before peak seasons. Also, think of how much you’re willing to spend on your own software platform. If you concentrate on integrating your custom network during a busy period, it may not be the best use of time, as this is when time ought to be spent on stimulating sales. Integrating into a third-party CPA or affiliate network can happen in as little as a week provided both the network software provider and merchant make the necessary time to do things like import marketing creative and test tracking. Integrating multiple products to create your own affiliate network will require a more time and technical support depending on how many brands you have. All this needs to be considered before creating a budget, as investing time and money into a platform can end up being costly if services and software capability are not factored in.

Consideration #2: Long-Term Success And Your Affiliate Manager

Having an affiliate manager is one of the few key components of a stable and successful affiliate program. It’s a given that affiliate managers should screen all affiliates applying for your programs, but awesome affiliate managers are a pro at leveraging affiliate relationships to cross promote your multiple offers in your fashion retail affiliate network, and help stimulate sales. With the right training, an affiliate manager can navigate through your chosen affiliate tracking software, but they are also creative enough to think of new features and functions that might help make the affiliate tracking software superior. A great software provider will be open to this type of consistent development for a much more enhanced and customizable product.

Consideration #3: Flexibility Of The Affiliate Tracking Software

Some fashion retailers pay their affiliates tiered commissions based on the purchase volume generated. Others prefer to pay their affiliates a flat rate commission. And others may want to have a multitude of marketing tools that can be categorized and made accessible to only an exclusive group of partners. A great affiliate tracking software will be allow for this type of flexibility and be capable of supplying all these needs. Furthermore, it’s important to have a platform that can support a variety of administrative levels. Some affiliate tracking software providers only allow one type of login level for management and navigation of a network. It’s imperative to inquire about the ability to view the affiliate tracking software platform from an administrative level, but some merchants want to know how the software appears from the point of view of the affiliate.

Are you a fashion merchant, or any retailer for that matter, that has affiliate tracking software inquiries that you would like to share? Leave us your ideas in the comments section below. Also, check out our LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook Timeline pages.

April 3, 2012
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How Fashion Retailers Can Use Affiliate Tracking Software

By | Affiliate Tracking Software | One Comment

Affiliate Tracking Software for Fashion Brands (Image Credit: FreeDigitalPhotos)Affiliate tracking software as we know it has evolved considerably since the dawn of affiliate marketing. Once developed, owned, and operated solely by CPA and affiliate network providers, affiliate tracking software can now be customized for white labeling or reselling, whichever term you prefer.

Often times we receive inquiries from retail merchants who want to know how affiliate tracking software can be of benefit to them. This is especially relevant for apparel and clothing retailers with multiple products. Some benefits, depending on your provider, are relatively straightforward:

* You can create your own affiliate network to host and manage multiple affiliate programs for your products all on one software platform.
* You can control and customize your affiliate tracking software to look just like your primary brand.
* You can have more control over affiliate relationships, including level of commission and frequency of payment.

As they grow more commercially successful, many fashion retailers start having more than just a primary brand. Sometimes it’s a matter of having a primary clothing line, and two secondary brands of shoes or accessories. Or, it could be that a retailer has three different designer clothing brands all targeting completely different audiences. This is where affiliate tracking software can work in a fashion retailer’s favour – they can integrate completely different products into one affiliate network with the support of affiliate tracking software.

The beauty about affiliate tracking software is that provided it’s coming from a good supplier, the product can always be customized and upgraded with different features and functionality that will make your apparel or accessories offers more accessible to affiliates requiring highly dynamic marketing tools in order to promote. Additionally, regardless of who the affiliate manager may be, all it takes is one login to oversee all the affiliate programs for multiple brands.

Another big plus of affiliate marketing software is the ability for a fashion retailer to have much more control over the operational aspects of an affiliate network. Having an in-house affiliate manager to oversee two or more affiliate programs integrated into a fashion affiliate network is, in the end, much more feasible when it comes to time and management. Unlike in a traditional affiliate program operated through a major network, being the owner of your own network allows easy access and management of affiliate relationships and the incentives offered to partners to encourage them to promote your multiple brands.

So, let’s say that you want to use affiliate tracking software to manage your multiple products on one software platform. What do you do in this situation? Stay tuned tomorrow when we give you three considerations for launching a fashion affiliate network for multiple brands.