Treatments for the Right Affiliate Marketing Process

Affiliate marketing offers operators of Internet sites the opportunity to present additional content on the website and to generate sales without initial investment and with very little effort. The risk for affiliates in a partner program is thus minimized to almost zero. Affiliate marketing is often the only way to cover the costs of operating the website, especially for smaller websites with a rather low number of visitors.

The aspect that the visitor is also moved away from the affiliate’s website, depending on the advertising material, can be seen as a disadvantage, provided that the desired action, such as the purchase of a product, is not on the merchant’s landing page and thus remuneration for the affiliate takes place. Another disadvantage is that users find intrusive advertisements annoying and could therefore shorten their stay on the website or, in the worst case, even avoid visiting them in the future. The affiliate must therefore observe how the advertising media used affect visitor behavior. Visit Fake EWF review warning if you want to know more about it.

Advantages and disadvantages for the visitor

By integrating topic-related advertising on the website of the website operator, the user has the opportunity to acquire interest-related products or services quickly and conveniently or to find out more about them. Communities in the form of forums, blogs or chats are often also available on the affiliate websites. The user can also talk to other users about products or services directly before or after the purchase and exchange experiences. However, if the website operator exaggerates the use of advertising material, this often turns out to be a nuisance for the visitor. This annoyance applies not only to a high number, but also to the type of advertising material, provided it is, for example, unnecessarily intrusive or overly animated.

In order for affiliate marketing to work, the publisher receives a code from the merchant or the corresponding affiliate network , which the affiliate embeds on his website. If this link is now clicked, the visitor is redirected to the merchant’s page and parameters are transferred that enable a publisher to allocate the generated sales. This assignment is called tracking and can be implemented using various approaches.

This is how affiliate marketing works

Session tracking

With session tracking, every visitor to a dealer website receives an automatically generated session ID, which is optionally transmitted via the URL (GET method) or via hidden form fields (POST method). The assigned session ID can also be assigned to the affiliate from whose website the referred customer comes.

If the customer now buys from the merchant or meets other commission requirements, the customer’s action can be specifically related to the publisher and he receives his remuneration.

Cookie tracking

Another tracking variant is tracking using cookies. A cookie is a small text file that is persistent / stored on the client side, which is stored on the visitor’s local computer when a website is visited and which contains information about the user or his behavior and personal settings relating to the website visited. In affiliate marketing, additional information about the publisher through whom the potential or referred customer came to is stored in the cookie. If the user visits the corresponding website again, he can be identified using the cookie and thus, for example, a later product purchase on the retailer side by the customer can be paid to the affiliate.

Since cookies are stored on the client side, they can of course also be deleted relatively easily by the client. So-called Flash cookies, which are browser-independent and have no expiration date, are intended to make deletion more difficult.

Tracking pixel

A tracking pixel is usually a 1×1 pixel image in GIF format that is embedded in the HTML code. A tracking pixel is required when an affiliate network is used. Whenever a remunerated action is taken, the tracking pixel is called up and transmits further tracking data, for example by a cookie, which is important for the assignment to the affiliate.

The small graphic is just an aid that made this type of tracking possible even before AJAX and, above all, works without the use of JavaScript.