An explanation of each type of creative and how affiliates use them
An integral part of setting up an affiliate marketing program is to provide a catalogue of creatives for your affiliates. Creatives are important because they are the advertising materials used by your affiliates to promote your brand, products and services.
Different affiliates will prefer to use different types of creatives, and many will use several at once. Hence, it is imperative for advertisers to continue updating creatives within the dashboard and provide affiliates with a variety of creative inventory to meet the affiliate’s needs.
Below is a list of the different types of creatives advertisers can provide in the Commission Factory platform, and how affiliates will use them:
Banners
Banners are electronic/graphic display images that are available for affiliates to integrate on to their website. Affiliates integrate those banners onto their own website to promote your products and services. Whenever a user clicks on these banners, they get directed to your website. Banners are a great form of visual promotion, so it’s important to ensure that all banners are consistent and up to date with your current branding and logo.
It’s also important to remove or expire any banners that are currently still available to affiliates for any promotions or campaigns that are no longer being run or honoured, as this could harm your affiliate program.
Coupons
Coupons are discounts provided to customers by advertisers in the form of a code that reduces the price of a product or order by a certain amount. Coupons are used by affiliates to share with their readers or database as they offer unique discounts or incentives for customers to complete their purchase. Also known as Vouchers, and Discount Codes, Coupons will have a code attached to the offer. For example: Save 10% OFF sitewide using code 10OFF.
Coupons can be relatively generic and apply to all affiliates, or they can be created exclusively for individual affiliates.
Reminder: you pay commission on the discounted price (after the discount has been applied).
Promotions
Promotions are similar to a coupon code or offer, however, they do not rely on a specific coupon code being entered at checkout to redeem the offer. Affiliates can be a very powerful channel to circulate advertiser promotions and to increase awareness of promotions.
Once a promotion has been added by an advertiser to the dashboard, affiliates can easily access these individual promotion links. These links are text-only hyperlinks that connect directly to your website (or specific pages of it). These links are embedded by affiliates to content on their own website.
Data Feeds
A product feed or data feed is a file made up of a list of products and attributes of those products organized so that each product can be displayed, advertised or compared in a unique way. A product feed typically contains a product image, title, product identifier, marketing copy, and product attributes.
Affiliates primarily use product feeds to populate their website, app or campaign. They are an easier method to access your product data rather than visiting every product of your site for the information, which would take time and be tedious. Data feeds are mainly used by shopping comparison affiliates.
Widgets
Widgets are web-based ad types that can be embedded into an affiliate’s website to promote an advertiser. These widgets can be used by affiliates for a search form, product listing, active scroller, competitions, surveys or animated banners that are hosted by the Advertisers site. Widgets are a dynamic, interactive and effective option for creative as it allows the affiliate to engage with potential customers in an innovative way. An example would be a travel booking form where consumers can search for travel dates and destinations directly from the widget on an affiliate's website.
Videos
Promoting with videos can be a great way for affiliates to engage with their audience and refer traffic back to your website or online store for purchasing. Videos are embedded into the affiliate’s website or blog simply by copying and pasting the HTML code into the intended area. Videos can consist of product or service presentations, educational videos, video courses and tutorials.
Library
The library section is meant for plain images or supporting images such as logos or specific product images for content pieces. The difference between images in the library section and the banner section is the call to action. Whilst banners always have a CTA (e.g. Buy Now), images in the library don't have any CTAs on them. This is also a great section to upload your brand logo.