Introduction to Affiliate Marketing or Performance Marketing

Introduction to Affiliate Marketing: What Is It?

Affiliate marketing Software is a performance-based promotional activity to gain maximum exposure or leads. It is a marketing type that rewards affiliates or publishers for driving visitors or customer to the merchant’s website. The five main players associated with each other for performing a pre-defined and confirmed action are the merchant or advertiser, the network, the publisher or affiliate, the marketing agency, and the customer.

In a typical scenario, the publisher promotes a merchant’s offer on its affiliate website in the form of a banner, static link, discount code, or product feed. A potential customer clicks on an affiliate website and then the affiliate redirects the customer to the retailer’s website to make the purchase and the affiliate receives a commission for the conducted sale.

Affiliates:

Affiliates or publishers are individuals, companies, or groups of people with an affiliate website. They drive traffic to their website and then send customers to the merchant’s website.

Merchants:

The merchant or advertiser with an online store is the entity that is selling the product or service.

Network:

An affiliate network is a technology provider, which works as a central communication hub between the publisher and the merchant. A network provides tracking, invoicing, affiliate recruitment, reporting, and technical services.