When it comes to affiliate marketing, the discussions tend to end at the funnel, with focus on landing page optimization, A/B testing, and the various ways to improve conversion rates. While these are definitely important, they are really just scratching the surface of a much larger operational system. In modern traffic ops, the real complexities come into play at the moment the user clicks on the ad.
When it comes to working on a large scale in affiliate marketing, it’s unusual to find a single traffic source or a single buyer. Most of the time, it’s a set of them working in parallel across multiple traffic sources, partner networks, and lead buyers. Every single lead or click coming into the system needs to be analyzed, qualified, and conditioned on a set of policies based on geography, device, type, and quality of traffic, buyer availability, and payout. And these sets of decisions are made in real time.
This explains the shift in thinking that teams in the verticals of finance, nutra, and gambling are starting to operate on the traffic instead of the funnel. Once the traffic starts and begins to flow, teams need to make decisions on where that traffic goes, across which buyers, where to filter fraud, and how to optimize payouts across partnerships.
The traditional funnel analytics tools let you see how and where users are coming from and where they are converting, but they don’t let you manage the most operational end of the traffic and how it gets dispersed. That’s where the specialized, post-click optimization tools come in. They handle the operational end of the traffic and how it gets dispersed. They become the post-click traffic management and decision systems, determining how and where leads, clicks, and traffic flow throughout the affiliate system.
What occurs post-click in affiliate marketing
There’s a chain reaction that occurs for the advertiser after a user clicks on an advertisement. Affiliate marketing begins the moment a user clicks an ad. This click will ultimately determine where the user goes after the initial click and how the advertiser/affiliate makes money.
Simple ad funnel/video funnel setups usually go something like this: ad → landing page → offer. However, actual affiliate marketing funnels are much more complex. Depending on the ads or landing page, the traffic could be routed to other buyers, filtered for fraud, or resold based on availability and performance.
As a lead enters a post-click funnel, routing decides where the lead goes. The system evaluates a myriad of conditions like location, device type, audience quality, and the existing lead capacity of a buyer. The system is structured in a way that if the primary buyer closes the lead or hits a lead cap, the lead is automatically routed to a secondary buyer.
Striking the right balance between buyers is also a tricky operational challenge. For the same ad quality, affiliate teams often collaborate with multiple buyers, each offering different payout rates. The optimal traffic strategy must balance and direct traffic to help the buyers win while equally facilitating the sellers. Therefore, Inferential Analysis (IA) will determine how fraudulent leads affect the system’s overall profitability. This system will automatically determine when and where to send leads to maximize overall profits.
Complicated systems like conversion validation and delayed postbacks paint an even more complicated picture. In some verticals, conversions are not confirmed instantaneously. Because of this, systems need to do traffic data reconciliation across multiple partners and validate revenue outcomes for some time.
Google Analytics and traditional funnel builders have always been limited to operational complexity. They observe user behavior on your site, not the control, routing, filtering, and traffic distribution across multiple external partners. As affiliate operations expand, systems to handle these processes become not only helpful but essential.
What a post-click traffic optimization platform should do
These systems optimize operations and thus are the core of a large proportion of affiliate marketing systems. Rather than emphasizing post-click design or funnel conversion rates, these systems prioritize traffic management once the user enters the ecosystem.
These systems are built to handle the routing and evaluation of traffic in an automated system to enable teams to control complex campaign structures without the need for manual interventions.
- Traffic routing automation
- Fraud detection and filtering
- Real-time performance analytics and monitoring
- Buyer lead distribution logic across multiple
- Affiliate network and traffic partner integrations
With the conditions of geography, campaign, traffic quality, and availability of buyers, traffic routing automation ensures that each incoming click or lead is sent to an appropriate location.
Fraud detection systems will protect your revenue by stopping suspicious traffic patterns before they reach your downstream partners. This way, teams ward off penalties from buyers and preserve their long-term relationships by filtering traffic early on.
With real-time traffic analytics, operational visibility improves. Instead of waiting for daily/ weekly reports, teams can see how traffic is flowing and distributed, how buyers are performing, and where revenue is coming from in the system.
Lead distribution logic allows teams to manage multiple buyers at the same time. Instead of working on a single partner basis, traffic is able to be dynamically dispersed to multiple buyers depending on payout thresholds and capacity.
Lastly, integrations let these systems interface with owned or operated affiliate networks, traffic sources, and CRM systems. This way, the complete traffic pipeline becomes a coordinated system, instead of just a collection of tools.
5 tools to track & optimize traffic after the click
Hyperone
Hyperone is a traffic automation and post-click traffic management system that helps teams manage complicated affiliate traffic systems. Instead of just tracking campaigns, this platform offers automated traffic routing, operational clarity, and control over traffic at the infrastructure level.
Hyperone describes its functionality as a system for managing activities post-click. It functions as a traffic management system that features traffic routing logic, analytics, and anti-fraud tools, all in one place, and allows teams to automate most of their traffic-related decision-making.
What Problems It Solves
Problems with operational complexity when managing traffic across multiple sources and buyers are one of the most upstream problems affiliate teams face. Manual routing decisions can cause delays, uneven distribution, and missed revenue opportunities. The solution to this problem is the automated traffic routing logic offered by Hyperone.
The UAD scenario routing feature allows Hyperone to divide and distribute traffic based on defined operational rules. These rules govern buyer traffic distribution, fallback routing for buyers who do not accept leads, and traffic redistribution based on changing performance conditions.
Core Features
Hyperone is equipped with active traffic routing, integrated anti-fraud measures, and real-time analytics to optimize traffic performance. However, operational simplicity takes precedence.
The platform provides multi-company account support, meaning multiple partners, brands, and managed accounts can operate within a single system.
Hyperone provides transparent pricing, is monitored continuously, and is supported by tech teams that work around the clock.
Hyperone is especially advantageous for companies handling significant traffic volumes across various buyers. The lead generation and affiliate marketing firms benefit from the platform’s capacity to route decisions automatically and distribute traffic fairly across partners.
Also useful is the platform, for instance, when various brands or multiple accounts need to be managed concurrently. Support for multiple company accounts enables teams to create different operational spaces while retaining control of the infrastructure from a central point.
Limitations or Considerations
Given that the main focus of Hyperone is on traffic routing and automation, teams looking for rudimentary campaign tracking may find the platform features more than they need. Smaller operational units that have only a handful of active campaigns may not need that degree of routing sophistication.
Potential users of the platform should consider the extent to which they rely on automated traffic distribution and lead routing. The more complexity, the more operational value there is to the platform.
Voluum
Overview
Voluum is perhaps the most popular platform for affiliate tracking in the industry. It allows media buyers to track and analyze campaign performance across multiple traffic sources.
The platform prioritizes performance tracking and monitoring. The infrastructure is built to handle large volumes of traffic while offering click, conversion, and campaign attribute analytics down to the individual granular level.
What Problem It Solves
Understanding traffic behavior in the context of different campaigns and determining the cause of a conversion are some of the main challenges faced by affiliate teams. Voluum helps resolve this by giving media buyers the ability to analyze campaigns using detailed attribution.
They are able to see the specifics on profitable sources of traffic, put a stop to campaigns that are not doing well, and improve their campaigns and targeting strategies.
A few key capabilities
Automation tools are able to move traffic to different campaigns based on the set rules of traffic performance goals.
There are also reporting dashboards and real-time metrics of traffic and campaign performance, reporting metrics, and dashboards. The distribution tools available are used to control the flow of traffic to different campaigns.
Voluum connects with almost every affiliate. This makes consolidated reporting an available option.
Because of the advanced analytics, a large number of professional media buyers use this platform.
This also applies to those media buying team who wants to strategize their campaigns and even media buyers who wants to create a detailed plan and use the data to be able to see the best performers and the trends.
Potential Drawbacks or Considerations
Even if Voluum has advanced tracking, the analytics capabilities are best suited to campaign analytics. Voluum is probably best at campaign analytics. If an organization needs more detailed systems logic, they are going to still need to add to their systems.
For teams that want traffic automation, other systems will be able to offer more support with routing and distribution systems.
RedTrack
RedTrack is an analytics performance marketing platform that aims to integrate tracking and campaign analytics across various ad networks. It aims to help media buying teams understand performance data.
The platform is typically used by teams that are spread across numerous ad networks and require a single source of analytics to assess the performance of their advertising campaigns.
What Problem It Solves
Campaigns across different ad networks lead to a lot of data fragmentation. Each platform usually defines and measures conversions differently, causing additional complexity to the overall campaign analysis.
RedTrack solves this problem by integrating campaign data and providing consolidated analytics for campaign attribution.
Key Capabilities
The platform provides its users with cross-channel attribution, automated campaign performance analytics, and customizable analytics dashboards, among other tools that help users guide campaign optimization based on performance data.
To make campaign data analytics easier, RedTrack offers integrations with advertising networks and affiliate marketing networks.
RedTrack can help media buying teams and agencies that manage a lot of advertising accounts. The platform’s analytics tools provide users with the ability to analyze campaign performance across multiple traffic sources.
This helps teams analyze data that can be hidden in various ad platform dashboards.
Limitations or Considerations
While RedTrack provides users with automation capabilities, the platform is still primarily focused on analytics. Attribution and analytics tracking are the core focus of the platform, which means additional tools are likely to be needed.
Companies that focus heavily on lead distribution or multi-buyer routing logic will require other platforms tailored to those needs.
Binom
Binom is a self-hosted affiliate tracking platform made for media buyers with a performance-focused tracking the need for robust infrastructure to track conversions quickly.
Binom gives users more flexibility with the tracking infrastructure because, unlike other cloud-based tracking platforms, Binom self-hosts on the users’ servers and allows users to split the cloud on their own.
What Binom fixes
A tracking infrastructure needs to be able to keep up with reporting high-volume traffic campaigns. If there is a delay on the tracking side, there will be an immediate loss in reporting integrity and, therefore, the ability to optimize the campaign quickly and efficiently.
To solve this, Binom self-hosted designed a tracking structure that is able to handle the large-scale traffic with a focus on low latency.
The features listed for this platform were the basis of the Binom self-hosted design. With the ability of the end user to configure their own servers, customers are able to customize their tracking solution as needed.
The customers that are featured the most with Binom are the media buyers, since it allows end users to keep tracking their own data. It is a performance designed for high-volume traffic campaigns and is designed for high speed.
Also, because it is self-hosted, it offers users the ability to manage their own cloud, which they share with Binom.
What are the downsides of Binom?
This means that, because it is self-hosted, there is a requirement for the teams to manage their own server infrastructure, so there is a cost to that in the form of technical ability to maintain that infrastructure.
Users who like cloud-hosted services that are fully cloud-controlled will be disappointed with this model because it is designed for self-hosted systems.
Everflow
Everflow is designed for affiliate networks and brands with partner programs, offering partner marketing and affiliate management functionality, including tracking, reporting, and partner management in a single environment.
The software is employed by numerous companies dealing with large groups of affiliates and needing oversight of multiple layers of partner programs.
What Problem It Solves
For affiliate networks, managing and maintaining a balance in the relationship between the advertisers and the publishers is a difficult task. As networks grow, managing the payouts, tracking partner performance, and compiling reports for the partners becomes overly complicated.
Everflow solves these problems by unifying partner management and performance tracking in a single ecosystem.
Key Capabilities
The platform includes affiliate tracking and performance reporting, partner onboarding, and campaign management. These capabilities enable networks to better manage affiliate relationships and streamline the coordination of traffic movement within the ecosystem.
Everflow has the ability to integrate with advertising tools and CRM systems, which allows for the merging of marketing and operational systems to extend beyond a single organization.
For brands and affiliate networks managing a large number of partners, Everflow is a great fit, as its technology enables both the management of relationships and the operational systems of the advertisers, publishers, and networks.
The platform’s reporting and partner management systems are extremely valuable for companies that manage structured partner networks.
Limitations or Considerations
Given Everflow’s emphasis on affiliate program infrastructure, it may be more than what is needed for single media buyers who are focused on partner management.
For smaller traffic-buying-oriented businesses, the appeal of strictly campaign tracking and optimization tools is more significant.
Selecting the best tool for your traffic operation
Every company takes a unique approach to designing its traffic infrastructure, based on its operational goals. Finding the right solution tends to center around the specific configuration of the traffic operation and the level of intricacy within the routing ecosystem.
Solo media buyers are usually focused on fast campaign tracking and analytics. They want to know which campaigns are resulting in profitable conversions so they can scale their traffic sources. This operational model tends to fit platforms that are focused on campaign analytics.
The operational model of affiliate networks is different. They need to manage the flow of traffic to and from several different advertisers and publishers, and also manage reporting transparency and payout management. In these cases, partner management platforms tend to play a bigger role.
The operational model of lead generation companies is even more complex, as they need to simultaneously send traffic to multiple buyers. Their infrastructure needs to dynamically route leads and ensure that the buyers receive the traffic they need based on their targeting. This is where platforms with sophisticated routing logic become imperative.
Companies buying traffic, to some extent, fall in the middle of these models. Some use affiliate networks to distribute the traffic, but a lot of them develop their own internal traffic infrastructure, which gives them direct control over their lead flow. \
The best platform for any company tends to be determined more by the operational design of the flow of traffic, rather than by the features of the platform.
Conclusion: funnels are only the first layer
Marketing funnels are a crucial part of affiliate operations. They shape the way users engage with the landing page and influence how effectively the page converts visitors into leads or customers. That said, funnels are traffic systems, and by themselves, they don’t do any management.
As their operations grow, affiliates have to manage different traffic sources, buyers, and payout structures simultaneously, and the relationships involved require advanced infrastructure for traffic routing, filtering, and real-time analytics.
Management of post-click traffic and optimization has become a solution for traffic flow challenges and visibility. These platforms relieve the burden of making manual operational decisions in a complex environment.
Affiliate marketing is a more sophisticated version of the digital ecosystem. Just as traffic systems become complex, so also must the systems that manage them. Although funnels will always be important, the operational layer that follows the entry point is what will determine the sustainability of a traffic operation.
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