Affiliate Network Offer Sharing and Cutting Margins

It’s one thing for an affiliate network to have the same offers as other networks, but for them to be one of the lower paying affiliate networks, it’s pretty sad. Fortunately, some of the best affiliate networks out there don’t just rely on “public” and “general” offers and actually start to create their own. Today’s post will focus on affiliate networks that provide their own affiliate offers and not just swap offers with all of the other networks.

Where did my Margins Go?
As more networks tend to swap and share offers, this usually means the best margins on the offers are thinning out. If the main affiliate network that brokered the offer, is getting $50 per lead (and paying affiliates $35), then brokering that same offer to another affiliate network (who then pushes it to their affiliates for $30 per lead, so they can make $5 profit per lead), you are getting the crappy deal by going with any network besides the one brokering direct. An offer can only be brokered and margined down so many times… not to mention, if the offer is available on so many networks, it may get over saturated by affiliates very quickly.

DirectTrack Makes Swapping Easy!
For those of you that don’t already know, many of the affiliate networks are run off a network called system “DirectTrack“. Years ago when I played around with idea of running my own network, I remember seeing the function to swap and share offers from one DirectTrack offer to another. While this isn’t a horrible thing, it’s just good to note that you may see the swapping or sharing of offers more often through DirectTrack run networks, just because of the simplicity of tracking and management. (If you wanted to start your own network up, essentially you could get a DirectTrack account, then just grab all the “shared” offers from other DirectTrack networks. This would drastically cut margins, but you would not have to broker any deals direct, as it would all be tracked through DirectTrack.)

Where are the Exclusive Offers?
The majority of big affiliates networks have their own “exclusive” offers available. By offering exclusives, networks are able to pull in affiliates to promote offers that aren’t available on other networks. Popular exclusive leads are usually for weight loss, debt consolidation or lead type offers. Networks usually also have a boat load of custom or unique ZIP/EMAIL submit offers. Here is a break down on a few affiliate networks with exclusive offers and their numbers.

From an affiliate stand point, the worst thing you can do as an affiliate network (besides fraud and non-payment), is to have a new affiliate login to your system and see nearly all of the offers available, listed on a bunch of other networks as well. The ONLY way that you can successfully pull this off, is by paying more than the other networks. In most cases, the networks that do the most swapping and sharing of offers, are the smaller guys that can’t compete and get the big advertiser deals themselves. While this may seem alright to the network, it won’t be when the affiliate finds another network paying a decent amount more on offers they have been promoting for months now.

[This post is covering part one of the “Five Reasons Your Affiliate Program Sucks” series, and is focusing on “Same Offers as other Networks“.]