To ensure that every invested dollar generates profit, you need more than dishing out content a few times a week. Quantity is important, but it doesn’t make sense without quality, so you need a combination of the two. This also means you need a solid strategy that allows you to focus on what’s truly important to both your referrals and partners who buy your traffic.
From lead tracking to content optimization to capitalizing on trends, there are around a dozen ways to refine your affiliate marketing and earn more, regardless of whether you are a pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale affiliate.
Without any further ado, let’s dig into how you can grow your affiliate marketing ROI.
Track Your Leads
To connect the dots between your efforts and results, it’s crucial to stay on top of your leads, knowing who they are, what they want, where they come from, and ultimately, what you can do to serve them better. So you might need a lead management system.
For larger publishers, knowing details such as the lead’s demographics, psychographics, and purchase history, as well as industry-specific information (insurance status, credit history, etc.), can be a game-changer.
The more leads you process, the easier it is to capitalize on referral insights. For example, if you know that most of your conversions come from California and occur around 6 pm, you should consider setting your ad campaigns to those parameters.
Affiliates that rely on calls can retrieve data from call tracking systems. In addition to demographic data, they may screen the caller’s intent and purchase interest and distribute them to a matching sales or customer support rep while also transferring essential details to the latter.
Postback URL
Although lead and call tracking systems offer best-in-class reporting, aspiring affiliates rarely use them due to their higher prices, opting instead for a more affordable postback URL.
Postback URL is a server-to-server tracking technology that allows you to source lead data in real time from the advertiser’s server, surfacing:
- Click ID
- Device
- Location
- Conversion type
Automate What Can Be Automated
There’s plenty of software that helps cut costs and streamline routines. However, it’s easiest to build your tech stack from a central hub, a CRM system like HubSpot, Zoho, or Salesforce that serves as a single source of truth by consolidating traffic data from your tracking solutions.
Here are some more affiliate marketing automation solutions:
- Lasso: Collects information about companies’ executives to help you build connections and secure important deals.
- Zapier + OpenAI: Connects AI to your Gmail, Google Calendar, Slack, and other management automation workspaces
- NotebookLM: Analyzes your website to generate unique content ideas for promoting affiliate links.
If you want to pull data from your automation solutions into the CRM, double-check whether they support APIs or other integration methods.
Read also: Why Your Affiliate Business Needs AI & How To Implement It
Respect the Timing of Engagement
To maximize your affiliate marketing ROI, you usually have to promote multiple products, each with its own appeal and target audience. So you need to identify an ICP for every product group and shape your offers accordingly.
For example, it’s effective to promote solar installations and solar maintenance services together, whereas that’s definitely not the case for, say, financial assistance and pest control.
With that in mind, here are the types of content you may need for each funnel stage:
| Stage | Goal | Content types |
| Top of the funnel (ToFu) | Establish your brand as a helpful resource in the specific niche | Educational blogs and social media articlesAd campaigns |
| Middle of the funnel (MoFu) | Appeal to your audience emotionally and gather users’ emails | EmailsCase studiesE-booksWebinarsQuizzes and surveys |
| Bottom of the funnel (BoFu) | Present affiliate product benefits and compare them | Promotional articles & emailsComparison pages |
A/B Test Your Content
To ensure your content drives the maximum affiliate marketing ROI, you may need to refine it through A/B testing – a process of improving your web pages, ads, and emails until you find and deploy their best-performing variations.
Here’s how to conduct A/B testing step-by-step:
- Formulate a hypothesis: Determine why your content underperforms and devise a reasonable solution.
- Upgrade your content: Develop an improved version of the content based on the hypothesis.
- Determine a winner: Split your traffic between the old and new variables to identify the best performer.
Important: Test only one content variable at a time to avoid noise and identify how this variable affects the UX and conversions.
Launch Retargeting Campaigns
Did you know that 25% of customers drop off at the consideration stage? Retargeting via paid ads or even a marketing email can bring them back. For instance, you may identify users who repeatedly visit the same product review page and then retarget them with an email.
When creating retargeting campaigns, you can act on behavioral insights sourced from:
- Third-party cookies: Collect behavioral data across the web, yet not as effectively as they used to, due to regulatory changes.
- Web analytics: Track user behavior on your website, including screen recordings and heatmaps that reveal which page elements attract users.
Retargeting campaigns perform even better when combined with time-limited offers, so you may want to add a discount or a countdown timer to nudge the referral to click or make a purchase.
Optimize for LLMs
As zero-click search satisfies ever more queries, you obviously have to do something to make LLMs (read: Google’s Gemini) like your website. Likewise, a fair share of traffic comes from other LLMs, like ChatGPT, making generative engine optimization even more important.
Here’s what you can do:
- Use question-based headers
- Break your content into lists, tables, and small paragraphs
- Write self-sufficient sentences that make sense even out of context
- Share articles on LinkedIn, Quora, Reddit, and other social media
Traditional SEO tools, such as Ahrefs or Ubersuggest, can display the number of citations your content receives from LLMs, so you can start from there.
Use the Right Bidding Strategies for Paid Ads
To ensure that your ads maximize your affiliate marketing ROI, use the right bidding strategy:
| Bidding model | Description |
| Manual bidding | Pay no more than a selected cost per click |
| Enhanced CPC | Pay slightly more/less when clicks are likely/unlikely to result in a conversion |
| Target return on ad spend (ROAS) | Pay according to your targeted ROAS |
| Maximize clicks | Pay to maximize clicks while staying within your daily budget |
If you want to leverage enhanced CPC, target ROAS, or maximize clicks models, keep in mind that you must input some of your conversion data into Google AI before it can make bidding decisions.
Maximize Your Lead Sales With Profitise
Profitise is an affiliate network that offers one of the highest prices for insurance and solar web leads and phone calls. As an affiliate, you can sell your traffic quickly and generate more of it with customizable lead generation forms.
Here’s why Profitise is a go-to choice for insurance and solar affiliates:
- The biggest pool of insurance and solar advertisers to sell your leads
- The highest price per insurance and solar leads
- Around-the-clock support from an affiliate manager
- Free lead generation forms that can be embedded on a website in a few clicks
Join Profitise as an affiliate to grow your bottom line.
Frequently Asked Questions
What’s the best way to do affiliate marketing?
Choose a profitable niche that matches your expertise, create high-quality, useful content, and join an affiliate marketing program that pays per lead or sale, depending on the preferred affiliate marketing model. If you’re an insurance or solar affiliate marketer, welcome to Profitise.
How to write content for affiliate marketing
Choose a topic that aligns with your platform and product, and write unique, engaging, and well-structured content reinforced with affiliate links that add value. To get more clicks, place links on the first screen so users can see them once they land on the page.
How to use social media for affiliate marketing
First, check whether your affiliate program allows traffic from social media platforms. Then choose the best social media for your target referrals, like LinkedIn for B2B leads, Instagram for photos, or TikTok for short, engaging videos.
