Coupon websites aggregate promo codes from different brands. Affiliates often use them to push traffic and convert it through their links or codes. Coupon affiliate programs may be profitable both for affiliate partners and brands. For example:
• Coupon websites expand your brand reach and visibility. If your brand is featured on coupon websites, more users will get familiar with it. That is how you can enhance brand recognition.
• A coupon affiliate program helps you to stay competitive. Your competitors will also be featured on these sites, so it is important to be in the same information space with them to prevent customers from turning to them.
• Affiliate coupon codes help to finalize a sale. A promo code can convince potential customers to buy from you when making a final purchasing decision. In this case, a coupon may become an extra “push” that brings you money.
It sounds perfect, doesn't it? Still, you need to be aware of some drawbacks that coupon affiliate programs have. Let’s have a closer look at the upside of coupon partnership and find the best strategy of balancing coupon marketing with brand’s safety through effective brand abuse monitoring.
The Drawbacks of Coupon Affiliate Marketing
With all its benefits, coupon affiliate marketing has some significant pitfalls:
• Affiliate coupon codes decrease the final profit. In many cases, your customers start looking for a promo code at the final stage of the purchase. They just reach the checkout and see the empty field for entering a promo code. So, they are ready to pay the full price. But at the last moment the customers decide to search for a coupon, and now they will pay you 10% less.
• Coupon affiliate marketing makes it difficult to analyze the customer behavior. In this case, brands cannot understand if customers would have purchased the product without any affiliate discount codes. So, they cannot adapt their offer or marketing strategy.
• Partner sales cannibalization. Sometimes coupon affiliates receive payment for traffic that actually was pushed by your in-house marketing campaigns or other affiliate partners. For example, the customers reach your official website because they have heard about your brand before. Then they visit a coupon website at the last minute and use an affiliate discount code. This way, the coupon affiliate gets the full commission, despite the minimal contribution to the sale. So, the brand pays twice for the same target action, leading to cannibalization traffic.
• Reputation risks. Sometimes affiliates offer codes that do not work. It may harm the brand’s reputation because customers expecting to receive a discount may lose trust in the brand switch to competitors who offer more reliable promotions.
Having those drawbacks in mind does not mean you need to completely give up on coupon affiliate marketing. It just needs a more thoughtful approach. So that you can get all the advantages of the coupon affiliate program and avoid its disadvantages. It is not that difficult, especially with modern AdTech tools.
How to Work with Coupon Affiliates Effectively
Now that we know about the pros and cons of working with coupon affiliates, let’s see how to make the most of coupon affiliate marketing:
• Work with a few reputable coupon websites. This way, you can make sure that your promotions are distributed correctly. So that all the presented affiliate discount codes really work and do not disappoint your customers searching for affiliate coupon codes. By taking this step, you get control of your brand’s messaging.
• Set a lower payment for coupon websites. As we have discussed earlier, some customers use affiliate codes at the very end of their purchasing journey. Paying lower commissions to coupon affiliates will help you to optimize your marketing budget. Also, affiliate discount codes decrease the final profit, so it will be fair to reduce the payment for such traffic.
• Monitor your branded search. Brands need to be aware of how their branded search looks and which methods their affiliate partners use to push traffic. For example, if your affiliate program prohibits using affiliate coupons, you need to find and punish the violators. Otherwise, you will overpay for traffic pushed with the help of affiliate codes. Such monitoring should be performed regularly, so you do not miss any violations.
Those were the basic steps that you can take to work with coupon affiliates effectively.
How Automated Monitoring Enhances Coupon Affiliate Programs
Regular monitoring of coupon websites becomes much easier with automated tools. For example, you can use Bluepear:
- • The software automatically monitors your branded search 24/7 from different GEOs, devices, and browsers. It finds violations even if your coupon affiliates target specific GEOs, show their advertisements at nighttime, or use dynamic redirects to hide their IDs.
- • Bluepear can free up your PPC team, allowing them to focus on developing a search engine marketing strategy.
- • The tool gathers all the violation evidence in one report. It provides you with the screenshots, affiliate links, and redirects history.
- • Blupear sends real-time notifications when it finds any violations. So that you can make quick decisions and dispute payments for the affilates fraud traffic. Taking quick actions matters when it comes to increasing CPCs for branded queries.
Besides, Bluepear not only finds ads that lead to coupon websites but also checks the website and clicks the button with an affiliate link. This way, you will have all the needed evidence without having to manually click through the ad.
