Affiliate marketing campaigns have the potential to boost sales and increase revenue significantly.

However, for most campaigns to be a success, it is essential that advertisers learn in-depth exactly how affiliate marketing works, thus avoiding the most common mistakes that advertisers quite often make.

As affiliate marketing experts with more than 10 years of experience in the sector, we are going to share with you the most frequent mistakes made by advertisers, so that hopefully you do not repeat them, thus achieving maximum performance from your affiliate campaigns.

1.Lack of a consistent strategy.

One of the main reasons why sales are often lost, and why your campaign fails to reach its optimum level, is down to the lack of strategic annual planning.

We constantly see how advertisers launch random promotions, without any prior planning. BIG MISTAKE! Before even launching a program in the networks, you should prepare a calendar for each of your markets, with all the dates of interest for your company and for your potential clients such as: Christmas holidays or Easter, start of summer vacations, relevant national holidays, the well-known Black Friday, Mother’s/Father’s day etc.

The purpose of this calendar is that you can be ready in advance for these dates by preparing specific material that will be of interest to your potential customers, thus attracting them to your website, which in turn, will generate sales. At Affilired, this task is the job of your Account Manager who will recommend the relevant dates and will ask you to send the material needed for the campaign, ideally at least one month in advance, which allows them to distribute the material among the affiliates in time.

An important part of the strategy is to be forward-looking. Remember, just as the saying goes, it is the early bird that catches the fattest worm.

2. Not taking care of your advertising creativity.

The brands that dominate the market are those that have an ongoing maintenance strategy throughout the year.

It is imperative that the creatives that accompany your campaigns are constantly brought up to date by offering fresh original banners, which are in accordance with the campaigns that have been previously established in your strategic annual planning. So, there is no mismatch between your creatives and your campaigns.

3. Not making the most of the synergies in performance marketing.

While it is true that over time your affiliate program will eventually start to work by itself, this doesn’t mean you should stop trying to improve it.

Submerge yourself in the world of performance marketing tools, there is a huge range available, use them with your program/s along with other actions that can also prove very useful such as programmatic advertising, SEM to CPA campaigns by affiliates, onsite engagement tools etc.

Follow the advice of your Account Manager and give your campaign some vroom!!

4. Not considering the publisher to be part of your team.

The relationship with your publishers is vital to achieving maximum exposure of your brand and for your offers on their web pages. You should regard the publisher as an ambassador for your brand, pamper them, be fair in the deals you make with them and with the commissions as well. The basis of successful affiliate marketing is the collaboration between all parties.

For instance, you can encourage your top publishers by offering them a special commission to increase per sales volume, free accommodation in exchange for a specific revenue on specific dates or simply offer them exclusive codes to position your company above your competition.

5. Believing that the return on investment is immediate.

There is a belief that affiliate marketing makes sales soar, and so it does, but not overnight, like most things in life success takes time.

You should keep in mind that when a campaign is activated in the different networks, the time required to achieve a high volume of conversions depends on external factors. If you observe your campaigns closely in certain networks, you should ask yourself questions such as “Is my brand well known in that market?” “Are my offers or is the commission attractive enough for the user? Or, how can I get the affiliate to give my promotion some extra special attention?”

Whatever the case may be, let yourself be advised by your Account Manager and keep in mind that even taking into account all of the above points, a program normally takes a few months to stabilize and begin to be profitable. Patience is the key.

6. Measuring results ahead of time.

Once the program starts working as it should, ideally you should keep it active, the longer the better, because it will be from that point that your revenue should begin to grow.

But that does not mean that you should start measuring results from month to month because seasonality must be taken into account, performance varies greatly depending on dates. The correct thing is to compare at the end of the year the volume of sales achieved with respect to the previous year, it is here you can see the real progression and you can measure the ROI of your campaign/s.