Part 3 of The 3 Keys to Affiliate Intelligence by Rakuten Advertising Series: Forward-Thinking Strategies & Results

Affiliate advertising is performance marketing, which means it has to… perform. And at Rakuten Advertising, we take things a step further, with affiliate that outperforms—your competitors, industry benchmarks, and your own standards. But, let’s talk about that last one a bit: How your business defines performance.

Every organization has different goals, both overall and for specific programs and initiatives. Sometimes you’re just looking for straight-up revenue. Other times, maybe you’re curious about the types of customers who are buying, or the specific sales of a brand-new product offering. And then, there are those times you might not have fully defined what you’re measuring, or how to measure it.

Rakuten Advertising is working to drive performance like never before with Affiliate Intelligence, an innovative approach built around 3 key elements: A network of diverse, premium partners—to reach audiences at every stage of the buyer journey. Industry- leading data and AI-powered technology—to find the right partners to deliver on your specific goals. And today, we’re exploring the final piece of the puzzle: The support and strategies of our expert teams.

They’re the ones creating our technology—and who can help you best make use of it. They’re the ones who cultivated our network—and know how to best leverage its connections. And, critically, they’re the ones that help define what performance means for your business—and strategize exactly how to reach those goals, both today and tomorrow. Forward-thinking strategies. For forward-thinking results.

The best way to show how our tech, network, and teams all work in tandem to drive performance is walk through, step by step, how we help you create a campaign. Affiliate Intelligence in action.

1. Setting Your Goals

As we mentioned above, first things first, you need to set clear affiliate performance goals, defined and measured by tangible KPIs. If you already have your objectives in mind, great! But, if you don’t—and, often, even when you do—our team usually has some fresh ideas to help develop and refine your plans… including some unique options you might not have even known were possible.

(For instance, instead of just targeting a broad category like “parents” – we can help you reach millennial parents, in Australia, with targeted back-to-school promotions.)

Your challenges will always be unique to your business, and deserve unique strategies in support of them. We work closely with key stakeholders in your org to set the standards we’ll be working to perform against. We might start with the basics—boosting sales and revenue—but, as we begin to better understand the little details of your business, we may make some other, sometimes surprising recommendations.

For instance, beyond just driving sales, we might also think about reducing returns.

Let’s say one of your SKUs has amazing top-of-the-charts sales—but ultimately a much higher return rate in the long run. Another product, meanwhile, might be seeing slightly lower initial numbers, but ultimately, those sales really stick. At first, refocusing your spend might look like you’re selling less, but really, you’re selling smarter, and getting greater value in the end.

And that’s just the beginning of how our tried-and-tested expertise can help. We can help with adjusting your promotions in response to key events, particular moments, and different seasons. We can raise awareness of an all-new offering to the all-new audiences who should be seeing. We can bring in new customers, bring back old customers, and create repeat customers. Really analyzing and optimizing your goals, so you can build the best program to match.

2. Finding Your Audience

With your goals firmly in place, now it’s time to find your audience and really start bringing your program to life. Rakuten Advertising offers an entire suite of advanced AI-powered tools to help you sort through our massive network of diverse partners and start creating the partnerships that will really reach the people that matter:

• Partnership Discovery allows you to use natural language to quickly search publishers that best fit specific product offerings—everyone from payment programs to media platforms to influencers and content creators.
• Affiliate Conversion Journey helps you explore publishers within the full context of your marketing funnel, pointing out the partners suited to support you at each stage: Who grabs awareness? Who drives consideration? Who closes the deal?
• Audience Engine, then, helps you better connect with these partners, sharing your individual first-party data to create custom campaigns you can practically personalize down to the individual consumer.
• And our forecasting and benchmarking tools actually allow you to predict and perfect how these partnerships are all going to pay off in your program.

That’s just the technology, though – we also offer seasoned support in getting the absolute utmost out of our network. For instance, our publisher team can help scale your campaign to the global level. With insider knowledge of local markets, across every vertical and region, we offer both proven and surprising strategies to help you decide what to promote where. “This lifestyle blog gets more hits in the UK,” “Cashback offers really hit home in the States.” “This product will be a major hit in APAC.”

Between our network, our tech, and our insights, we’ll help you meet audiences where they are, when they’re ready to take action.

3. Measuring—and Optimizing—Your Performance

From there, your campaign launches, and now it’s all down to numbers, numbers, numbers. Again, Rakuten Advertising offers a slew of tools to help you keep on top of your key metrics—spend, conversion, clicks. But, it’s not just about monitoring performance—we also offer some unique ways to use this real-time data to adjust, adapt, and evolve your campaigns, to push performance even higher:

• Our Commissioning Suite helps you match commissions to performance and adjust on the fly. Remember that high-sale, high-return product we mentioned earlier? You can spot these outliers— the positive ones—and quickly change their rates to best take advantage. And enhanced order locking (EOL) makes commissioning more reliable for those long-term purchases prone to change or cancellation, like travel and events.
• Placement Recommender lets you experiment with different, well, placements— pulling from our vast amount of historical data to quickly discover and test unorthodox placements that might actually deliver significant results on your specific goals, from returns to ROAS.

And, as always, we’re here to provide ongoing, side-by-side support to take performance above and beyond. Our data science team—the largest in affiliate—can dive deeper into your data to provide prescriptive suggestions and unique opportunities you might not have spotted on your own. Our publisher and account teams will continue to offer up new strategies: How to better work with your current publishers, or new partners to try in response to changing trends.

Ultimately, everything we do is designed to help you both drive and demonstrate performance: Proving what affiliate can really do for your business, and getting leadership excited about its future prospects and potential.

Affiliate Intelligence: the key to outperformance, now and in the future

So, that’s Affiliate Intelligence today: Our tech, our network, and our strategies all working in tandem to deliver better performance than you thought possible. Helping brands convince customers to take action. Helping publishers make the most of their unique audience. Creating the connections that show what affiliate is truly capable of.

But, it’s not enough to plan for today’s needs—modern affiliate can’t afford to rest on its laurels. From growing privacy concerns to rapidly evolving technology, the industry is facing disruption like never before, and it can be a challenge to keep making the most of your affiliate investment.

At Rakuten Advertising, we’re always thinking ahead, and making our own investments in the future of affiliate. We see the trends, where the industry is heading, and we’re already working to take advantage: Developing new advancements, rethinking what’s been done before, and making more of every resource at our disposal.

We’ve always been a leader in affiliate, from first pioneering the approach to continually driving the industry’s top results. (And we’ve got the awards and success stories to prove it.) Affiliate Intelligence is just another way we’re working to keep our lead, and help you keep yours.

Jump back to Part 1 to learn how our data and AI are cornerstone to Affiliate Intelligence.

Check our Part 2 to get the full details on our full-funnel network.