iGB Affiliate 52 AugSept | Page 62

INSIGHT Figure 2: Example of contextualised advertising with mouse over ●●Misunderstanding In my view, affiliate management teams have a fundamental misunderstanding of the core levers that affect success. By focusing on the right levers in the ecosystem, amazing things happen. How can you as an affiliate improve your game? Having highlighted a number of key areas where affiliates fall down, the question to ask now is what kind of levers can you pull to improve your game? Firstly, it’s understanding how to get converting traffic and then converting it efficiently. ●●Paid media Because of the economics behind paid media, it’s very hard for an affiliate to make a large enough profit margin to justify the risk behind their spend. In other words, you need a buffer so if something goes wrong, you are not running at a revenue loss. Because you’re competing against operators, who can spend more per customer than you do on acquisition and they have the added benefit of brand, it makes paid media very challenging. But saying that, there \