Affiliate marketing is a set of activities undertaken by owners of websites or other digital mediums to promote a product or service produced by another company. There are three parties involved in the affiliate marketing system:
- Advertiser is the company who owns the product or service
- Publisher is someone who encourages people to use an advertiser’s product or service
- Client is the end consumer of the product or service
An advertiser pays a commission to a publisher every time when the user on the publisher’s website completes a target action such as viewing the ad, clicking on the link, placing an order, or purchasing a product or service.
This marketing approach is beneficial for both advertisers and publishers:
Advertisers get an opportunity to boost sales and increase brand awareness without conducting additional marketing activities themselves. There are also risks for advertisers that include publishers harming the brand image and driving fraud traffic to the offers.
Publishers get a chance to monetize their traffic and build a solid business without the necessity to produce any goods and handle the clients’ requests. The biggest challenge for publishers is to find an advertiser that would provide solid payouts, precise statistics, and whose offers would be relevant to the publisher’s audience.
