SEO Consultant – Costa Rica

Building and maintaining strong PPC campaigns is becoming increasingly difficult in what has become a very competitive marketplace.

At the same time, many companies report poor performance with their affiliate programs.

The question we asked ourselves is this:

If companies invest sufficient time and effort to develop strong affiliate programs, can affiliates deliver a better ROI than PPC advertising?

Working with two of our research partners we have identified some important trends, and have confirmed that a well-managed affiliate program can deliver significant revenues.

Please note that the purpose of this brief is not to encourage marketers to abandon their PPC advertising in favor of affiliate marketing.

Instead we are suggesting that a strong affiliate program can deliver additional revenues with a very favorable ROI. Also, with skilled affiliates working on your behalf, and with some of them using PPC advertising themselves, you can extend the reach of your total PPC exposure, and reduce your PPC costs.

That is to say, many affiliates will be running their own PPC campaigns to attract the same traffic you have been fighting for yourself. They will then refer the most qualified of those visitors to your site, in the hope of achieving a sale and earning a commission.

Case Study 1 – Tracking the relative ROI between the PPC and affiliate programs of National Alert Registry.
One of our research partners is the National Alert Registry.

While we have been handling their PPC campaigns only for about a year, we have seen a decline in ROI, in spite of making substantial efforts in a number of areas:

We have added a number of new campaigns over time, often in response to current news in the media.
We have more than doubled the number of keywords we are bidding on, searching the “edges” for low-cost words and tracking their conversion rates.
We have more than doubled the amount of traffic to the site generated through PPC.
However, in spite of this, over the last nine months we have seen our partner’s PPC cost per sale going up, and PPC profits going down.

NAR is not the only company or organization to have found itself unable to scale its PPC programs any further.

Over the same period, NAR has more than made up for the decline in PPC revenue and profits by working hard on its affiliate program.

This increase has been achieved by focusing very tightly not on recruiting thousands of new affiliates, but by identifying a small handful of super-affiliates, or strategic partners.

Here are the results: