Advantages to Affiliate networks vs. In House Programs
September 10, 2008
Affiliate marketers generally like to use affiliate networks, but sometimes there are some good affiliate programs that are independantly run by the website themselves we call “In house”.
The major advantages to using affiliate networks compared to in house programs is usually the following:
1) The Ability to congregate multiple affiliate earnings together as one balance. Most affiliate programs have a minimum payout balance, which is hard to reach if you are using many different programs on moderate to low traffic sites.
2) Convenience of joining multiple affiliate programs. Instead of looking around the net and having to go through a registration process for each one, joining new programs is very convenient in affiliate networks.
3) Compliance & Tracking. When a affiliate program is in house, you have no way of knowing it actually has a profitable history or if they are even tracking your earnings. Before joining a affiliate program in most affiliate networks, you can see their profit history by looking at their EPC earning rates. EPC is calculated as the average dollar earnings made per 100 user clicks by all affiliates together in the program. Most affiliate networks, will also make sure each program is actually tracking sales, although Shareasale is by far the best in showing affiliate marketers when they track compliance and the only one that shows a merchant’s uptime history.
4) Security. Instead of giving sensitive personal and banking information to some small independant affiliate programs who you don’t know from adam and may be risky, the big affiliate networks can be trusted with this sensitive information.
July 24th, 2008 at 7:41 pm
I just stick with Commission Junction so I can easily reach payout. It would take forever if I waited for payouts from 50 different affiliate programs.