"Your leads are weak, you need to pause your campaigns," says the affiliate manager. It's a message that every affiliate marketer dreads and will probably receive at some point in their career. You've finally figured out how to run a profitable campaign that generates revenue even while you're sleeping. But then you start getting emails, Skypes, and WhatsApp messages from your affiliate manager, telling you to pause offer #93829. The advertiser doesn't like the quality of your leads.
It's frustrating because you have to stop a campaign that had the potential to make a lot of money. Your initial reaction might be to get angry and say some harsh words to your affiliate manager. However, it's important to understand why lead quality is so important from the advertiser's perspective and how it affects a successful relationship in affiliate marketing.
In this article, we'll cover everything you need to know about lead quality from the perspective of the affiliate network and the advertiser. We'll discuss how it can impact your campaigns and how you can ensure that you get high-quality leads.
What is lead quality?
At the end of the day, advertisers want to make a profit, just like affiliates. They have specific targets for return on investment (ROI) that they need to meet in order to justify investing in affiliate marketing. If you send them low-quality leads that are unlikely to convert, it's a sure way to have your campaigns paused and your revenue cut off.
The ideal scenario for a campaign is when everyone wins:
- You, as the affiliate, make money.
- The advertiser makes money.
- The traffic source is happy with your advertisements and targeting.
- The end customer finds value in the offer.
Let's take a look at dating offers, which are mostly lead generation campaigns, as an example to understand lead quality. Here's how it typically works:
- John fills out a registration form on your landing page.
- He confirms his email address through a double opt-in process.
- You get paid a fixed amount, let's say $5, for bringing in that lead.
- The advertiser's goal is to get John to engage with their dating site and upgrade to a paid monthly subscription.
If the advertiser spends $2,000 on leads from your campaign but none of them convert into paying members, they will be losing money. They will ask the network to pause your campaign and hope that some of those initial leads convert later on, so they can recover their advertising expenses.
On the other hand, if they spend $2,000 on your leads and generate a large amount of revenue from subscription upgrades, you will become their favorite affiliate. They may increase your conversion cap and payout, allowing you to attract more traffic and scale up your profitable campaign.
There are other factors that can affect lead quality as well, such as chargebacks, cancellations, and customer complaints. If you have too many of those, your successful campaign will be paused.
Prioritizing lead quality gives you a huge competitive advantage as an affiliate. Being selective about your traffic and always trying to deliver high-quality leads to advertisers is how you build a reputation that ensures your long-term partnership. When your leads are of a high quality, the advertiser can hit up your affiliate manager and ask them to give you more incentives like pay bumps. They can even ask you to work with them directly instead of going through the affiliate network. This is to ensure that they get more of your leads which are proven to work successfully for them.
How to send high-quality leads
So how do you ensure that you send high-quality leads? Below are 6 tactics that I recommend for maximizing lead quality.
1. Don't over mislead people
As affiliates, we work on slim margins and need to squeeze out every possible conversion to stay profitable. This can lead to landing pages and ad copy that is, shall we say, a bit over convincing (In reality, there aren't really 574 singles in your area looking to hook up tonight).
One common pitfall is advertising an offer as "free" when it really isn't. If your ads and landers scream "FREE!" but then John is asked to pull out his credit card to access the dating site, he's going to be annoyed. He was drawn in by the promise of a wholly free service.
By emphasizing "free" you end up attracting low-quality leads who are unlikely to ever convert to paid memberships. "But I've seen plenty of ads in spytools mentioning the word 'free' from campaigns run by big affiliates!" you might be thinking. What you don't see behind the scenes is that:
- Their huge volume gives them more leeway with the advertiser
- They have cultivated a strong direct relationship with the advertiser
- They're taking a smaller payout on the free leads and making it up on volume
- They have other high quality traffic sources you're unaware of that make up for the lower "free" traffic
The more honest and transparent your messaging is, from the initial click to the submit button on the landing page, the higher the quality of leads you'll attract. A more qualified prospect is more likely to become a paying customer for the dating site.
2. Refine your targeting
Make sure your offer is highly relevant to your target audience. Let's say you're driving dating offer traffic aimed at 45+ males. A middle-aged man clicking your ad probably has some hesitations and anxieties about online dating. He may register for free to check things out but won't be sold enough to hand over his credit card number.
Your job as the affiliate is to frame the offer in a way that addresses those concerns, leveraging your ad copy and landing page design. Show photos of attractive older gentlemen with beautiful younger women. Highlight success story testimonials. Make him believe that women are eagerly waiting to meet a distinguished man like himself. The more you can tap into your prospect's desires and emotional triggers, the greater your chances of securing a high-value conversion.
Other targeting factors that affect lead quality include:
- User demographics (age, gender, income, etc.)
- Traffic source (high-quality placements tend to perform better than cheap, bulk inventory)
- Mobile targeting (certain carriers and devices produce higher-quality leads)
This is why Facebook was a goldmine for dating offers before they tightened their regulations. Affiliates could precisely target their ideal prospects and saturate their newsfeeds with "personalized" ads. An older man seeing an ad featuring a fitness model in her 50s is much more likely to engage than a generic "Meet Hot Singles!" banner. Unfortunately, those days are now in the past.
3. Track lead quality by traffic source
Not all traffic sources are equal in terms of lead quality, mainly due to variations in targeting capabilities, user demographics, and ad formats.
Historically, Facebook traffic has been known to deliver excellent lead quality due to its granular targeting options (age, gender, interests) and the aspirational nature of the platform.
On the other hand, popunder traffic tends to have lower quality. This is because popunder visitors don't actively click through to your landing page; they passively arrive there after closing their main browser window, often hours later. Their intent and engagement are typically weaker.
Tracking lead quality from each traffic source is crucial for campaign optimization. One way to do this is by appending a SUBID macro to your tracking links, such as "&s1=[trafficsourcename]".
To maintain confidentiality, use coded values for SUBID names instead of revealing the actual traffic source. For example, instead of "&s1=facebook," use an unintelligible code like "&s1=x82sh".
After a few weeks, review your SUBID reporting to compare the volume and lead quality from each traffic source. You might discover that Facebook delivers exceptional leads that the advertiser appreciates, while popunder leads result in higher complaint rates. In this case, you can focus more on scaling your successful Facebook campaign while pausing the underperforming popunder traffic.
4. Balance quality and profitability
As an affiliate, you're always striving to find the sweet spot between lead quality and your own bottom line. Some of your lower-quality traffic might deliver great ROI for you but fail to convert well on the advertiser's backend. Alternatively, your premium traffic with amazing lead quality could be less profitable due to higher costs.
The solution is to find the right mix that keeps your ad spend ROI strong while still satisfying the advertiser's quality requirements. This is more art than science and will require testing different traffic allocation ratios.
Start with an 80/20 blend: 80% premium quality traffic, 20% cheaper/lower converting traffic. Analyze the results and then adjust the dial accordingly. You may find that 70% high quality and 30% lower grade leads deliver the optimal mix of affiliate profit margins and advertiser lead quality. Keep tinkering until you find the ratio that maximizes your ROI while keeping the advertiser satisfied and your account active.
5. Redirect low-quality traffic
If you're getting some low-quality leads from a particular traffic source, don't worry! You can still make the most of the situation by separating and directing the clickers based on their quality.
Let's say you're running a campaign for dating offers where the advertiser wants to target “high networth” individuals, particularly men with money. To filter out the leads, you can create a landing page with a question about income. If someone selects an income level below $75,000, you can redirect them to an offer that pays less. On the other hand, if they indicate an income above that threshold, they can proceed to the premium advertiser's landing page.
You can apply similar sorting methods based on different factors like age, gender, location, and more. The idea is not to ignore the lower-quality leads but to match them with offers that suit their profile better.
Your goal is to play matchmaker and pair each prospect with the offer that best fits their needs. This way, you can maximize your earnings and satisfy your advertisers.
6. Push for Pay-Per-Sale
If you're tired of dealing with lead quality issues, consider shifting towards a Pay-Per-Sale (PPS) model for your campaigns. With PPS, you only earn a commission when a referred lead makes a purchase or signs up for a paid subscription. In this case, lead quality becomes less of a concern because you're only compensated based on actual revenue generation.
Instead of receiving $5 for every email submission on a dating offer, you can negotiate a $50 commission for each new member subscription that results from your campaign. This eliminates the frustration of receiving complaints from the affiliate network about low conversion rates from registrations to paying members. When both you and the affiliate network make money, everyone is satisfied.
The main drawbacks of PPS are extended conversion cycles and greater risk exposure for affiliates. Since your payout is tied to backend sales that may not occur for days or weeks post-click, it requires more patience and time to reach statistically significant conclusions about a campaign's viability. You're also on the hook if an offer simply doesn't convert well for reasons beyond your control (bad landing pages, broken sales funnel, etc.). The potential rewards are significantly greater though.
Q&A with Marco Guarracino, the Founder of the Offersify affiliate network
To get more insights on the topic, we are presenting you a Q&A we held with Marco Guarracino, the Founder and CEO of Offersify.io. Offersify is an affiliate network that deals with COD offers in the Nutra and E-commerce verticals.
Q: As an experienced affiliate network owner, could you explain the difference between a high-quality lead and a low-quality lead, and how they impact your business?
A: To start with the first question, being in the cash-on-delivery vertical, the key point is that unless you ship the product and the client pays for it, you essentially have monopoly (theoretical) money.
For affiliates, a confirmed lead is often considered a success. However, from the perspective of merchants or affiliate networks, profitability is the ultimate goal. A confirmed lead is only valuable if it translates into a profitable sale. This is why I believe that the future lies in adopting a profit-share business model.
Q: How do you track and measure lead quality? How do you determine that an affiliate is sending you poor-quality leads?
A: Before, we tracked lead quality by simply looking at the numbers and applying a 2x multiple to determine the value of the leads. However, we have now created a dedicated statistics team. They analyze each offer using the publisher ID to determine if it's profitable or of poor quality. If we identify poor-quality leads, we issue a first warning to the affiliate.
Q: If you discover that an affiliate is consistently sending in low-quality leads, do you ask them to stop running the offer, or do you let them continue and then scrub them for the poor leads? Or do you actually ban them from the network?
A: Usually, we ask them to stop them from running the offer. Because for us it gives us extra work in the call center and in the warehouse, plus the cost of shipping. So when we have bad-quality leads, we tend to immediately advise the affiliate to stop it altogether because it's creating extra work for us. If they continue to do that, we ban them from the affiliate network.
Q: Are there some common mistakes affiliates make that hurt lead quality? How can they be avoided?
A: There is one common mistake that affiliates make while running their campaigns. They don't think about the advertiser or merchant side, so they promote a product using ads that show a different kind of image of the bottle or the size of the bottle.
If the clients receive the product and the size of the bottle or the product is quite or slightly different, it is an issue. In Eastern Europe, when clients are going to pay the courier, they open the package, and usually, they remember if they saw different ads. So they tend not to pay cash on delivery. This is a problem, so affiliates should ask the affiliate network for the ad creatives, live photos, and other promotional material.
Q: What traffic sources usually deliver the highest-quality leads? Which ones should affiliates avoid or use cautiously?
A: The traffic sources that are working very well today are Facebook, and Instagram. Google Shopping is also performing very well in terms of quality and certain affiliates are killing it on there.
What is not okay and affiliates must avoid doing for cash-on-delivery offers is using pop-ups and pop-unders. This kind of traffic makes you just spend money, but you never close these lead confirmations because people tend not to leave their correct mobile phone number and address if they see the offer from a pop-under or this kind of traffic source.
Conclusion
So as you have learned from Marco, lead quality is very important, especially for the affiliate networks and merchants/ offer owners. If affiliates are caught sending poor quality leads, first the get a warning and are asked to stop. If they continue, they get banned from the affiliate network.
Recently I spoke to a newbie affiliate who was having lead quality issues on his dating campaigns. His "solution" was to simply hop to a new network or offer as soon as the advertiser complained and he got paused. Lather, rinse, repeat.
That's playing checkers when you need to be playing chess. It's a myopic approach that will get you blackballed by advertisers in short order. Low quality traffic is a short-term Band-Aid, not a long-term business plan.
To truly "make it" in the highly competitive affiliate marketing space, you need to treat your advertising partners as exactly that - partners. Put yourself in their shoes. Would you want to buy leads from someone who's just trying to pump and dump low-grade traffic, or an affiliate who consistently delivers premium leads that make you money?
By prioritizing lead quality, you position yourself to aks for higher payouts which will enable you to scale further, build a moat around your top performing campaigns and grow a reputation that advertisers line up to work with. Aim to be the Rolex of affiliates, not the Casio.
As the barriers to entry in our industry continue to rise and the "easy money" loopholes get plugged, the affiliates who thrive will be those who can deliver traffic that truly performs. Taking the time to match the right conversion flow to the right user might be more painstaking than blasting generic creative to the cheapest traffic sources, but the long-term payoff in higher commissions and bigger budgets is more than worth it.
Prioritize lead quality and the sky's the limit. Your affiliate manager will thank you. Your advertisers will thank you. Your bank account will thank you. Now stop reading this article and get back to optimizing your campaigns!
