Voluum as an Affiliate Network: Overview
Voluum, as an information tracking and analysis platform, can be used as a basis of building your own affiliate network. It provides live data with visually no delay and vast data reporting and analysis options. With Voluum-based affiliate network, you can:
Analyze the traffic characteristics of visitors that have clicked your affiliates/influencers/partners ads. These characteristics include: country, city, device type and brand, browser type and version, connection type and many more.
Check the performance of each affiliate/influencer/partner separately or summed up. They can be grouped with Workspaces.
Scan for bot traffic to monitor traffic quality. Scan for bot traffic to monitor quality of traffic that your affiliates or partners bring.
Monitor the money flow between affiliates/influencers/partners and offer owners.
Share selected reports that contain live data with your affiliates without them having to sign in to Voluum. Provide the stats for your affiliates that are updated in real-time and are available via URL they can use in any browser. You can work with partners who have access to your potential customers but have no own tracking tools and are not advanced technically.
This solution is perfect if you already run a partnership program with influencers or want to start with media buying.
Methods of Using Voluum as an Affiliate Network
There are two ways in which you can set up Voluum to act as an affiliate network:
Voluum as an Affiliate Network: Partners as Traffic Sources: This method is most suitable if you deal with smaller number of affiliates/influencers/partners. The suggested limit is less than 100. In this method, you add each affiliates/influencers/partners as a separate traffic source in Voluum.
Voluum as an Affiliate Network: Partners in Custom Variables: This method is most suitable if you deal with bigger number of affiliates/influencers/partners and/or use a custom platform to manage your client data. In this method, you create one traffic source for all affiliates/influencers/partners and distinguish them by passing an ID of your affiliates in a custom variable.
You can mix these two methods freely if that will suit your needs.
How Does Tracking Work?
To track traffic, Voluum goes between your affiliates/influencers/partners and your offers. Once you add offers and setup a campaign, Voluum will generate tracking URLs that you will give to your partners. Every time such URL is activated by a visitor, they will be lightning-fast redirected through the Voluum tracking domain to the offer. Voluum will then count this visit and measure various traffic characteristics.
If a visitor converts, your offer should send conversion information via the postback URL, or a conversion tracking pixel, or API, so conversion will be recorded. If you require to send conversion information back to your affiliates, you can do so via the traffic source postback URL or pixel redirect URL.
How Does Reporting Work?
If you deal with smaller number of affiliates/influencers/partners, you can use Shared Reports to share selected stats external parties. Shared reports generate a link that directs anyone with this link to a live data report in the read-only mode. This solution can be provided as white label.
- There is also an option to access the reporting data via the Voluum API and present it in your custom interface. You would just have to build your own front-end to this solution.
