Performance Marketing Automation Tools to Use in 2020

Automation is not a new word for digital advertising. Still, every year we observe new areas of automation implementation and even more promising tendencies for the time to come. And it is no surprise. Marketers would better spend their time exploring new niches for their business rather than spending time on manual corrections and constant ad campaign monitoring.

Automation in performance marketing is not only about reducing the time spent on setting offers and pulling data but also about preventing any possible losses. So what are the marketers’ demands for automation and what processes can’t do without automation? Let’s have a deeper dive into what will be demanded in 2020.

Smart traffic management

CR optimization

All affiliates want to improve the quality of traffic they work with and increase ROI. On most affiliate marketing platforms users can benefit from a CR optimization tool. CR optimization is a process aimed at increasing the number of reached final conversions tapped into a precise audience.

How does that work in practice? Users set the CR range for particular offers or advertisers per specific affiliates or values received via subaccounts. Once the rule is applied, the tool checks data compliance with the CR restrictions following a given frequency. The tool filters traffic based on the resulting statistics.

Click Automation

Making a step further, with another automation feature, click automation, marketers can keep their ad spending under control. How? Upon reaching a certain amount of clicks without a single conversion, these affiliates and all further traffic on an offer are automatically blocked. In this way, advertisers don’t risk paying for anything and always stay within their budget.

Offers Schedule

Not always advertisers want their campaigns to be running 24/7 – some need their campaigns at a specific time. Especially when it comes to special offers or campaigns targeting a particular audience. Running outside the specified time is more likely to result in spending ad budgets in vain. For this reason, advertisers need to set their campaigns over the specified period.

Previously advertisers used to start and stop campaigns manually, which was very time-consuming. It is no longer a problem with the Offer Schedule¹ feature. The offers schedule is designed to activate offers at a certain time via a special calendar. Users set rules for their offers to be activated and paused at a specific time – once it is done, their campaigns automatically run accordingly.

Offer Validation

Another valuable automation feature when running ad campaigns is the offers validation or in other words, affiliate links checker. It is no less important than any other feature. Moreover, its neglect may result in losing traffic and money – as up to half of the offers are either “dead” or expired. Unless marketers are aware of that, they continue wasting traffic by sending it to inactive offers. Automated offers validation allows you to avoid unnecessary risks and check the workability of your links.

Which tools can help you identify broken links?

TestMyOffers – a tool to test tracking link CPA offers for all main types of mobile devices. It supports more than 200 geos. Our tool has some interesting features which allow users to automate their work and save time and money.

Affiliates – smart affiliate tracking links validation tool that gives both advertiser and publisher the option to check the landing page of their tracking links to avoid sending traffic to a broken link.

GoTrace – a platform to test affiliate tracking links and monitor them at regular intervals.

Campaign management via A.I. Smart link

Marketers handle vast numbers of offers and create the corresponding number of advertising campaigns. Working with that many offers would have created a huge mess if it wasn’t for Smartlink automation. Smartlink² is a robust monetization tool that allows affiliates to keep all offers under one link only. Using the technology of machine learning, it automatically selects offers by several preset parameters and decides which offer to show for each specific user.

Automated data-transfer

In affiliate marketing, you work with hundreds of partners, and thousands of offers, and not always everything is unified on one platform. When you decide to work with offers from other affiliate networks, your next task is to add these numerous offers, configure necessary parameters, unify all of the data, and so on. And this becomes time-consuming. And the solutions here are again – automation.

For this purpose in the affiliate industry, there is a developed for this aim tool, CPAPI³. It fully automates the process of transferring and synchronizing data between systems: sources of offers, such as advertisers, agencies, and recipient systems: affiliate networks, tracking platforms, agencies, and publishers. What previously was done in a few days, now can be managed in a matter of minutes.

Additionally, you can automate the process of data transfer from your platform leading to the leading BI tools for deep data analysis. With a go-between tool Data Fusion⁴, you stream data in real-time from multiple sources into a single view in AWS or Google accounts, and then to the BI tools, such as Google Data Studio, Power BI, Oracle BI, Tableau, etc.

Fraud Prevention

Real-time detection and prevention of fraud are a part of an affiliate’s daily routine. With the fast growth of the industry, digital marketing attracted a lot of online fraudsters. Now fraud in affiliate marketing is one of the most spread types of online fraud. And unless detected, it might cause affiliates significant financial losses.

Even though there is a series of recommended fraud-detection actions, such as careful validation of new affiliates, constant data and metrics growth monitoring, IP tracking, and so on – it is no longer enough to keep your campaigns perfectly fraudless. Only through automation of all these actions combined with the algorithm of Machine learning markers can protect their online campaigns.

Which tools are we talking about? Some affiliate marketing platforms offer in-house fraud prevention tools. For example, such a solution is a click-level fraud prevention tool⁵ that reduces fraudulent traffic by filtering VPN and non-earmarked traffic from proxies, bot traffic, etc. The system detects fraudulent traffic in real time, blocks it, and doesn’t allow it to reach the destination website.

If marketers want more, they can also use ready-made tools, such as FraudDefense, Forensiq, FraudScore, or FraudShield, which are already integrated into the majority of performance marketing platforms.

*Separately on which tool is better to fight affiliate fraud, you can learn here.⁶

As you can see, many aspects of affiliate business need to be automated. And with the volume of work and attention that these tasks require, automation is the only reasonable solution. By making automation the rule, and not the exception, you can prioritize the strategic development of your business while providing a basis for higher revenues.

However, it doesn’t mean that automation can replace relationship management. Automation is here to take care of repetitive tasks, and to help the affiliate marketing team focus on creating value where the human component makes the difference.

1. I believe in transparency. So, heads up: some links in this review are affiliate links. If you purchase them, I may earn a small commission (at no extra cost to you!). It helps me keep the lights on and create more helpful content like this.

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