The affiliate marketing industry is projected to grow to nearly $7 billion by 2021. According to many affiliates, opportunities are growing faster in emerging markets than in the United States in Canada. Savvy affiliate marketers are capitalizing off of big data to run successful campaigns in the global economy.
Here are some reasons big data is driving the international affiliate marketing industry.
Estimating market volume in various regions
Affiliate marketers don’t need to invest time and resources needed to create their own products. However, they face a different challenge – choosing the right markets to pursue.
Identifying promising markets didn’t use to be very easy, even if affiliates knew the population of the regions you wanted like to target. Fortunately, modern marketing platforms use big data to gauge demand for various dishes in different regions. Here are some examples:
- The Google Keyword Planner tracks the search volume for every keyword in the network. Search volume can be tracked at the global, national, state or provincial and city levels. Localization of doubt it is very helpful for affiliate marketers trying to run campaigns in specific countries.
- Facebook estimates the number of users that fall into any specific targeting criteria. This can help them determine whether they have defined their target audience too narrowly.
- Propel Media (formerly known as Trafficvance) has activity bars that gauge the number of clicks or impressions various keywords have received. There activity bar for a given keyword is empty if that keyword has not been clicked or displayed over the past 30 days.
These tools have made it much easier for affiliate marketers to measure the demand for any given niche. This is important, because it takes a lot of time to create ads and landing pages. Affiliate marketers don’t want to focus on verticals or regions where there is practically no traffic.
Estimating the necessary SEO resources for overseas content marketing campaigns
While the most aggressive affiliate marketers rely on paid traffic, content marketing is one of the most practical ways for cash strapped or risk averse affiliates to build funnels for their offers. Creating web properties overseas can be a great way to promote Affiliates offers. There is less competition in those regions, so they do not need to invest as much in their SEO.
However, they can’t expect results overnight. They still need to invest in creating content and building links. When affiliate marketers outline their content marketing strategy, they must estimate the amount of resources they will need.
There are number of big data tools that make this easier. Alexa, SEMRush, Moz And SimilarWeb help Affiliates see how well other sites have been optimized, so they can locate enough resources to rank themselves.
Identifying content marketing opportunities
Perhaps the biggest advantage of big data is that it gives affiliates the opportunity to find new ways to aggregate theircontent. Tools such as BackLinkWatch and SEMRush use big data to track inbound links from other websites. They can also use tools such as Inline Web Hosting Blogger to identify other web properties of their competitors by listing their IP addresses or nameservers. They can use these tools to find out where their competitors are promoting their content, so they can use similar link building strategies.
Split testing additional variables
Split-testing is essential for all affiliate marketers using paid traffic. They can improve the success of their campaigns by testing more variables. Tracking platforms such as CPVLab and Prosper202 offer affiliates the option to track multiple SubIDs, while also simultaneously tracking a number of variables by default. Since advertising platforms are offering new tracking features, affiliates have a deeper understanding of the nature of their campaigns.