Traffic arbitrage has many advantages for budgeting. For example, you can save a lot of money on testing your ad campaigns and not worry about the cost of customer acquisition. In addition, a big advantage of affiliate marketing is that it has the lowest level of risk, as you only pay affiliates commissions for results and performance. However, affiliate marketing requires certain expenses, just like any other business activity.
Traffic arbitrage requires a strategic approach based on three main principles:
- Realism: The budget should be realistic, taking into account available resources and potential revenues. It is important not to overestimate the potential of your campaign.
- Flexibility: Since the traffic arbitrage market is constantly changing, the budget should be flexible enough to adapt to new circumstances.
- Resources are intended for: Budget allocation between different channels and strategies should be smart and focused on maximizing ROI.
- Clear Control: To manage the budget effectively and avoid cost overruns, it is important to have a clear mechanism to monitor and control the expenses.
Setting goals and expectations
The success of any traffic arbitrage campaign depends on clearly defined goals and expectations.
- Goals should be unique: For example, goals should be specific and clear, such as achieving a certain level of revenue or conversions.
- Measurable: To make it easy to evaluate the progress and success of a campaign, goals should be quantifiable.
- Attainable: It’s important to set goals that can be realized given the resources and market conditions available.
- Relevant: Objectives should be consistent with the company’s overall strategy and long-term goals.
- Time-bound: Clear deadlines help to better organize the process and encourage the achievement of goals.
Assessment of risks and potential costs
Assessing risks and potential costs is a key part of budget planning:
- Analysis of market conditions: It is important to study market trends and potential risks, such as changes in platform algorithms or fluctuations in ad prices.
- Competition Assessment: Understanding your competitors’ activities helps you identify potential threats and opportunities for your strategy.
- Financial Risks: It is important to assess financial risks associated with unexpected expenses, changes in conversion rates, or loss of revenue.
- Technical and operational risks: This can include technology issues, campaign errors, or data loss.
- Developing a risk mitigation plan: Create strategies to mitigate potential risks, including budgeting for contingencies and utilizing insurance.
How to calculate affiliate commissions
Affiliate marketing is based on the Cost Per Action (CPA) system. Thus, the payment of commissions is one of the most critical points of budgeting. However, finding the perfect commission rate for each specific affiliate program is not that easy. Affiliate compensation rates for your business depend on many factors, including your budget, industry niche, and affiliate program.
However, it will be helpful if you take into account all the factors that affect affiliate payouts. So let’s take a closer look at each of these factors:
- Standard affiliate commission – the amount or percentage that affiliates receive for completing one qualifying action.
- Commission Tiers – commission increases or fixed bonuses designed to reward successful affiliates.
- VIP commissions – since some affiliates can bring you more value, it makes sense to pay them higher commissions (for example, bloggers who do product reviews, influencers in a particular niche, and large content providers).
- First Sale Bonus – offering a fixed bonus amount or multiplying the commission by the first sale or sales – a great way for affiliates to start promoting your brand right away.
- Referral Commission – You may consider paying commissions to partners who bring new affiliates to you. These can be marketers, marketing platforms, affiliate marketing forums, online job posting services, etc.
- Retention bonuses – affiliates ask that you offer them additional incentives if you introduce them to networks.
Why you shouldn’t limit your budget?
In many organizations, it’s hard to predict exact results, so their marketing budget is constantly set. Affiliate marketing is a completely different matter. Affiliate marketing is based on the principle of performance marketing, which means that you only pay for results.
Thus, you pay your affiliates only after your product becomes popular. Always, marketing costs will exceed profits. You win because you earn proportionally, even if the amount of commissions to be paid to partners exceeds the approved budget. Thus, affiliate marketing is a source of high ROI.
To get an accurate ROI, it is important not to miss any details. For example, consider the costs of affiliate marketing software, banner creation, and landing page development if you outsourced, as well as your affiliate commissions.
Let’s say your affiliate program generated $5,000 in revenue and your total expenses were $3,000. Let’s calculate the ROI using the formula: $5,000 – $3,000) / $3,000 x 100 = 67%. After calculating your ROI, you can use it to evaluate each of your affiliates and identify potential for growth.
It’s hard to imagine that someone will voluntarily give up further profit because their monthly budget is exceeded. If you exceed your affiliate payout budget in a particular month, you can borrow money from the next month’s budget to make up the difference. The adjusted affiliate marketing budget will bring even more profit.
Conclusion
As you can see, affiliate marketing is not the most expensive channel. However, it does require you to budget money, which depends on many factors. Let’s say your goal is to make a profit from affiliate marketing. To achieve this, you need appropriate resources and professional support, which of course costs money. Affiliate networks provide you with affiliate directories and help you manage your program. While SaaS platforms offer the same services, SaaS solutions are more transparent and cost-effective in the long run than affiliate network solutions.
Hire qualified staff to manage the affiliate program and communicate with affiliates, making sure your affiliate program is visible. Affiliate marketing will do the rest for you if you have a great product.