Affiliate marketing has risen from its slightly murky early days to be a sophisticated and powerful channel in the marketing funnel. With more understanding, strategic thinking and innovation on the side of both the affiliates and the clients, it has shaken off its controversial reputation, which owed to the early days where it was muddied by spammers and black operators.

Affiliate marketing, or performance marketing as it is also known, is now a huge industry and a key weapon in the arsenal of many online advertisers. It is growing so fast that it is predicted to be worth $6.8 billion as an industry by 2020. It is a lucrative channel for businesses and advertisers, who are realizing the value of spending billions a year on affiliate partner commissions, as well as for the publishers, bloggers and performance marketers themselves, who are driving valuable traffic to merchants and being rewarded handsomely for their troubles.

An Introduction to Affiliate Marketing

For those unfamiliar with it, affiliate marketing is a simple idea in principle. It an adaptation of traditional advertising, but involves paying commissions to digital marketers who can direct customers to the advertiser’s site. Often they are paid a percentage of the value of the sale, or a fee per lead. Typically, affiliates might be publishers of a magazine site or a blog, email marketers with an active audience of readers, or social media marketers who use their preferred channel to drive relevant traffic. Other affiliate marketers might use PPC and dedicated landing pages to find would-be customers for their advertisers. Pretty much any online channel that offers a route to an audience will have a presence of affiliate marketers.

Amazon offers one of the most popular affiliate programs, with advertisers using links, banners, reviews, display ads, or other media on their channels to promote products sold on Amazon. If a reader clicks on their link, then their purchases made within a certain time-frame are attributed to the affiliate, and they receive a percentage of the sale value.

Why AI has a part to play in Affiliate Marketing

Playing such a key part in the marketing funnel, it’s natural that affiliate marketers, and affiliate marketing managers, would want to make the most of the latest mar-tech developments. Artificial intelligence is already playing an increasingly important role across the digital landscape, which is providing opportunities for improving audience targeting, managing reporting, automating key processes, making communications more efficient, and optimizing design, creative and journeys to conversion.

Let’s look at some of the areas where AI offers opportunities for boosting performance marketing.

Improving communications between networks and publishers

Affiliate marketing is a fast-moving space. Many of the most successful publishers rely on speed to get the most up-to-date content out to their readers or finding the best new deals to promote as quickly as possible.

And for the clients or affiliate networks, they can be dealing with hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of publishers at any one time.

Webgains, an affiliate network since 2004, has partnered with IBM Watson to offer what it calls affiliate marketing’s first ever chatbot. The machine learning-powered personal assistant allows publishers to quickly find the information they need, manage their campaigns, and discover new opportunities, at the same time reducing the workload of the network’s account managers.

Spotting key opportunities for affiliate managers

For overworked account managers, handling thousands of affiliate relationships can be overwhelming. But as well as improving communication channels through chatbots and automated communication tools, AI can also play a crucial part in monitoring performances.

Machine learning can take away a lot of the heavy lifting of manual reporting, allowing the monitoring of these different affiliate properties to be done in a much more efficient and effective manner. Being able to monitor thousands of relationships at scale allows for spotting trends in the data, which can be crucial for affiliate success. This would help account managers to pick out the affiliates that offer the most potential, developing one-to-one relationships earlier, to be able to grow the potential of those key publishers, leading to better results for both parties.