One of the main jobs of an affiliate program is to bring in as many affiliates as it can. Affiliates generate traffic, and traffic means profit. To make that happen, networks pour dollars by the kilo into every kind of advertising — and then make one basic mistake that slices a huge chunk off all that effort. It costs them affiliates, and it costs them profit. Fix that one basic thing, and the network gets more affiliates, and more profit to go with them.
The mistake is as old as the market itself. Verticals have changed, payouts have changed, even the messengers have changed, and the mistake hasn’t gone anywhere. What is it? And how do you avoid it the right way?
Manual approval of affiliate registrations
With manual approval, the affiliate has to enter their contact details on the network’s site and describe their traffic sources. Then nothing happens. The managers look at the application, and the affiliate looks at this:
Once the application is in, the affiliate has to wait for a manager to get back to them. How long? Sometimes an hour. Sometimes a day. Sometimes a week. And sometimes forever. We’re not the only ones who’ve written about this pain: back in the day, Partnerkin ran a whole article on slow approvals.
How happy is an affiliate going to be with a partnership that starts like this? Here’s a comment one affiliate left under that same article:
It’s not so bad when the network at least shows a manager’s contact: you can message them and somehow take matters into your own hands. But often there isn’t even that.
The second half of that comment is a gem in its own right: there were outfits out there whose sign-up form let you enter an ICQ number but not a Telegram handle. ICQ has since shut down for good. I suspect that field is still alive and well on a couple of forms out there.
Why do networks go for manual approval?
There are real reasons for it. Affiliate networks don’t like showing their offers and payouts to just anyone on the internet. Many offers go only to experienced affiliates. The logic is clear: an offer list with payouts is a ready-made cheat sheet for competitors, and a private offer you spent six months prying out of an advertiser isn’t something you want to hand to the first stranger who shows up with bot traffic.
So there’s no getting around manual approval?
Manual approval is a tool for solving that problem. But that same tool wrecks the results of the funnel that’s supposed to turn an interested affiliate into one who makes the network money.
I’ll be honest: AlterCPA Pro and Cloud have that checkbox too. For a long time they didn’t, on principle: I considered manual approval a bad habit, and I still do. But the clients were dead set on suffering, so in version 30 I gritted my teeth and added registration confirmation. One checkbox in the settings, and new affiliates sign up as inactive and wait for a manager to confirm them. It’s off by default, and nobody’s making you turn it on. I wouldn’t.
Because there are other ways to keep what’s good about manual approval and drop what’s bad.
A welcome Telegram bot for affiliate networks
How does it work? After signing up, the affiliate sees a message along the lines of: “Check your Telegram, your personal manager has already messaged you.”
Waiting in the affiliate’s DMs is a message from the account of one of the network’s managers, sent automatically. For example: “Hi! I’m your personal manager at the Akvolabean affiliate network. So we can get to know each other a bit better, take the survey at @NotAScamBot — it takes a minute, tops.”
The message goes out in the affiliate’s language. And to stay clear of anti-spam filters, we tweak the wording a little every time.
The survey bot invites the user to take a short survey. It can have any number of questions. Best to keep it to five or fewer so you’re not eating up the affiliate’s time: experience, traffic source, vertical, GEO and how many leads a day. A manager doesn’t need more than that for a first conversation anyway. Every question comes with answer options; there’s no typing in free-form answers. That also saves the affiliate time and lifts survey conversion. At the end, the affiliate gets a thank-you, and their manager gets a filled-in survey.
The bot doesn’t come bundled with the engine: we build one for each network individually, with your texts and your questions. What you’ll need to prepare to order one is covered in the article about the bot.
What the bot gets you
The upshot: the affiliate already has a personal manager’s contact. The link to the bot came from that manager’s account. The affiliate filled in the survey quickly and interactively. And if the manager also takes a quick look at the application and writes back, then life is just grand.
Ideally, the affiliate gets access to their network account right after signing up. You can hide the sensitive stuff, meaning the important offers and the payout amounts. Or simply make every offer available only on request to a manager. But once you’ve let someone get a feel for the interface, the network’s conversion goes up considerably, and the affiliate walks away with a clear picture of the network and a good opinion of it.
The bottom line
Using the bot means protecting confidential information with a human face. A good affiliate network always looks after its affiliates. Let them get a taste of that care right from the first hello, instead of posing as some strict, closed-door organization that it’s an honor and a privilege to be admitted to.
An affiliate doesn’t wait a day. An affiliate opens the next tab. So if your hand still reaches for that registration confirmation checkbox, go ahead and tick it — consider yourself warned. But when new affiliates start slipping off to the network next door, I’ll have exactly one answer: I told you so.