Affiliate Network Breakdown – Top 5 Affiliate Networks

Once you decide to venture into affiliate marketing, you have quite a few choices for the types of offers you can promote. In addition to in-house offers and boutique affiliate networks, you may decide to promote offers on one of the top affiliate networks. Each network has their own specialties and methods for monetizing traffic, so you’ll need to be careful in your decision-making 

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process.

To help you down this path, I have compiled a breakdown of the ways you can make money on the top five affiliate networks.

This information comes from network representatives who kindly responded to a series of email interviews (with the exception of Google, who didn’t respond). The networks are listed in no particular order.

I hope you enjoy the breakdown and don’t forget that you should always pick the network or offer you promote based on how well you think they’ll perform on your website.

Newbie Cheat Sheet

CPA = Cost per Acquisition (typically a sale)
CPC = Cost per Click
CPL = Cost per Lead
CPM = Cost per Mille (1000 impressions)

Commission Junction

If there was an 800-pound gorilla of affiliate networks, CJ would eat it like a light snack. By far, CJ is the largest clearinghouse/marketplace of advertisers and publishers. CJ boasts a diverse network of verticals and some of the best branded advertisers (63 percent of IR500). According to Affiliate Benchmarks, CJ was the publisher’s choice in 2010.

Types of Commissions: CPA, CPC, CPL

Bonuses: Bonuses are “supported”; however, tracking and issuing are the merchant’s responsibility. You’ll want to pay close attention to make sure the merchant is paying when they are supposed to.

Custom Cookies and Commissions: Merchants can choose between 1 – 120 day cookies, as well as offering specific commissions and cookie lengths to publishers. You can negotiate with your merchants for higher commissions and longer cookies.

Seasonal offers and Contests: Seasonal offers are promoted through CJ’s control panel; however, they do not currently provide native support for contests.

What sets them apart?

“Commission Junction offers alternative Pay for Performance options including Pay Per Call and Automated Targeting. Our platform enables a diverse range of possible payout structures set by the merchant. We have over 2,500 merchants and I’ve never seen the exact same payout structures.”

-Commission Junction, Director of Marketing (quote paraphrased from bulleted list)

LinkShare

LinkShare is a leading affiliate network, founded in 1996, and headquartered in New York City.LinkShare boasts a re-designed interface, offering streamlined productivity features for affiliates. With a huge selection of merchants to choose from, you’ll have no shortage of offers to try out on your website.

Types of Commissions: CPA, CPC, CPL, CPM

Bonuses: Fully supported and tracked by either LS account managers and/or merchants.

Custom Cookies and Commissions: Custom cookies are supported and the length is set by the merchant. Custom commissions are supported. You can negotiate with your merchants for higher commissions and longer cookies.

Seasonal Offers and Contests: Seasonal offers are promoted through the LinkShare control panel and contests are natively supported for merchants.

What sets them apart?

“The LinkShare interface for Advertisers (the LinkShare Advertiser Dashboard) was completely redesigned in 2010/2011 offering Advertisers of streamlined productivity features to make them more efficient. A particular emphasis was placed on reporting features including easy access to year-over-year trends at the program level and the individual Publisher level. LinkShare also recently introduced a new ad network for advertisers and publishers called LinkShare Lightning. Unlike traditional affiliate marketing there is no program application process yet advertisers and publishers can decide who they want to work with simply by “including” or “excluding” brands/sites at the click of a button. Lighting will also determine the best performing ads and display those ads more often.”

-LinkShare, Vice President of Marketing

ClickBank

Founded in 1998, ClickBank serves more than 50,000 digital products and 100,000 active affiliate marketers. ClickBank offers a low, one-time product (merchant) activation fee of $49.99 to sell products and offers commissions of up to 75 percent commissions. The cost of entry is low for merchants on ClickBank, so this results in a healthy variety of offers. ClickBank is privately held with offices in Broomfield, Colorado and Boise, Idaho.

Types of Commissions: Cost per sale only. (CPA)

Bonuses: Bonuses are supported, however merchants must track and issue all bonuses themselves, so you’ll want to pay close attention to make sure the merchant is paying when they’re supposed to.

Custom Cookies and Commissions: Custom cookies are not supported. Multi-tiered, custom commissions and whitelists are supported. So basically, you can negotiate with merchants for higher commissions, but not longer cookies.

Seasonal Offers and Contests: ClickBank does not provide native support for merchant contests nor do they promote seasonal offers within their network.

What sets them apart?

“Our payment processing, relationship management (Vendor to Vendor, Vendor to Affiliate) and Fraud Controls are elements that create great advantage for merchants to utilize our network. This is in addition to a large, active affiliate network.”

-ClickBank, Sr. Manager of Marketing Services

Google Affiliate Network

Google started their own affiliate network in 2008 after acquiring “DoubleClick,” one of the first in ad measurement and affiliate marketing. To use the Google Affiliate Network, users must first sign up with AdSense. Google offers a simple, easy to use interface with numerous offers from well-known brands.

Types of Commissions: CPA only.

Bonuses: Bonuses are not natively supported. Bonus tracking and payouts are the responsibility of the merchant.

Custom Cookies and Commissions: Custom cookie length and commissions are supported so you can negotiate with merchants on both of these points.

Seasonal Offers and Contests: Seasonal offers are promoted through the network, but there is no native support for merchants looking to offer affiliate contests.

What sets them apart?

First off, you probably already have an AdSense account so you’re half way to running offers on the network already. Secondly, it’s Google so you know you’re going to have access to the best-of-the-best when it comes to merchant offers.

ShareASale

ShareASale is one of the largest, and due to their relatively low cost of entry, one of the most easily accessible networks for merchants. This results in a wide variety of offers to choose from. ShareASale has been around since 2000, is privately held and boasts a newly designed interface.

Types of Commissions: CPA, CPC, CPL

Bonuses: Fully supported, tracked and issued by ShareASale.

Custom Cookies and Commissions: Custom cookie length and commissions are supported by ShareASale. You can negotiate with your merchants for higher commissions and longer cookies.

Seasonal Offers and Contests: Seasonal offers are supported through the “Holiday Center” of SaS’s control panel. Contests are not supported.

What sets them apart?

“ShareASale has been around for 10+ years but is still operated as a private company which gives us a big advantage in the marketplace. We are able to move quickly and provide advanced tools to

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 Merchants and Affiliates, but we are still a very mature and stable company able to support clients large and small. Our list of tools grows quickly and includes tools that help Affiliates make their own videos (with affiliate links), Merchant videos, widgets, HTML campaigns – and even includes our own proprietary social network specific to ShareASale – the Affiliate Aquarium. Further, Affiliates always know that they are being looked out for as our network is the only major network to take a hard stance regarding Adware – and does not allow any type of downloadable application, toolbar, Adware app, or anything similar to interfere with traffic generated by Affiliates.”

-Brian Littleton, Founder and CEO

I hope you enjoyed this breakdown of the top five affiliate networks. As always, choose your offers based on how well you think they’ll perform on your site.

Keep an eye out for me at PubCon, where I’ll be speaking about how affiliates can use merchant programs to increase earnings on the offers they promote. Thanks for reading!