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When running a partner promotion, you want to have sufficient tracking in place in order to determine the performance of each partner.
Tracking partner performance can be done using several methods. First, you can use the Google URL builder to generate custom campaign URL’s for each partner. Each partner will use their specific URL when promoting the campaign. Inside of Google Analytics, you would be able to track traffic going to these URL’s under your campaigns.
Pro-Tip: Viralsweep's referral source tracking feature will track these links and show you how many people entered from them.
Another option is to use Viralsweep’s custom tracking links tool, which allows you to create your own bit.ly URL’s that you can supply each of your partners with, and then you can track clicks and entries coming from each link directly within Viralsweep.
While impressions or visits to the page are important, the most important factor is determining the number of conversions—or in this case, entrants—each partner is driving to the campaign.
This way you can reach out to each partner throughout the campaign to let them know how they are performing, and if they are underperforming, you can encourage them to increase their media plan.
Marketing is planned before the promotion begins, and is laid out in the partnership agreement that everyone signs. This agreement will let each partner know what their role is when it comes to marketing.
The great thing about co-marketing is that you really don’t need to think too hard about how you are going to market the campaign. Partners also should not have to spend any money on advertising.
When you have multiple partners doing this at one time, you should start to see a surge of traffic and entries.
If a campaign is running and all partners have promoted it and it is underperforming, or a specific partner is underperforming, there could be several reasons for this.
If a partner underperforms, it could be that the prize was not a good fit for their audience, so their audience is not converting as well as they had expected. On rare occasions, it could be that the partner was not upfront about the number of conversions they expected to drive to the campaign from their list.
If everything is properly planned before launching the promotion, your partner promotion should not underperform to the point of becoming a lost cause.
Our advice: Be upfront and honest about your audience size, and how many people you think will convert. In addition, be sure to ask all partners to be upfront and honest about this, and get potential estimates from each partner on conversions they think they will drive to the campaign.
A good way to figure this out is to look at your email list size, and then look at your email campaigns. What % of your list is opening your campaigns? What % of your list is clicking through on your email campaigns?
If you have 100,000 emails on your list but you only get a 2%-3% open rate, you should not be expecting to drive 10,000 entries to your campaign.
Paid advertising, like Facebook ads or influencer posts can be really successful for driving traffic and entries to your campaign.
However, Lauren says:
“I’ve only known partners to do paid media when they are suddenly and unexpectedly underperforming, and that’s just out of respect for the other partners.”
She continues, "Sometimes, a smaller partner will include paid in their marketing plan, but it’s rare."
Since there are many partners working on a campaign together and everyone has an audience, paid advertising shouldn’t be necessary as long as everyone has a sizeable audience to begin with.
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