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Getting Started with Affiliate Research

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Looking for new referrals to boost traffic and broaden your audience? Well, look no further!

In this article, we'll introduce you to how to get started using Similarweb's powerful affiliate research tools to help you identify, qualify, and monitor affiliate opportunities to optimize your marketing strategies.

How it works

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Step 1: Discover Top Affiliates

As an affiliate manager, you'll want to build a portfolio of the best affiliates to drive relevant traffic to your website.

In the Affiliate Research module, use the Find Affiliate tool to conduct your search for new affiliate partners that are associated with your target keywords, an industry of interest, or your direct competitors.

 
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  • Find Affiliates by Keyword: One of the easiest ways to discover new affiliates is to start by identifying the websites that your target keywords are driving traffic to.

    Based off the keyword, Similarweb returns a list of sites gaining traffic from the term and from similar terms. Take a close look and shortlist the websites that meet your potential partner criteria. Then, research and analyze their affiliates. Try it now!

  • Find Affiliates by Industry - Find the best referral websites in your industry using a more targeted approach to the discovery of affiliates that rank highly in your industry.

    Looking at referral traffic at the industry level can help you discover relevant affiliate opportunities and top referral domains sending traffic to websites in your specific industry. Once you've found some affiliates of interest, add them to partner lists. Try it now!

  • Find Affiliates by Competitor: Find who your competitors are partnering with for referral traffic. Targeting your competitor’s affiliate strategy is probably one of the oldest tricks in the book, and definitely one of the most effective.

    Reveal exactly who the competition is getting the most referral traffic from and just how well those referral visits perform through the Affiliate Engagement Score. Try it now!

 

As you identify new affiliates using these tools, it's extremely useful to create partner lists. Simply select the box next to each affiliate of interest, and click Create New List .

Partner Lists are an easy and convenient way to keep your most important affiliates in one place, and to compare and monitor key metrics like MoM change, clicked vs non-clicked, and more.

Try Partner Lists now!

 

Step 2: Analyze Affiliates

The Analyze Affiliates tool helps you to evaluate affiliates based on traffic volume and traffic sources. Use the data and insights in these pages to get an in-depth understanding of the full competitive landscape for any affiliate in worldwide markets.

  1. From the sidebar navigation, select Analyze Affiliates.

  2. Enter an affiliate website. Click +Compare to add up to 4 more websites.

  3. The Website Performance page provides an overview of the traffic insights for the analyzed site(s).

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    Key Insights: As an Affiliate Manager you want your partner websites to have as much traffic and visits as possible, so they can deliver traffic to your own site. Sites with a higher average visit duration, rather than bounce rate, would also signify a high performance

  4. Navigate to the Outgoing Traffic page.

    Key Insights: View the total outgoing visits to these domains, the industries that this website is most successful at sending traffic to, and the total number of domains that this site refers traffic to. Check where the analyzed sites are seeing the most traffic by looking at the Outgoing Traffic metrics.

    Tip: Outgoing Traffic can help an affiliate manager prevent being subject to fraud. Ie: they can scan through the outgoing URLs to ensure the domains are reputable.

  5. Navigate to the Similar Sites page.

    The SimilarSites feature provides a quick snapshot of domains that are similar in content, audience, keywords, and backlinks

    Tips: 1) Analyze your domain and see the other websites that users visit or 2.) Analyze a potential affiliate to find other similar affiliates users also visit.

 

Step 3: Monitor Affiliate Partners

Once you’ve identified the affiliates of interest, creating and monitoring Affiliate Lists is an important step. Stay ahead of your competition by monitoring Affiliate performance for you vs. your competitors throughout your campaign.

The Monitor Partners tool makes it easy to view and monitor all of the Affiliate Lists you have created, and lists that have been shared with you, in a centralized location. View high-level metrics and drill down and see more in-depth data for each listed Affiliate.

  1. From the sidebar menu, go to the Affiliate Research module and select Monitor Affiliates.

  2. Click See All Partners in a list to get the full view of traffic insights for a saved list.

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Explore the insights for each of the domains in your partner lists. Analyze traffic share, change, volume, trends, and more.  To drill down further on a specific Affiliate, click the Affiliate link in the table and access the Overview page for that list item.

Learn more about monitoring your partner lists.

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