Improve Your Affiliate

Marketing with
Competitive Intelligence
What you will gain from this report
Whether you’re running your affiliate program in house
or through an affiliate marketing agency, it is critical to
always be looking for new partnership opportunities that
can help build trust for your brand and effectively sell
your product. This report will demonstrate how you can
leverage competitive intelligence to grow and improve
your affiliate marketing program. Learn how to establish a
full competitive set, identify and vet new opportunities, and
effectively benchmark your performance against that of
your competitors.
Step 1: Establish Your Competitive Set
Before you begin to find new affiliate partnerships While you may already have a grasp on which
and analyze your competitors, you’ll first need companies yours typically competes with, there
to build your competitive set, or the companies are often even more competing for the attention of
yours is most likely to compete with for customers. your target customer online. One way to discover
Comparing your company’s performance to that unknown competition is by leveraging competitive
of your competitors is the best way to understand intelligence data. For example, Compete PRO’s
strengths and opportunities. This is especially Related Sites feature allows you to easily explore
important in affiliate marketing since you will likely domains that actual consumers have identified
be going head to head with many of your strongest as similar to your domain based on the content
competitors for the same partnership opportunities. of each site rather than its popularity, creating
Don’t be afraid to include companies that are much unbiased and accurate comparisons.
larger than you in your competitive set. They’ve
been successful for a reason, so following their
marketing best practices may also work for you.

Compete PRO Related Sites Feature

1
Step 2: Identify Potential Opportunities
Once you’ve established which companies make fastest growing referrers. Compete PRO’s Traffic
up your full competitive set, you can start finding Dashboard feature allows you to view a visual heat
new affiliate opportunities right away. A great place map of referral sites and categories of sites that
to start is by analyzing incoming and outgoing are generating traffic at the fastest pace for any of
traffic for your competitors’ websites. your competitors. Fast growth can indicate your
competitors’ new partnerships, affiliate programs,
Unlike local analytics tools, competitive intelligence
or advertisements. Knowing what is working for
tools like Compete PRO can show you which sites
them will help you make smarter decisions about
are driving the most traffic to your competitors as
your own online marketing programs.
well as which sites and categories of sites are the

Compete PRO Traffic Dashboard

2
You can also easily compare incoming share The last step in your initial discovery should
for two of your competitors at the same time to be analyzing your local analytics (e.g. Google
help highlight relevant trends. By knowing which Analytics, Adobe SiteCatalyst, etc.) to see which
competitors are getting more traffic from particular sites are already driving traffic to your site without
sites, you can more easily understand which sites you having to pay for it. While these sites are
your competitors are focusing their own online already sending traffic to your site, an affiliate
marketing efforts on, aiding your research and partnership may help drive even more traffic from
helping to put it in context. those sites. Making use of existing relationships
can be impactful in growing your affiliate program.

Compete PRO Saved Group Incoming Traffic Share Comparison

3
Step 3: Vet Those Opportunities
Once you’ve identified a list of potential opportunities Engagement metrics like page views, pages per
to improve your affiliate marketing program, visit, and average time on site will also be important
you should make sure that those prospective to you as you qualify your potential partners. If their
partnerships will actually pay off for you. Before you users are actively engaged, that can indicate an
contact a potential partner to learn more, you should established level of trust between the site and its
reference unbiased data and vet opportunities at a visitors, which naturally builds some trust in their
high level by looking at basic site metrics. affiliates by association.

By looking at unique visitors (UVs), you can easily You should also be actively engaging with the
estimate the size of a potential affiliate site, and websites of your potential partners. If they have an
setting UV thresholds for who you’ll work with can existing relationship with one of your competitors
help ensure that your affiliate relationships will be and it appears to be working, then you should
as profitable as you need them to be. explore the possibility of creating your own
partnerships with those sites.

Compete PRO Site Summary

4
Step 4: Benchmark Your Performance Against
Your Competition Regularly
An easy and efficient way to keep tabs on your Regularly monitoring your competitors can be
competitors’ affiliate marketing is to use the made even easier with Compete PRO’s new
Saved Groups or Custom Category features in Dashboards feature that can help you showcase
Compete PRO. Creating a group of the sites in your competitors’ weaknesses and help you adjust
your competitive set allows you to easily compare your marketing accordingly. Because Dashboards
all of the referral metrics that you care about. update automatically each month when new
Additionally, you can opt to receive monthly email data is published, you can regularly monitor your
alerts highlighting changes in the data for the sites competitors’ new traffic sources to see if you can
in your Saved Groups. also take advantage of their new partnerships.
You can also create white-labeled PDFs of your
dashboards to share with colleagues and add
annotation widgets to highlight important data
points when sharing.

Compete PRO Customizable Dashboards

5
About Compete
Compete, a Kantar Media company, helps the world’s top brands improve their marketing based on the online
behavior of millions of consumers. Leading advertisers, agencies and publishers rely on Compete’s products
and services to create engaging online experiences and highly profitable advertising campaigns. Compete’s
online panel—the largest in the industry—makes the web as ingrained in marketing as it is in people’s lives.

Compete PRO, Compete’s syndicated offering, is the only online competitive intelligence service that combines
site, search and referral analytics in a single product and user interface to help you outperform the competition
and increase online marketing ROI.

For more information please contact [email protected] or 866-633-8390.

Become a fan on Facebook

Follow us on Twitter

Follow us on Google+

Find us on LinkedIn

Subscribe to us on YouTube