Best practices for affiliate creatives and banners, and brand assets

Cloud Cast TV allows you to provide creatives and marketing material to make it easier for you to promote your website and our products quickly. Below are some best practice guidelines that will help you provide attractive, effective creatives for your posts.

Affiliate-made creatives

In some instances affiliates may want to create their own Creatives or marketing material. To ensure our business or website branding is as consistent as possible in all affiliate communications brand assets include elements of our brand or website such as high-resolution logos, colors, specific copy and guidelines on how to use these on other websites or in banners. You will find pre-made banners in your Back office under creatives.

 Promote online with an additional 100 Custom Banners & Images

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Here are a few additional tips for creating banners:

  • Simplicity is key. Imagery plus one primary message is the most effective!
  • Keep your branding consistent. Banners should employ the same branding as your website, social media accounts, etc.
  • Smaller files load faster. 40kb or less is ideal!
  • Use standard banner sizes. These include (width x height, in pixels) 300×250, 728×90, 300×600, 468×60, and 160×600.
  • Use .PNG format if possible. Otherwise, use standard image formats like .JPG or .GIF.
  • Follow IAB’s Display Advertising Guidelines for the most up-to-date standards on banner sizes and more.

Sharing affiliate referral URLs/links

With AffiliateWP, it’s incredibly easy for your affiliates to generate and share their unique affiliate referral URLs/links anywhere. Below are some commonly asked questions and answers on how they can generate or create their own referral links, and where they can share them.

How do I generate affiliate referral URLs/links?

There are three ways that affiliate referral links can be generated:
  1. The affiliate can add their unique affiliate ID or username to the end of any URL or product page on your website. For example: http://yourwebsite.com/product-1/?ref=123. See more information on affiliate URLs here: Affiliate URLs
  2. The affiliate can generate their own referral link from the Affiliate Area by pasting the page URL from any page on your site into the Page URL field and clicking the Generate URL button
  3. Or, you can use examples- you’ll just need to append their affiliate ID or username to the URLs you provide them.

Example:

Can affiliates still promote my products if they don’t have a website?

Yes! Whether your affiliates have a website or not, they can promote your site and products on social media, offline, or anywhere else using any of the supported affiliate referral URL formats.

How can I  share my site or products specifically through social media?

Affiliates can use their affiliate referral link to promote your products via any social media platform (including Facebook, Twitter, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and more).
When affiliates share their affiliate referral links on any of these platforms, you want to ensure your site and products are showcased properly; all links shared by affiliates in a social media post should display the correct page title or product title, the correct site image or product image, the correct page URL, and/or a correct description. To do this, it’s recommended you use Open Graph tags/social media meta tags throughout your site’s HTML. Each social media platform has crawlers which will look through your site’s HTML and pull the relevant (and correct) information through to the shared link’s post.
The requirements and specifications are slightly different between each social media channel. Below is a list of links to the documentation for some popular social platforms with detailed specs for images and copy, and how to properly include Open Graph tags or meta tags for seamless and effective social sharing.

Can affiliates track the performance of where their marketing efforts are focused?

Yes! Affiliate referral URLs can include a campaign parameter which helps affiliates track and monitor the performance of their affiliate links.
Affiliates can name each campaign in the Affiliate Area when generating an affiliate referral link. The campaign name will be automatically appended to their affiliate referral link. Here are a couple of examples of what the affiliate referral link looks like with a campaign parameter added: 
Your affiliates may wish to use campaigns to place specific affiliate links in specific marketing channels – such as in an email, on a particular social media platform, or on their own website (if they have one).
The campaigns created by the affiliate are visible in the Statistics tab when they are logged in to the Affiliate Area. This tab also shows the following campaign data:
  • The number of visits through a specific campaign referral link
  • How many unique referral links have been used for that campaign
  • Whether the conversion was successful (a referral was generated)
  • And what the conversion rate is for that particular campaign.
Some examples of campaign names an affiliate might use are: “Winter email”, “Twitter January”, “Facebook sale”, “Summer special”, and so on. This could be aligned with the marketing material you provide to your affiliates, or a sale or promotion you have scheduled.
Using this campaign parameter will allow your affiliates to identify where they should focus their marketing efforts for maximum sales and referrals. Read more on how affiliates can set up the campaign parameter in this doc:  How to use affiliate referral URL campaign tracking.