Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate Marketing is a business cooperation between a merchant and a publisher.

In this partnership, the merchant is marketing his application or website through an affiliate who is redirecting users to the merchant’s product. The merchant is therefore paying a commission to the publisher according to a predefined payment metric. In digital advertising, these usually are cost-per-click, cost-per-lead, or cost-per-sale.

Technically, affiliate marketing is working with tracking technologies. These are necessary for merchants to clearly identify which affiliate redirected a user to their website or application.

The way this identification works varies depending on the used platform. In mobile advertising, the identification usually works via device IDs or advertising IDs which are individual for each device. In conventional display advertising, it usually works via cookie tracking. Equipped with these technologies, merchants always know where their users came from.

If an app publisher wants to increase the reach of his app with an affiliate-partnership, he needs to integrate the software development kit (SDK) of his affiliate. Nonetheless, too many integrated SDKs could have a negative impact on the usability of an application. This is a fact every publisher has to be aware of.