Rakuten Marketing  – continued investment in affiliate technology

The affiliate landscape is evolving at a rapid pace. Publishers are consistently creating innovative ways to promote advertisers and their products; and advertisers are looking to reach new and existing customers, throughout the increasingly complex path to purchase.

At Rakuten Marketing, we understand the challenges that both advertisers and publishers face in reaching and engaging consumers. That’s why we’ve been busy working on new product releases and enhancements to existing tools that make the world of affiliate marketing a little easier.

Tools for Advertisers

Cadence
Cadence, our proprietary attribution and insights tool is now available to all Rakuten Marketing clients at no additional cost.  Advertisers can now gain greater transparency and uncover actionable insights to drive better performance against the entire consumer journey

Multiple Products Feeds
The multiple product feed feature delivers a new level of audience segmentation to affiliate marketing that enable strategic content customisation based on what marketers know about their audiences.

The latest enhancement allows users to continue to upload files utilising the same process as existing merchandiser feed files, while expanding an advertiser’s ability to:

• Upload feeds in different languages and currencies, helping both advertisers and publishers increase their global presence
• Separate “promotional” and “marketplace” products from main feeds
• Create feeds for a subset of products associated with a promotion, season, sale or holiday-themed offer
• Create customised groupings, such as those containing high margin products or inventory intended for liquidation

Flexible Commissioning
At Rakuten Marketing, we understand that an affiliate program needs to suit individual advertiser and business goals. That’s why our tracking technology can be adapted to track and commission differently on:

• New vs. existing customers
• Coupon vs. non-coupon code use
• Full price vs. discounted items

Paid placement insights
The Paid Placement Insights (PPI) Interface within the advertiser dashboard is a new tool that provides advertisers and account managers with more transparency into placement performance. Through the PPI Interface, advertisers can log placements with publishers and the commission increases or flat fees associated, and get campaign specific reporting that looks at results and ROI for that placement.

Tools for Publishers 

Automate
Automate instantly turns standard links into deep links!

Released in August 2016, Automate allows publishers to cut out the manual steps and automatically create commission-generating deep links from the URLs they publish. Automate allows publishers to setup several scripts, each with U1 value of their choice.

We’ve recently launched Global Automate, a version of Automate now available to all international publishers. 

Curate
Last year, we also launched Curate, our product discovery tool where publishers can create product showcases from all of their approved advertisers and publish them to their website. Product highlights include dynamic filtering; customisations; and search box functionality.

Throughout the first half of 2017, we’ve made some updates to make Curate even better!

These updates include:

• The ability to autofill and backfill showcases with dynamic or hand-selected content
• Call-to-action buttons such as ‘buy now’ can now be added to showcases
• Publishers are able to add a deep-linked product into showcases to include images or products not available through an advertisers product feed

The Curate UI has also been translated into 5 languages including Japanese and allows publishers to set the currency and language they want to search for products in.

Bookmarklet:
Bookmarklet is a browser extension that enables publishers to create tracked affiliate links without having to access the publisher dashboard.  Web content editors can browse an advertiser’s own site and when they see a product they wish to promote, they simply create a deep link using Bookmarklet.

Bookmarklet even makes it easier for publishers to curate galleries or Pin items directly to Pinterest!

PayPal payments to help globalisation

We’ve been working diligently to help our clients expand beyond their borders and into new markets. To further facilitate expansion, we’re able to pay publishers in over 200 markets via PayPal.

Want to find out more about Rakuten Marketing’s Affiliate technology and products? Visit https://rakutenmarketing.com/en-au/ or reach out to rm-salesapac@mail.rakuten.com