What is an affiliate marketing network?

affiliate marketing networks are online platforms designed to help businesses achieve success in the affiliate marketing space. They provide tools, resources and other services to help affiliates promote products, or services, and earn commissions through those sales. By leveraging the strengths of other web-based businesses, affiliate networks are able to maximize a company's reach by connecting it with relevant affiliates who can drive targeted traffic and generate valuable leads.

At its core, an affiliate marketer provides advertising space or services in return for financial compensation in the form of commission earned from sales referrals/leads. The network acts as an intermediary between advertisers (known as merchants) and publishers (known as affiliates). These networks also provide various services such as tracking availability and performance of campaigns, providing tips on optimizing campaigns, payment processing and marketplace visibility for their merchant programs. By using an affiliate network platform, companies are able to find reliable partners for their business at much lower costs than traditional advertising methods.

Affiliate marketing networks handle all the administrative elements involved in scaled-up performance marketing including payments for clicks, payouts for leads or sales that tracked back to a publisher's active promotions. This saves time from having to search individuals across different platform manually who have expertise in affiliate marketing which could be potentially inefficient use company resources. Furthermore, it reduces errors which can happen if personnel choose different sources of potential affiliate partners all operating off different 'rules of engagement'. To further serve their purposes they would also conduct due diligence on these potential partners making sure they adhere to industry standards and quality assurance guidelines ensuring highest clicks or engagement with quality products and services.