Review affiliates can both grow and hurt your bottom line. It’s how you work with them and what the goals of your affiliate program are. Not all affiliate programs have the goal of making money, some are there to burn budgets or keep executives and investors happy. Review affiliates are not only mid-funnel touchpoints, they can be top-funnel and bottom-funnel. In some cases they can be ROI negative even if the review is a good one.
Here’s how we evaluate these partners for our affiliate management services and their level of value add. You’ll find the reasons why they get the high, medium, or low value label and ways you can work with them to meet your company’s goals.
Side note: ORM below means online reputation management which is when negative articles and features show up in search results.
- Review only and no SEO ORM issues – Low value to no value
- Review only and there are SEO ORM issues – Temporary high value
- Review only and an engaged audience – Temporary high value
- Review only and no audience – Low value to no value
- Review + comparisons – Medium value
- Review + non-branded listcicles – High and medium value
- Nonindexed reviews + non-branded listcicles – High value
Review Only and No SEO ORM Issues
If the affiliate only does a review of your brand, and nothing bad shows up when you type your company’s name into Google, this is a low value touchpoint. As your own traffic grows, their traffic grows. As your traffic shrinks, so does theirs. When Google or YouTube updates and replaces their review, their traffic magically disappears because they never sent you customers. They intercepted your own customers.
In this situation you do not currently have any issues with your company’s reputation, so having a positive affiliate review will not benefit your brand as much as an ambassador or actual customer in this same space. By replacing the affiliate review with a non affiliate you no longer have to pay commissions on customers already in the shopping process and save money on your bottom line.
Pro-tip: Even if the touchpoint was 70% new customers, it is not new customer acquisition because the review affiliate didn’t send the customer to you. They intercepted the new customers and took credit for them. Any partner at this touchpoint would be 70% new customers making it low value.
This is not a no-value touchpoint because a review does add credibility. But it is a low value touchpoint because a non-affiliate review is more profitable as you only pay one time or you got the review for free. When the review is an affiliate you have to pay again for customers already in your own shopping process via commissions, network fees, and affiliate manager salaries or bonuses.
Ways work with these:
- Offer lower commissions since the touchpoint is a lower value.
- Request a no-index meta robots on the review so it cannot rank in search engines for your brand + reviews.
- Require non-branded traffic like exposure in a listcicle and on competitor’s reviews, and give the partner separate tracking links for the review and the non-branded. The goal is to track how much traffic is branded and how much is potentially new customer acquisition.
Review Only and There Are SEO ORM Issues
This is a temporary high-value touchpoint, but long term low value. When you need to get bad search results buried, affiliates are always happy to jump in for these interception touchpoints. It is low effort and high revenue return for them.
By intercepting your own customers searching for you by brand name, they make money without having to bring you customers or traffic. The benefit for you is getting new reviews going live that have the ability to replace bad PR quickly. While affiliates replace the bad search results, your SEO team can work on the online reputation management problems.
It’s a short term win and a form of parasite SEO using their domain authority to rank for your brand, but an effective one for combatting negative PR. It buys you the time you need to get your branded top ten results back to properties you own. The other value-add here is that potential customers won’t be exposed to the bad, and this can help keep them shopping.
How to work with these partners:
- Pay a full commission as you currently need them more than they currently need you.
- Get a deal and agreement signed with the review site that the reviews must be kept up-to-date and accurate, and that eventually you’ll be reducing the commissions or removing them if they don’t drive non-branded traffic too. Give them extra time to get the non-branded live as you need them now and they do not need you right now. If they offset the review traffic with mostly non-branded, do not reduce their commissions. They’re not high-value.
- Once the ORM issue is done, work to replace affiliate reviews with non-affiliate reviews so you can keep more of your bottom line revenue, and cut a deal with these partners to get top-funnel, non-review traffic from them.
Review Only and an Engaged Audience
When an influencer or blogger has an engaged audience they can give you short bursts of value-adding traffic. The subscribers to their channel or newsletter, and readers that come back for new content will learn about or be reintroduced to your brand which is high-value, even if they’ve previously shopped.
The review affiliate drives awareness and first touchpoints, and they also give a reminder you exist and it may be time to repurchase product when the new review launches.
The value from the review does disappear after the initial touchpoint making the review low-value as it shows up for your branded search. If the only traffic seeing the review is your brand + review in Google or Bing, it stays a low value touchpoint. But you can turn that around and keep it high value by working with them in a smart way.
How to work with these partners:
- Give a unique URL that does full commissions for the first week or two, then reduce the commission for that URL once it is review only.
- Keep the commissions full if they also add you to listcicles and value-adding posts that bring traffic you don’t have access to without them, and let them keep the review commissions at full fee.
- Find the rate at which their audience grows, and once enough new people are on the list and your customers are ready to repurchase, have them do follow up reviews and content to gain new exposure and a reminder to repurchase.
Review Only and No Audience
We normally decline these affiliates from the programs we manage as there is no value in them compared to review affiliates with an audience. The same is for review affiliates that also have non-branded traffic, we allow them in. If they’re only going to do a review, they’re only going to intercept your own customers searching for “brand + review.”
Instead let affiliates that will add top-funnel have these, and work with your SEO, influencer, and ambassador teams to get non-affiliate traffic in these places so your company does not need to pay for people already in your sales funnel multiple times.
How to work with these partners:
- Pay reduced commissions because they do not introduce customers to you, even if it is 70% new customers viewing the review.
- Lower their click on the attribution timeline so if a top-funnel or mid-funnel touch point happens, the partner with more value gets the commission.
- Try to get them to place you on competitors’ reviews and places where you can get value, and do your best to get some benefit from them.
Review + Comparisons
Review sites that also do comparison copy (you vs. a competitor) are low-value to medium-value. Unlike a review only, consumers on these pages are stuck trying to decide which brand to go with. If the comparison favors your brand, or shares details that are deal breakers for consumers, that could be the tipping point for the conversion.
With that said, these are all customers already in your own funnel. It’s more value than a review only, but not customer acquisition as they do not introduce customers to you. They do help the customer make a decision, so it is part of the customer acquisition process.
They intercept them mid-funnel but do help convince them to shop. It is very hard to get non-affiliate comparisons, so this is a value-adding interception where a review only is not as valuable since they’re a dime a dozen.
How to work with these partners:
- As you learn why consumers choose you over the specific competitor, make sure your selling points are highlighted in the comparison.
- Try to win them over and as you improve, make sure their reviews and comparison selling points like the cons list get updated regularly.
- Make sure they have access to your products and services so they get first hand experience and you can keep yourself on good terms with them.
Review + Non-branded Listcicles
Non branded listcicles are the “best XY for 123” types of lists. They can be solutions by need or user demographic, or a standard list of the top options. Being featured here does not rely on your brand to have traffic, it adds value. Being a top feature or best choice builds your brand. These sites have a better chance at ranking because their reviews are normally in depth and niche.
If the traffic you get is all non-branded from those lists, it is high-value. If it is a mix of branded and non, chances are it is medium-value adding. It depends on how much of both exist.
Bonus-tip: Talk to your SEO team as these sites almost always do awards to get backlinks. Before you approve using their badge and boosting their SEO through the award badge, have your SEO clear the backlink as some of the sites will be toxic SEO wise and not something you want to link to.
To work with these partners:
- Pay higher commissions to be featured on their lists, or cut hybrid deals for guaranteed placements with media fees as long as they’re ranking.
- Send keyword and topic research as their niche authority can rank for multiple long tail keyword variations.
- Have them update your selling points as soon as you learn why people choose your brand so you can try to get more click throughs from the lists.
- See how you can get highlighted through banners, starbursts, and bolded boxes to help your feature stand out on the list.
Nonindexed Reviews + Non-branded Listcicles
This is some of the highest value traffic in the affiliate space. They don’t try to intercept your own traffic because their reviews cannot index in the search engines. What you get from them is their listcicles and competitor traffic coming through the affiliate link to convert on your site.
This is high-value and likely customer acquisition on a performance only basis, or customer win back campaigns. I’ve seen where customers leave an SAAS client, and a few years later they need a better solution. They find the list and see the familiar name (our client), then click through and discover the client has updated their tool sets. Now they come back and convert again. Working with these partners is the same as the section above, so instead of repeating it, I’ll leave it as is.
These are bread and butter partners. Treat them well and support them. It’s worth the effort building the relationship.
Review affiliates on their own are not going to grow your business if you need new customers. They may help convert customers already in your sales funnel, but they’re not going to introduce new ones through reviews only. It is up to you as a business owner or affiliate manager to evaluate each and determine where they fall on the high to low value scale.
I hope this helps clarify if review affiliates add value. Yes, in many cases they do, but the amount of value a review site adds depends on how else they’re promoting you.
