Accelerating Affiliate Marketing Kulwal puts in perspective the significance of performance-based marketing.

Affiliate networks play a crucial role in effective affiliate marketing programs. As affiliate marketing has evolved to become more sophisticated and complex, both advertisers and publishers turn to affiliate networks to help manage their programs. In addition to providing tools to help plan, execute, and measure affiliate campaigns, affiliate networks are also the leading way advertisers find new affiliate partners.

Admitad was founded in Heilbronn in 2009. Since then it has grown into one of the global affiliate marketing companies with its offices worldwide. It expanded its market penetration to India in 2015 and is proud to be one of the top three affiliate networks in the country, claims its India Chief Executive Officer - Neha Kulwal.

Can You Spotlight the Value Admitad Delivers?

admitad is a global Cost-per-Action affiliate network, originally launched back in 2010.It is a global network with the largest volumes coming from Russia, the United States, Western Europe, the UK and India. The brands come from a number of different industries and verticals, leveraging admitad flexible in-house platform.

admitad gets regular campaigns with ecommerce, travel, finance, mobile, online games etc. It delivers a diverse range of valuable perks, including weekly prepayment facilities for publishers, a full-service with an individual account manager assigned to each client, exclusive and top-rated publishers worldwide, a great number of internationally recognized brands, detailed and transparent reports as well as a huge amount of useful tools and advanced technologies, comprising anti-cookie technology, cross-device tracking, lost orders, and fingerprint tracking.

How Do You Enable Publishers and Advertisers?

Admitad is always looking for new business practices and developing current ones in order to offer publishers and advertisers the cutting edge in the affiliate marketing industry. Admitad flexibility is crucial for ensuring efficiency in its innovative and technological approach to adapt to ever changing affiliate business dynamics and to constantly overcome the most pressing challenges in the whole marketing industry.

Uniting publishers and advertisers on the one platform admitad gives an entry to the global market to them, secures and increases their revenues and helps to optimize their marketing strategies with the help of various tools for both groups and a clear system of analytics and anti-fraud.

So Clients Have to Set Up Their Own Programs?

No. We are the only affiliate network in India that helps its clients set up their affiliate programs, manage, recruit and take the campaign to the next level. Technology, transparency and tools are the three must haves for affiliate marketing business, which we provide to our customers, give an added advantage to us. Also, we have our in-house tracking platform unlike other networks that use third party technology platforms. The affiliate programs which we help create caters to 15 per cent of overall sales for any advertiser.

What AreThe Most Pressing Issues in Affiliate Marketing Today?

Finding a niche is one of the most daunting steps in an affiliate marketer's journey. It's a step that can't be overlooked or rushed through. Indicating the most profitable niches, we should mention that admitad covers many topics and has tied up for different product and service categories. The following are some of the categories, under which admitad has got regular campaigns: ecommerce,· mobile, online games and services ( finance, travel etc.).

The biggest issue in the industry is the inability for companies to scale their affiliate programs after setting it up on their own. A small business may not have enough human or technical resource to track their sales as customers shift to different devices. So, it is tough to scale if one is working with individual publishers as there are validation, invoicing and payment issue, publishers' recruitment difficulties and many others. All this can be done by an affiliate partnership channel, as admitad is doing for its exclusive clients like 1mg, Emirates, Bewakoof, Flintobox, etc. This is what we are aiming at and bringing in as a change in the industry.

What's The Road Ahead for You?

We are already among the top three networks in India. Admitad India engulfs the company's Middle East and AsiaPacific operations. The overall market size in India is $7.8 billion and would be up to 5x of that size in next five years. So, the opportunity is tremendous as Internet penetration is on the rise in India. With expectation of 50,000+ publishers, 1,000 advertisers by the end of 2017, UAE, Indonesia, Singapore and Malaysia is on the expansion map.

Generally speaking, admitad global expansion strategy should help to provide a fuel for a continued growth and innovation in the affiliate marketing space. It gained not only transactions but also an invaluable brand recognition, regular payout system with pre-payment options, responsive customer care team, various niche support, fraud-proof analysis and customer engagement while efficiently delivering the type of content demanded by today's sophisticated online consumer. It is exactly the type of network that could put long-standing industry titans on the defensive.

(This article was first published in the August issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here)