The Affluent Link Scanner is a revenue recollection and competitor intelligence tool. This article walks you through Link Scanner strategies.
- Defend your evergreen and most reliable referral URLs
- Recover lost revenue from 404s and broken links
- Automate competitor intelligence and identify new opportunities
- Discover new publishers and content sites
- Identify the best spots to promote specific products
- Maintain link quality
- Streamline and audit network migrations
To upgrade you Link Scanner account please contact support@affluent.io
Why: Defend your evergreen and most reliable referral URLs
Established and high-ranking articles are vital to affiliate programs, so protecting them from link rot and competitors is essential.
How: The likelihood is you know your ‘cash cow’ links*. Add your top performers to Affluent Link Scanner, and run a scan.
Key findings to checkout:
- ‘Link Status’, are you seeing ‘404’ or ‘Out of Stock’? These error messages mean your brand is losing high intent shoppers to broken links.
- ‘Brand Domain’: make sure your domain is listed, if not the affiliate link isn’t going to your brand. Has it been poached? Or is the link going to a reseller’s website?
Top Tip: Run this report regularly with the same links, adding new top-performing URLs as they emerge, for ongoing monitoring.*
*If you don’t, you can log in to Affluent and create a “Top Referral URLs” report (Category = Referral URL and Metrics = Revenue/Orders). With Affluent constantly monitoring your top Referral URLs or Referral URL trends is easy.
Why: Recover lost revenue from 404s and broken links
Losing revenue to link rot is unnecessary with the Affluent Link Scanner. Don’t rely on time-intensive, manual work to identify and action non-performing links.
How: Enter your program’s referral URLs and run the Affluent Link Scanner. Include links that have previously performed, but might not currently be performing*, these are the most likely to have suffered link rot. Top report column to action:
- Link Status: sort this column to surface 404s and Out of Stock items.
Top Tip: Use the ‘Position on page’ to prioritize your follow-up, start with links with the highest position on the page (lower the number, higher the position on the page).
*find these trends by creating an Affluent Report with ‘Previous Period’ and ‘Trend %’ metric variants to see which Referral URLs have suddenly declined i.e. have the greatest percentage decrease.
Why: Automate competitor intelligence and identify new opportunities
With the Affluent Link Scanner finding your competitors' affiliate links is as easy as a couple of clicks. Take advantage of your competitors’ 404s or out-of-stock links to build relationships with publishers.
How: Create a new scan using ‘Help me find pages’ and enter your competitors' keywords ‘e.g. Cruella’s Coats Reviews'. Leave the website filter blank to search Google, or search a specific website by entering the domain. How to action the full scan:
- Start with 404s and broken links, approach publishers to swap out rotten links with new affiliate links for your program
- Identify high potential links for displacement opportunities and build a relationship with the publisher.
Top Tip: Approach a publisher with 404 or out-of-stock product links on their domain to help them avoid lost publisher commission (friends don’t let friends miss out on commission!).
Why: Discover new publishers and content sites
With 'help me find pages' you can easily discover top-ranking publishers and new content site opportunities.
How: Create a scan and select 'help find me pages'. If you're looking for a new beauty publisher try 'best beauty blog' or a new partner in the outdoor vertical try 'hiking gear reviews'. Affluent will return the Google search results that rank highest for those keywords. The scan will return affiliate link information on the top content site, the products they promote, and the 'health' of those links (where products are out of stock or links are broken).
Top Tip: When auditing a program this is a great way to quickly find if a brand is featured on top-ranking content sites and if they're not easily identify opportunities for program expansion.
Why: Identify the best spots to promote specific products
Are you looking to promote a specific product, but not quite sure where? Use the Affluent Link Scanner to identify the best possible links and locations.
How: Create a new scan and select ‘help me find pages’. Enter the product you want to promote e.g. “swimsuit reviews”, and optionally a website. Affluent will return the top URLs for those keywords either from Google, or your chosen website. Select ‘All shown’ or ‘All Results’. You can run multiple searches (e.g. red swimsuit reviews), and add additional links to your scan.
Top Tip: Search a specific website ahead of chatting with a publisher to identify specific pages and links that would work for your program.
Why: Maintain link quality
Just like link rot, links pointing to the wrong products lose high intent shoppers and revenue.
How: Create a scan with pages that link to your products and open the full report. To review just the affiliate links that point to your website, use the ‘Brand Domains’ filter at the top of the page.
Focus on the ‘Product Name’, ‘Product Description’, and ‘Image’ columns to audit link quality.
Top Tip: Use the ‘Product Image’ column to quickly scan what product the affiliate link is pointing to.
Note: Product information is not always available, but Affluent will always display it when possible.
Why: Streamline and audit network migrations
Chasing down referral links from your old network(s) is time-consuming and can feel like hunting for a needle in a haystack; speed up the process and monitor progress with Affluent.
How: Create a scan with your high-value URLs and click ‘Run Scan’. Filter the scan for only links pointing to your brand domain (at the top of the report) to focus on the affiliate links sending traffic to your website (we’re not looking at competitors for this scan). Focus on the ‘Network’ column.
- Before the migration, this column will only show the ‘old’ network
- During the migration, you will see a split between the ‘old’ and ‘new’ networks.
- By the end of migration, the ‘Network’ column should only show links on the ‘new’ network.
Top Tip: As you progress through the migration, use the ‘Network’ filter to include only links for the ‘old’ network, that’s your ‘to-do’ list, it will show only the links that still need to be migrated.
Why: Measure advertiser Share of Voice over time
Understanding your referral footprint across different partners, or top search keywords can inform whether or not your efforts are paying off and how the landscape is changing over time.
How: For a ‘Top Search Keywords Share of Voice’ Scan, select ‘Help me Find Pages’ enter your top search keywords, and leave the ‘Website’ blank (to search Google). For a ‘Partner Share of Voice’ scan, enter your keywords and the specific partner’s domain. The Scan Overview will break down your Share of Voice compared to competitors.
Top Tip: Run the same report a month later to monitor changes or after a publisher outreach campaign to measure how your efforts affected Share of Voice.