Ever happened that you land on a website only to be haunted by different product ads or promotions all over the webpage? Have you ever wondered that why an informative page web page is filled with all these advertisements and product listings? Are you one of the owners of such websites and are struggling to find the best affiliate marketing plan? No worries then because in this article we will be looking on how to use web scraping to find the best affiliate marketing plans. This will help you monetise the web-traffic at your disposal. You may also want to explore other use cases of web scraping here. Furthermore, if you are worried about web scraping being legal or not then you should check this out to resolve all your queries.
Before we directly jump on using web-scraping for finding our best affiliate marketing plan, first let us go through some basics of affiliate marketing.
Affiliate Marketing
Affiliate marketing has made businesses millions and ordinary people millionaires. We can start understanding affiliate marketing by simplifying it as a scenario in which a seller or a product owner pays an external person for rerouting traffic to his/her product. The external person may use advertisements or references of the product on his web page which will route the traffic to the seller page. If the traffic being sent over the reference link actually makes the conversion
(buys the featured/promoted product), then the external person receives his commission from
the seller for promoting his product.
This idea comes from the combination of the need for promoters to sell more of their product
and the requirement by web page owners of turning their web pages profitable.
Let us understand this process through an example and also go through all the stakeholders involved simultaneously.
Shareholders in Affiliate marketing
The Seller
Let us suppose that you are an owner of a particular watch brand. One of the watches has been getting good responses through online sales. At this point in time, you, as a seller, are looking to improve your profits by getting more relevant traffic to arrive at your product page. For an affiliate seller, best affiliate marketing technique could be finding an affiliate network with many affiliate marketers or finding affiliate marketers with a lot of web traffic.
The Affiliate Network
One day, you happen to meet your friend Mr. N, and he suggests you that he knows a few people who can tell a much wider audience about how good your product is. He is aiming at expanding the scope of your profits. Your friend N here is similar to an affiliate network which provides a platform for sellers and promoters to come in contact with each other. For an affiliate network, best affiliate marketing technique could be connecting affiliate sellers who have high-profit commission on their products with affiliate marketers having high and relevant web traffic.
The Affiliate Marketer
I run a blog page where I have thousands of visitors on my web page. Also, I am friends with the person mentioned above Mr. N. I have always been looking to monetise my web page by cashing on massive web traffic at my disposal. I get contacted by Mr. N as you are also looking to promote your watch. Both of us come to an agreement that if anyone whom I suggest your watch actually ends up buying it, you, as a watch owner, will owe me a small share in profit. I, as a blog page owner, am an affiliate marketer looking to monetise my web traffic. For an affiliate marketer, best affiliate marketing technique is looking for sellers who have products similar to the interest of web traffic at disposal to increase conversion at seller’s end.
Tracking Link
It is kind of a unique link which you will be giving to me to filter down all the customers (who actually bought the products) which navigated from my web page. It helps in calculating the commission amount.
If you are a seller, this article will have something for you in finding a proper affiliate network for your product. In case, you are an affiliate marketer then this article will help you in optimising your profits. If you think that how this can happen then the answer lies in web scraping.
Web scraping for best affiliate marketing?
Web scraping is a technique used to extract large amounts of data from websites that retrieve and save data to a local file on your computer or to a table database. At this point in time, you must be wondering that why are we even talking about web scraping here? Is even web scaping related to affiliate marketing in any way? To answer this query of yours, we will have a look at some of the benefits which web scrappers bring along with them in the world of data-driven marketing.
Benefits of web scraping in affiliate marketing
1. Curating good content for viewers
Massive web traffic is the only resource with affiliate marketers which can earn them profits through affiliate marketing. Quality content on the website is one of the most critical factors in determining high web traffic on a web page. Web scraping can help affiliate marketers to look for current trending topics to write on, different product and services content to compare and show results of etc. Traffic will come to your website only if it has some useful material. Web scraping can be your primary key to this quality content.
2. Getting highly rated/most loved affiliate products
The other way to achieve a best affiliate marketing plan can be choosing the right products that can maximise conversions for you. Suppose you run a sports blog and you select some gardening products to promote on your page, then no doubt you will not be getting many conversions. Traffic that will be coming to your sports blog will naturally be more interested in sports news and events hence gardening products will not even make much of an appeal to them. One should select products which match with the content of your blog. This will result in the right audience reaching out to right products thereby achieving the best affiliate marketing plan and eventually increasing profits. Web scraping can help you get data about different products available with seller onto which you can apply analytical skills to find out the most loved products according to web page content.
3. Finding fraudulent sellers/product
Trust of the end users in one of the most essential thing which all the businesses across the world aim to achieve. As we discussed in the previous section, that routing the traffic to irrelevant products will lead to fewer conversions but routing traffic to a fraudulent product is a much graver crime. This will not only result in fewer conversions but also you, losing all the trust of your web traffic. For an affiliate marketer, his web traffic is one of the most prized possession. Losing the confidence of his end users is the last option to any individual.
4. Choosing best affiliate marketing networks and products
Web scraping can also collect data on different affiliate networks and products they are offering, have the maximum probability of conversions. This holds for the cases when you are new to affiliate marketing, and you do not have much idea on which products to choose. Selection of the best performing products gives you an initial edge as it is a safe bet in the initial stages.
5. Product price prediction to catch user attention or analysing user attributes to modify web pages
With the help of web scraping, you can do some forecast and generate insights which can attract the traffic on your page to actually buy the promoted product. For example, you can scrape the price of a product say over a time interval which will help you understand how the price has been fluctuating over time. You can then predict the amount of that product in the coming time and notify the user that cost may increase in coming time and ask them to consider the promoted product right now. Such insights not only captures the attention of web traffic on your page towards the advertised product but also inches them closer to the conversion.
6. Show similar products
Web scraping can also help you find products identical to the ones that you intend to promote. Displaying similar products provides an alternative to the readers. Too many options tend to confuse the readers and influence their purchase decision, but a few other options give readers a sense of available choices which can bring conversion for you if the actual product is not really satisfying their criteria.
Datahut as your reliable scraping partner
As you can see that there are immense benefits of using web scraping for affiliate marketing. Web scraping can assist you in achieving a best affiliate marketing campaign for yourself. There are a lot of tools that can help you scrape data yourself. However, if you need professional assistance, companies like Datahut can help you. We have a well-structured and transparent process for the same. We have helped enterprises across various industrial verticals. From assistance to the recruitment industry to retail solutions, Datahut has designed sophisticated solutions for most of these use-cases.
You should join the bandwagon of using data-scraping in your operations before it is too late.
It will help you boost the performance of your organization. Furthermore, it will help you derive insights that you might not know currently. This will enable well-informed decision-making in your business processes.
Conclusion
In this blog, we looked at how we can use web scraping to achieve the best affiliate marketing plan for yourself. There are many other usages web-scraping tools such as online merchandising, travel planning, content marketing and price monitoring. I’ve only mentioned its usage in the context of an affiliate marketer looking for the best affiliate marketing plan, but hopefully, it would give you some additional ideas on how to use the scraped data across different shareholders in the affiliate marketing. With a large number of products available, web scraping is one quick method to make the complex world of affiliate marketing a tad easier.
Wish to incorporate web scraping into your affiliate marketing business? Contact Datahut, your web scraping experts.