Driving Leads from Affiliate Marketing with Pay-Per-Click
National Medical Supply Provider
This national medical supply provider is committed to providing families with the supplies they need, through their insurance policy. In fact, they work with over 1,400 insurance plans to make it convenient for families to choose and order medical supplies, and have them delivered straight to their homes.
The Challenge
In the health insurance industry, legal restrictions on how insurance products and services can be sold make it nearly impossible to be able to use a traditional affiliate marketing approach. Our team was challenged to help this national medical supply provider to build an affiliate marketing program that was both legally compliant and a lucrative part of the brand’s digital marketing strategy.
The Strategy
The first step was determining causation between different levers of this brand's funnel. We needed to figure out how to manage ad performance within the legal regulations.
To do so, we analyzed historical performance, competitor results, and industry benchmarks to determine that we could manage campaigns differently than the communicated objective, and incorporate the right optimizations to exceed the brand's goals. This required incorporating a new strategy with both our tactics and our partners.
TACTICAL INNOVATION
1. Better Match Ad Objectives to Brand Goals. Instead of paying affiliate partners for leads, the non-compliant approach, we started to pay for clicks and impressions (CPC based), instead of leads (CPL based). By changing our digital objective in order to remain compliant and still meet the client’s goals, we found exactly what CPC amounts best correlated to exceeding the $20 CPL goal.
2. Leverage Supplemental KPIs. After the move to a CPC based model, we continued tracking the leads in order to still optimize clicks towards the leads, but avoid paying for them.
STRONG PARTNERSHIPS & PERFORMANCE
1. Collaborate with Impact for Ideal Partner Mix. Impact helped identify publisher categories that matched the brand's audience. We then used their systems to power the tech and tracking necessary for us to run compliant campaigns.
2. Turn Accountability into Results. We updated CPC payouts accordingly based on publisher performance and altered if needed. For example, if a publisher missed the $20 CPL goal, we would decrease their CPC rate until performance improved. Once results picked back up, we would increase their CPC rate.
The Result
*On target with this brand's goal!