Examining competitors’ affiliate programs that offer similar products to your company can help you and your affiliate grow exponentially. This approach can also lead to a better audience understanding and discovering finer offers. Want to learn how to find competitors’ affiliate publishers? Using our thorough guide will help you do that in 9 simple steps before you continue building a better partner program.
We can name several reasons why finding affiliates that operate in your field and analysing them is worth it. First of all, they already understand your market field and know how to engage with their target audience. Secondly, their customers are very familiar with their products/services and how they work.
Another good reason concerns the competitor’s posted content, as it provides proof of performance that you can thoroughly analyse. The final reason has to do with the quicker recruitment, as you get to avoid starting from scratch and not knowing who to hire.
When conducting competitor analysis, you must carefully select the businesses and affiliates that you want to examine. There are 3 types of competitors that you need to know before deciding which one to look for.
These are businesses that promote products and services that are similar to the ones you’re offering. They also tend to feature a similar audience, business model, pricing, and positioning.
Such affiliate pages compete for the best SEO ranking, most traffic and attention, and audience engagement. They often target similar keywords and topics while looking for the same users.
These are affiliate marketing programs that usually don’t sell the same content or service as you. But they do compete for affiliate attention with various deals and revenue-sharing agreements.
We at Ace Alliance will help you learn how to find competitors’ affiliates by introducing an ultimate guide that features 9 simple steps. Here’s what you must do to identify affiliates with ease:
While you look for your top competitors, you may come across a large number of affiliate programs. This can cause issues, as you might not know which of them are best for benchmarking your affiliate. That’s why we recommend setting up an easy-to-use scoring system.
If you don’t know how to create your own scoring system, we’ll gladly point out a couple of useful tips. We evaluated numerous parameters and picked the main ones that you need to grade from 1 to 5. Here are the key attributes that you need to score:
Use this scoring scheme to grade your competitors and identify areas of interest. When you finish scoring all affiliates, rank them from top to bottom based on their total score. You can then choose to analyse the finest affiliates. Don’t put your entire focus on raw traffic, as relevance is key for locating the best affiliates.
Using a competitor affiliate spreadsheet helps you understand how other businesses grow through affiliate partnerships and marketing. Your objective should be finding out where they get their traffic from, how they promote products and brands, what incentives they offer, and what strategies they use. But before you do this, you must first track several important details, such as:
Make sure to use official websites and affiliate links when setting up your competitor affiliate spreadsheet. Some competitors might hide certain information from the public, which may cause difficulties during your tracking.
Recruiting potential affiliate partners from your competitors can be a difficult task to accomplish. But there are a few tricks that you can use to gain a competitive advantage and sign deals with new affiliates. Check them out below and choose the approach that you think works best for your new potential partners.
Not every recruitment opportunity starts with an email. Affiliate events, dinners and private meet-ups can help you build trust with high-value publishers, understand what they need and give them a reason to consider your programme when the timing is right.
As our Head of Partnerships, Hordij Shkuropat explains:
Never underestimate the value of affiliate events. Building relationships with an organiser of gatherings frequented by desired affiliate partners can do wonders for advertisers. Sponsorship of, or attendance at, networking parties, dinners and retreats can build real trust and open many doors at once, as it is no secret that, in the age of AI and digital fatigue, meeting face to face makes even more of a difference.
Here are a couple of common mistakes that you need to avoid when looking at and analysing affiliate programs:
Copying competitors blindly – top affiliates may provide some ideas, but fully copying their approach can cause various issues.
Contacting every affiliate without qualification – not every affiliate that operates in the same industry is worth partnering with.
Leading only with higher commission – there are numerous other tools that you can use to attract businesses for a potential partnership.
Ignoring compliance and disclosure rules – this approach can create legal issues and risks, payment processing problems, and reputation damage.
Forgetting to monitor new affiliates over time – the new partners’ performance may change over time, which might include a decline in quality and traffic.
Learning how to find competitors’ affiliates is not about copying everything that you understand about them. It’s all about identifying proven partners, assessing them in the right way, and offering them a better deal. We at Ace Alliance recommend starting with 3 competitors, finding 20 affiliates, scoring them, and contacting the top 5.
Yes, it’s legal to contact competitors’ affiliates, as long as they operate as independent publishers and you ethically use public information.
Yes, you’re free to find competitors’ affiliate programs on your own. We suggest using competitor pages and disclosures, as well as popular platforms like Google, YouTube, and Reddit.
It depends on your goals and growth plans. Active affiliate programmes should repeat this research monthly, while smaller or stable programmes can do it quarterly.
