Affiliate networks are affiliate programs that offer more than one destination for your traffic. Many casino affiliate programs can be considered affiliate networks because they have a handful of casinos all owned by the same parent company, but branded separately.
This is actually a big plus from your marketing perspective. Customers love having a choice. You could put two identical products in front of a thousand people, but if one was priced $19.88 and one was priced $20.00, many more than 500 would instantly click on the $19.88 product, feeling as though they'd found the better deal.
This is called perceived value. It's not real value, because if we think about it we know that there is no significant difference between the two prices, but the numbers don't lie, and it's obvious that people will perceive a small price difference as a real value savings. Perceived value is perhaps the most powerful variable that defines impulse buying behaviour.
Impulse buying is very similar to the behaviour people are forced into on a web site. They have to click on a link, so they're going to click the one that strikes them as having the most potential bang for its buck.
This underlies the importance of having good marketing copy. Advertisements that are good at grabbing attention have what is known as a 'call to action'. This is a small snippet of text that talks to the target audience in a language either specific to them, or commonly associated with the topic. For us, trying to get webmasters to sign up for the affiliate program we push, our call to action is 'START EARNING NOW!'. We want to attract the attention of people who see money when they see that phrase, but understand that it's a path with work on it, hence, the term earning.
Are we saying this is the best call to action for attracting webmasters attention? Not at all, and it's really not easy to determine if one is significantly more effective than another, but some level of quality should be obvious.
A call to action, combined with a nice comparison of one casino to another, side by side, with one appearing slightly better than the other (the one, of course, that offers you the best deal) can get you more clicks than just having one advertisement, even if that one ad were big and colourful and wonderful. Perceived value can't be there without some level of comparison.
This is the value that affiliate networks offer. Using an affiliate program that has slightly different sign up offers for its different properties, offers you more to work with, more values for your audience to perceive, and more incentive to get your visitors to the casino.
