Finding Your Affiliate All-Stars: A Deep Dive into Konnecto vs Publisher Discovery

In today's competitive landscape, brands are constantly seeking innovative ways to expand reach and drive sales. Affiliate marketing has emerged as a powerful tool, leveraging the trust and influence of established publishers to connect with new audiences. However, building a successful affiliate program requires more than just throwing products at a network of websites. Brands face a multitude of challenges when it comes to cultivating a thriving network of partners.

One of the biggest hurdles is identifying the right publishers. Not all publishers are created equal. Partnering with irrelevant or low-performing affiliates can dilute your brand message, waste resources and time, and ultimately yield disappointing results. Sifting through endless publisher directories or relying on chance encounters is a time-consuming and inefficient approach. While affiliate marketers are sometimes judged on the volume of new publishers they bring to the table, it’s often a trade off of quality to reach those goals. Finding quality publishers to recruit to your program that will meaningfully to your growth remains a challenge affiliate marketers have. Choosing the right discovery platform is of the utmost importance to affiliate marketers.

Another challenge is measuring the potential and actual effectiveness of your partnerships before investing time in the relationship and while working with them. Without clear data on performance metrics like clicks, conversions, and revenue generated for competitors, it's difficult to identify top-performing affiliates and optimize your program for better results. Additionally, fostering meaningful relationships with publishers is crucial for long-term success. Building trust and rapport with your partners encourages collaboration and ensures they are genuinely invested in promoting your brand.

This is where affiliate discovery platforms like Konnecto and Publisher Discovery step in. Both platforms aim to bridge the gap between brands and potential publishers, but they cater to different needs. Let's delve into their key features and differentiators to see which platform best equips you to overcome these challenges and build a winning affiliate marketing program.

How Discovery Works

Starting to grow your affiliate program is the base level of achieving success with affiliate marketing. But who should you reach out to and recruit into your program? It starts with discovering which partners and publishers make the most sense for your specific brand or product. 

• Konnecto: Utilizes a deep data-set, advanced algorithms and AI to help you discover highly relevant publishers based on niche, audience demographics, content focus, and most importantly, the success of your competition in affiliate marketing. This ensures laser-targeted outreach, maximizing the impact of your program and can be accomplished in a short period of time.
• Publisher Discovery: Employs a more manual search approach with a vast publisher directory. While offering a broader selection, it requires more effort to identify suitable partners as more tests are required to make sure you discover the “right” opportunities.

Building your target affiliate list

Once you understand the key affiliate publishers in your industry, the next step is to start to develop a target list of brands to go after to recruit into your program. Konnecto and Publisher Discovery have varying ways to help you build that target list. 

• Konnecto: Because Konnecto sits on top of such a wealth of conversion data, they uncover full path to conversion visibility for your brand and your competitors. What this means is that instead of a laundry list of all affiliates in your niche, you get curated opportunities based on the quality of traffic sent to your competition. You see not just conversion counts but also quality, measured by conversion rate, in your industry, allowing you to sort and prioritize your target affiliate list.
• Publisher Discovery: Allows a user to see all publishers in their network falling under a specific niche. For example, you can go in and see their list of all personal finance or home warranty publishers they work with and develop your target list from there.

‍Outreach & Recruitment

Now that you have your list of affiliate partners you want to target for your program, it’s time to do some outreach and recruit them into your network. 

• Konnecto: Focuses on efficiency and data-driven decisions. Konnecto provides insights into the publishers that move the needle with your competition, including data on why the publisher should want to partner with your brand (metrics like funnel efficiency) and relevancy to your target audience. Also, Konnecto can show you the contact information required for you to reach out and recruit them to your program.
• Publisher Discovery: Prioritizes fostering connections. Their platform allows for direct communication with publishers, enabling you to stay within their platform and invite publishers to your network of choice.

Performance Tracking & Analytics

• Konnecto: Offers comprehensive performance analytics that track clicks, conversions, and conversion share generated by each partnership across all brands. This allows you to identify top-performing publishers in your niche, optimize recruitment pipeline, and refine your outreach strategy. Konnecto allows brands to benchmark their programs performance to the competitions so the brand affiliate manager can see how their program stacks up relative to other brands and build a strategy to improve positioning and win market share.
• Publisher Discovery: Offers basic performance tracking capabilities and deeper insights might require additional integration with publisher analytics tools.

Network & Publisher Selection

• Konnecto: Focuses on providing you a curated list of high-performing publishers that have shown the ability to deliver results in your niche. This ensures quality partners, but the selection might be smaller compared to Publisher Discovery.
• Publisher Discovery: Boasts a vast and diverse network of publishers across various industries. This provides a wider pool to explore, potentially uncovering hidden gems, but quality control might require more due diligence and more guessing.

Fees & Pricing

Both platforms offer tiered pricing models based on features. Konnecto offers the affiliate marketer a free, no-obligation customized demo to see the power of the platform. According to their website, Publisher Discovery costs less than $500 per month. Both platforms offer annual SaaS subscriptions. It's crucial to compare pricing structures in relation to the value proposition offered by each platform.

Choosing a Discovery Platform for you

While both platforms have their strengths, the ideal solution depends on your specific goals:

• For brands seeking laser-focused outreach, data-driven optimization, competitive benchmarking, and in-depth performance analytics: Konnecto is a strong choice.
• For brands prioritizing relationship building, exploring a wider publisher base, and recruit with publishers within a platform: Publisher Discovery offers valuable tools.

In summary, Konnecto is a platform for the data-driven affiliate marketer that wants to leverage the insights Konnecto’s platform provides to supercharge the growth of their affiliate program.