About five years ago to compete in the CPA Marketing space as a network you needed to have a rewards program that rewarded your top affiliates with special gifts and prizes for their revenue production. However, as the market became more saturated with CPA Networks brokering offers, plus the low margins on many offers, rewards programs were often harder and harder to maintain.Now it seems that with the industry stabilizing and a lot of dead weight disappearing, companies are starting to look at rewards programs as a method of recruiting and keeping affiliates.

Adknowledge is set to announce Monday that they will be starting their Preferred Partner program, that will give special benefits to their highest performing publishers. While in the past most programs focused on just gifts and travel, Adknowledge is providing free services to their best publishers that will help them make more money long term. According to Adknowledge,

The program begins on August 9^th, exactly one month from today.  During the next 30 days , Adknowledge will closely monitor traffic numbers and evaluate its existing publisher base to determine which publishers will be invited into the Preferred Partner Program…. Preferred Partners will be rewarded with a number of perks including exclusive access to best offers, hard price floors, exclusive creatives, list scrubbing services, deliverability consultations and more.  The program encompasses all of Adknowledge’s publisher solution product offerings, meaning it rewards CPC and CPA publishers, as well as partners on the Integrated API product.  The list of Preferred Partners has not been finalized yet, so publishers still have 30 days to get their revenue numbers up.

MaxBounty, one of the largest running CPA networks has informed PMI that they too will be starting a rewards program.  They are using the rewards program to show that MaxBounty is an extremely financially stable company, well-financed and has no problems. In light of all losses some affiliates have suffered with the major failures of COPEAC and EPIC, companies seem to need to be re-assured that other networks are doing well.

“We’re taking our top 6 affiliates based on total earnings from Aug 1 – Jan 31st, as well as 5 more affiliates who saw the largest increase for this period, one random affiliate and a special guest who’ll be announced later,” said JP Suave of MaxBounty. “Our first Affiliate Rewards retreat will be held in Las Vegas.  Our plan is to fill their days with some non-traditional Vegas activities like horseback riding and a desert dune buggy race.  Nights will be more of what you’d expect from Vegas, shows, top restaurants and such.”

MaxBounty will be announcing more information soon.
To Learn more about the Adknowledge rewards program visit here.

Written by Pace Lattin

Pace Lattin is one of the top experts in interactive advertising, affiliate marketing. Pace Lattin is known for his dedication to ethics in marketing, and focus on compliance and fraud in the industry, and has written numerous articles for publications from MediaPost, ClickZ, ADOTAS and his own blogs.

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