How to Manage Coupon Campaigns Distributed on Partner Websites?

Are you running multiple coupon campaigns on coupon-aggregating websites? Monitoring your campaigns in such a complex distribution model can be frustrating and inefficient. Finding out the ROI of the campaigns and identifying the best partner websites to post your coupons on can be a struggle. But it does not have to be like that. 

Learn how to monitor and manage your campaigns distributed on various platforms efficiently. Take the campaign management, like setting expiration dates, preventing fraud and shutting down inefficient campaigns into your own hands. Make sure you get the return on investment you want and optimize your campaigns, without the need to rely on your partners to get your hands on the reports. With the right coupon management software you can do this and much more. 

Disclaimer: This article is inspired by the article by Robert Glazer from Acceleration Partners. He wrote a stellar article on how to modernize your coupon strategy. It’s a must-read for a company that wants to launch discount campaigns, especially through the network of coupon sites. 

Table of contents: 

1. Monitoring your coupon campaigns performance

• Monitoring your coupon partners
• Monitoring the overall campaign performance
• Tracking your goals completion 

2. Coupon compliance and fraud prevention

• Failed redemptions monitoring
• Redemption limit
• Real time deactivation 

3. Getting better placements on coupon-aggregating websites

• Offering exclusive deals

4. Summary 
   

Monitoring your coupon campaign performance

Monitoring your coupon partners 

You should be cautious when it comes to coupon partners. The key is to regularly check if they stick to the promotion agreed guidelines e.g. if the deal is being displayed in the right time and place. This is hard to automate with software, if you have a limited budget. Voucherify, our discount management software, lets you automate some aspects of the coupon partners management. Voucherify gives you the ability to control your partners in a detailed and data-driven way. How?

First of all, you can create separate coupon campaigns for each partner/marketing channel. Thanks to this, if something good or bad happens to one of the discount promotions, you’ll be able to figure out the attribution right away. If you need more deals for the same partner, you can create a separate discount campaign for each of them and still group them by partner with categories. What you’ll get is a greater level of granularity with keeping a clear-cut view on individual partners. 

With Voucherify, each coupon campaign can have different parameters including discount type, expiration date, or a number of possible redemptions, therefore you can launch completely isolated experiments with each of the vendors. 

Mapping the separate voucher campaigns is an excellent first step to build your promotion monitoring infrastructure. Once you know which coupon campaign belongs to which partner/deal, you can closely observe the number of redemptions and ultimately calculate ROI. 

Voucher campaign monitoring features also let you disable any coupon with a single click when something goes wrong e.g. your coupons are misused.

Finally, you can make manual checking easier too by using the description field. You can store the contract information your partner has to fulfil. Plus, you can paste a link to a deal page, so you can check it quickly.

It’s also worth highlighting that Voucherify can easily work with multiple vendors when it comes to separate redemption gateways. Imagine you’d like to have 3 different checkout pages handled by different vendors. You want to isolate them in a way that vendor A cannot redeem or list coupons that belong to vendor B and the other way around. With Projects and separate API keys you get it out of the box.‍

Monitoring the overall campaign performance 

We’ve designed Voucherify in a way that it shows which voucher campaigns work and which not, based on the data available. Here you can see a list of tools Voucherify offers for your marketing team to monitor your campaign performance:

• Dashboard – it operates on a selected timeframe and shows a couple of useful charts including: a total number of redemptions or a list of most recent redemptions with their status. A nice and quick way to get a bird’s eye overview of your deals.
  

• Coupon browser – a powerful view to inspect each and every coupon campaign’s performance. Thanks to extensive filtering capabilities you can list and sort coupons by:
  

• Discount type
• Category
• Activity status
• Start date
• Number of redemptions
  

This view gives you also the ability to manage the lifecycle of the coupon. For example, you can see the details of every coupon code, edit its details, or even disable and delete it any point in time. 

Tracking your goals completion 

Marketing goals usually consist of three pillars: acquisition, awareness and conversion. 

Let’s find out how you can monitor the completion of these goals with Voucherify.

• Conversion – this is a no-brainer. Just count the number of redemptions.
• New customer acquisition – With built-in ‘new customer’ segment in Voucherify you can monitor the incoming traffic. You can also build other segments with a plethora of filters.
• Awareness – you can add metadata, like your coupon code name, to the URL so that you can match page views count and the metrics related to engagement on your website with a corresponding referrer in Google Analytics or other analytics tools.
  

Having these metrics in place, you can easily structure your commission scheme. Bear in mind that this is just one of many possible ways of performance monitoring. You can monitor more parameters (e.g. cart size) that influence the way you reward your partners. The API-first approach lets you model even the most demanding scenarios.

Coupon compliance and fraud prevention

Here are a few mechanisms that can help you control the coupon compliance and prevent fraud:

• Failed redemptions monitoring – this section does not only group the failed redemptions, but it also shows the reason of the failure. Imagine that you’re seeing ‘failed because the coupon has expired’ message time after time. In this case, we may suspect that one of your partners hasn’t updated your deal. What’s more, you can prevent such situations by allowing your partner to list the up-to-date collection of coupons you want to share with them. This is easily achievable with our API.
• ‍Redemption limit – you can cap the redemption number when creating a campaign. In this way you ensure that the promotion won’t kill your stock. You can also use it increase users’ engagement by running promotion similar to: “$20 off for the first 200 shoppers with the code ACME2017”.
• ‍Real time deactivation – Finally, in the case of fraud, you can disable a particular coupon (or the whole campaign of unique codes), so the customers won’t be able to get any discount when trying to redeem it. 

The good thing is that due to separate campaigns you can apply different levels of precaution for different channels.

Getting better placements on coupon-aggregating websites

Creating frequent unique promotions for specific coupon-aggregating websites can be a good strategy. Coupon deals sites highly appreciate exclusive deals and they often reward such promotions with a better ad placement. 

Offering exclusive deals is available out of the box in Voucherify. One can achieve it in two ways:

• Offering fixed code, public vouchers with a prefix indicating a partner e.g. groupon-ACMEPROMO.
• Creating bulk unique vouchers that are then pushed out to customers by your partner. This is a more secure option, but it might be also more tricky to distribute. 
  

Summary

Building a solid coupon infrastructure that allows for multiple experiments and detailed ROI monitoring, even in case of complex distribution of coupons on coupon-aggregating partner websites, can be easy if you have the right promotion engine software in place. Voucherify offers coupon management software with a lot of built-in features that make coupon management much easier, for a fraction of a cost, compared to building such software yourself. If you’re not familiar with Voucherify yet, I’d suggest reading creating advanced coupon campaigns part 1 to grasp the idea of how our discount management software automates coupon promotions.

{{CTA}}

Do you want to learn more about Voucherify?

Get started

{{ENDCTA}}‍