CONDÉ NAST AFFILIATE LINKS MANAGEMENT

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In an effort to increase commerce revenue, Condé Nast’s digital team took a deeper look into how they make money from affiliate links and ways to improve.

Originally, they were working with a few select networks that hosted connections to 24k+ retailers. Every time an editor refers to a product from one of these retailers, they included an affiliate link via their select network which would in turn give Condé Nast a percentage of each click or sale. Although this was a simple way to earn revenue from products their editors were already linking to, they were missing out on earning a higher percentage through other networks that had slightly more complex linking systems.

In order to simplify the affiliate link creating process so that the commerce team could utilize the more complex but higher paying networks, we designed a system in Condé Nast’s internal hub which now allows the commerce team to easily manage all of Conde Nast’s affiliate Networks and Retailers in a single space.

LIST VIEW

The commerce manager now has a single source of truth where they can navigate to every Network and Retailer in an easily readable list view. This new list view allows them to search, sort, and filter for exactly what they’re looking for vs managing each network individually via the networks own site on a per brand basis. The user can immediately see the current rate and status of each item, providing valuable context when deciding which network to link from.

CRUD SCREENS

Now that all Networks live in a central location, the user can easily create, read, edit, or disable a new Retailer from each Network type. The ability to read and manage a retailers information in a single location is vital when a networks percentage offer or terms of agreement changes. Now a user can immediately review and update a detail page without having to manually update every link its referenced it within the editorial CMS.

UNIFYING LINK REQUIREMENTS

It’s never an easy task combining the requirements from multiple sources, there will always be instances where fields, requirements, and labels vary. But in order to have a true single source of truth we had to analyze each network type to find a common ground. By consolidating field types and naming conventions, the user has a clear journey when working with affiliate links.

HANDS OFF EDITORIAL WORK

By managing these relationships in the back end, we’ve now allowed the editor to focus on what’s most important– the content. Instead of needing to modify and update products in the CMS every time a Network or Retailer relationship changes, they can simply enter the original link to the product and the back end with do the rest. Our system scans product links, and assigns the ones within our current relationships with the Network offering the highest percentage. When reviewing a product, the editor can easily see the URL they use as well as the display URL thats currently being served.