Mosaic’s Most Asked Questions… Answered

Questions are inevitable. Questions about work, what to eat for dinner, questions about life and the meaning of the universe, or in this case, questions about Mosaic. If you’re reading this, you might just be poking around out of curiosity or you might really have questions about our product. Good thing, cause we’ve got answers. 

What is Mosaic? 

Mosaic is an affiliate management suggestion engine—in the form of AI-based automated software—that recommends growth strategies for e-commerce businesses using over 10 million historical data points and a decade of performance data history across a dozen affiliate networks. 

It’s a DIY platform for large brands wanting global context and small e-commerce brands interested in a budget-friendly solution to assist them in growing their affiliate program. 

To give just a glimpse into what Mosaic can do for you, it makes recommendations, monitors your affiliate campaigns, offers up trends, helps with the affiliate recruitment process, delivers KPI reports, and more. 

What is the difference between Mosaic and an affiliate network? What does each do and why do I need both? 

You should think of an affiliate network as a tool. It gives you access to potential affiliates, tracks conversions that those affiliates bring in, and provides payment process options. But, the thing is, an affiliate network will not do the work for you. An affiliate network cannot help your strategy.

It won’t help you choose the best affiliates for your brand or give suggestions for improving your campaign. Not only does our SaaS platform find those affiliates for you, but it finds the exact right ones for you, your business, and your vertical. As mentioned in the above answer, it uses comprehensive data to give you tailored suggestions for improving your program. But we’ll build on Mosaic’s features more with the next question.

How do I find affiliates to partner with using Mosaic? 

We provide several tools and strategies to help you recruit and partner with affiliates:

• Fresh Faces List: Provides tailored recommendations for top affiliates that drive the most revenue across hundreds of similar affiliate programs. It offers options for sorting these affiliates by clicks, actions, revenue, and other metrics. If you recruit a suggested affiliate into your program and they produce a click or sale for you, they’re automatically replaced with a new affiliate. 
• Vertical Report: Shows the top affiliates in your vertical with those same options as above for sorting by clicks, actions, revenue, etc. Using this report is a great way to measure the success of your affiliate program using data. 
• Mosaic’s Help Center: Offers strategies and templates for reaching out to affiliates that you want to partner with. 

Using the Fresh Faces list, what should I do once I get contact information for an affiliate?

We give you access to different templates for reaching out to affiliates through the Mosaic help center. We have unique outreach templates for each affiliate classification. After using a template, you can contact affiliates via email. 

What should I do if an affiliate doesn’t respond to me? 

First of all, don’t worry. It’s a common thing for affiliates not to respond the first time. These people get hundreds, even thousands of emails a day so it’s crucial to be diligent with following up and, potentially, reaching out to multiple other contacts for partnership. In addition, it’s worth customizing your outreach to convey the benefits of working with your brand. An affiliate might also join your program through your affiliate URL without responding to your email so make sure you’ve checked your network to see if they joined silently.

What should my commission rate be? 

Well, to be honest, the answer depends on your vertical. Typically, though, you want to leave about 5-10% of wiggle room above your base commission to provide increases as an incentive for your top-performing affiliates in exchange for additional exposure on their website. 

What is cookie duration (or tracking gap), and what should mine be? 

Cookie duration is the amount of time a customer has to complete a purchase for the affiliate to earn a commission. For example, if you were to click on a Buzzfeed link to a kitchen supply store today and there’s a cookie duration of 30 days, you have to purchase from the store within 30 days for Buzzfeed to get a commission. 

We recommend anywhere from 30 to 90 days. The higher the cookie duration, the higher incentive for affiliates to join your program. 

How do I know if an affiliate is a good fit for my program? 

The key indicators that you should look for when determining if an affiliate is a good fit for your program are the following: 

• Site quality: Is the affiliate site well-done or built poorly? You want to stay away from lower-level, low-quality affiliate websites. 
• Website traffic: What kind of traffic does the affiliate website get every month? You want to be on the lookout for partners with a minimum of 30K monthly site visitors, minimum. However, you should always pay close attention to engagement on the site as well. There are some smaller sites out there that have high-quality content, solid engagement, and great conversion.
• Competitors: Are your competitors on the affiliate website you’re looking at? If your competitors are active on any affiliate website and you are not, then that leaves you at a competitive disadvantage. 
• Branding: Is the affiliate website on brand? Are there similar brands and/or verticals being promoted on the site? Does the content make sense for your brand and your target audience? 

We highly recommend that you work with top-of-funnel shopping and cashback or loyalty affiliates in addition to content affiliates, as we have seen the most success with programs that have a healthy mix of the different affiliate types. 

What are different types of affiliates and how do I decide if I want to work with them? 

The different types of affiliates include: 

• Shopping
• Loyalty and cashback
• Technology
• Content (blogs, influencers, YouTubers, media companies)
• TM+ and PPC
• Sub-affiliates
• Influencer networks
• Comparison and review sites

When deciding to work with affiliates, we recommend you take the advice from the above Q+A into play, but also to ask yourself how you want the affiliate to work for you.

We dive more into the affiliate classifications in Mosaic’s Help Center but for example, content affiliates increase your exposure to new audiences and build your digital presence and reputation. Shopping affiliates, or loyalty affiliates give their audience an incentive either in cashback or a discount code that drives high conversion rates. Tech affiliates can help provide solutions to cart abandonment or automate an email drip campaign to give a more holistic approach to generating growth for your program.

We hope we’ve answered some if not all of your questions about Mosaic Digital Systems’s technology and affiliate management platform. If you have any additional questions feel free to reach out to support@mosaicdigitalsystems.com and a team member will be happy to give you more information!