By Aimee Chanthadavong

Since launching more than six months ago in Australia, affiliate marketing company Rakuten LinkShare has signed a number of deals with a number of online retailers and it does not appear they plan to slow down.

With likes of Macy’s, Bloomingdales, SABA and Sportscraft  as retail clients, Anthony Capano, Rakuten LinkShare Australia managing director, told RetailBiz of the company’s excitement to continue growing in Australia.

“We’re quite excited about the future for us in the Australian market. We will continue to grow and provide expertise in this market and bring on new advertisers and new publishers,” he said.

“We see affiliate marketing as a channel that helps advertisers drive sales month-on-month and year-on-year to date, especially as we get closer to Christmas.”

The company assists with pairing the right advertisers to publishers and ensure that each performance is tracked.

“The analytics is really the foundation of being able to identify for growth in a program,” Capano said.

“We will have significant amounts of reporting for each of our advertisers because each of them has a targeted KPI for their campaign and we’re able to establish which offers are performing best, at what time of the day and who are clicking on those offers to ensure the publisher the advertisers we are marrying together work well.”

Although, affiliate marketing is more than just about driving sales it’s also about brand exposure.

“It’s not just based on offering a coupon or percentage off a product. In fact, publishers understand the brand value and the value proposition and so clients often use it to promote a new product line or season of stock. So it’s certainly a mixture of pricing and focusing on the brand,” Capano said.

But regardless of how large or small a business is, Capano said their objective is all the same: driving and measuring performance.

“Big or small they have a common goal of driving the brand with the publisher’s base. For us it’s about teaming them up with the right publisher to help them build real sales,” he said.