Each affiliate program at Travelpayouts has its own set of affiliate tools. At the moment, the maximum number of tools can be found in the Aviasales affiliate program. You can explore them in the partner’s personal account:
You can create an unlimited number of tools for your partners. But, to get started, you don’t need to create dozens of tools at once. You can start with the most popular ones and further expand your list of affiliate tools. Below, we will give an overview of all the available options.
Ready-made affiliate links
Affiliate links are the most popular tool among affiliates, as they can be used with literally any traffic source, be it a travel blog, YouTube channel, social media group, or more.
Note: In the Travelpayouts account, partners must add all the links to their traffic sources and then undertake to use links and other tools specifically for those traffic sources. Therefore, despite the fact that affiliate links can actually be used anywhere, as they are a convenient and versatile tool, for partners, it is related to the traffic source specified in the profile.
Ready-made affiliate links usually lead to the most popular pages of your site, such as the home page, some pages of specific directions, or special landing pages for affiliate traffic. For example, Booking.com offers the following ready-made links:
There may be many other ready-made links. Partners can conveniently navigate through them thanks to the search bar on the page or sort them by language.
For example, Rentalcars offers several dozen ready-made links:
If you take into account mobile application sales, then in the ready-made links section, you need to add links to your application, which can be done in the Aviasales affiliate program.
You can offer affiliates ready-made links to any pages that will attract sales. Over time, you can supplement and edit the suggested ready-made links. Partners independently choose a page to link to from the links offered by you. Furthermore, partners can create a unique link to any page on your site using a generator.
Affiliate link generator
You may not be able to guess where the affiliate wants to refer and drive the traffic, and that’s okay. In such a case, a link generator is available to partners. With this tool, a partner can make an affiliate link to any page on your site. For example, drive traffic to car rentals from Economy Bookings in Los Angeles:
The link generator is available in most of the affiliate programs at Travelpayouts. Among partners, links to the internal pages of your site are called “deep links”.
Partners prefer to send traffic to specific offers rather than just to a site’s home page, so a large set of ready-made links and a generator are essential tools for successful work in any affiliate program.
Banners
If you offer interactive widgets (for example, search forms), ready-made banners are not usually such a popular tool among partners. But some partners use them on their sites. So, if possible, provide banners of various sizes.
A large grid of sizes is important, since the partners’ websites have different widths of the blocks where banners are added, such as different widths of sidebars on their themes. Ideally, you can provide your partners with banners of all popular sizes:
- 300 × 250
- 336 × 280
- 468 × 60
- 728 × 90
- 120 × 600
- 160 × 600
- 970 × 250
- 300 × 600
- 970 × 90
- 320 × 1200
The list of popular banner sizes includes both small banners and “skyscrapers” or long horizontal creatives. So, most partners will be able to find the right one. However, you can create banners in other sizes. There are no limits. The more banners you provide to partners, the more use cases there will be.
In addition to the size, banners should be varied in design, message, and landing page so that the partner can choose the right one. The language of the banner may also differ. If you have a multilingual site, provide banners in all your most popular languages.
Ideally, provide your partners with banners that have already been tested on other advertising campaigns. For example, if you’ve previously purchased display ads and know which creatives perform better or worse. Affiliates can test your creatives on their own, but banners with predictable high conversion rates will certainly generate more sales for everyone.
Partners can create banners on their own. This is done outside of the Travelpayouts platform, as there is no graphics creation functionality on the platform. If you have certain requirements for the use of a logo, fonts, and other things, you can provide partners with a link to your guidelines, as Aviasales did.
Never name an image file with ad-related words, such as ads.png or banner.jpg, as doing so increases the risks of blocking ad placements by AdBlocks or its alternatives in your users’ browsers.
Search forms
Search forms are the most popular type of interactive widget. Using a search form, your audience can set the necessary service parameters on the partner’s website and go directly to your website to view the desired product. For example, using the Economy Bookings search form, users can find a car in different locations:
This tool is limited in use, as it only works on sites and platforms where a partner can add external code. The code can be added to any standalone site (like HTML) or any popular CMS (like WordPress). Sample code:
Search forms are not suitable for traffic from social networks, such as Facebook or Instagram, as they cannot be embedded there or anywhere where partners cannot edit or embed the code.
Provide partners with the opportunity to pre-fill the form, for example, specify their departure city or product code. This is an important feature, as it allows parents to increase conversion rates.
Forms can be created and provided to partners with ready-made code, such as some forms in the Onlinetours affiliate program:
This is a simple and convenient way to embed forms if they suit your content. In this case, the partner does not have the ability to change the format of the search form. In this case, customizable search forms are a preferable option. Such forms are appreciated by partners, as they allow them to set the form’s format and design for a specific page, for example:
If your own website has a search form, that is, you are selling more than one single option for your product or service, you should definitely offer your partners a search form for their sites as well. Travelpayouts has a dedicated form builder for brands that allows you to create a widget in a convenient visual interface.
Various widgets
In addition to search forms, there are other interactive widgets with which the partner’s audience can interact on their website.
The content of the widgets is related to your product. For example, Aviasales offers:
- Flight schedule widget
- Best deals from airlines
- Calendar widget with low prices for flight tickets
- Popular destinations widget
- Email subscription widget for price changes
- Bot subscription widget in messengers
- Price map widget
Analyze what kind of data you can share and try to put that data into a widget format. Ideally, some of the information, such as current prices, will be displayed immediately on the partner’s website.
Here is another example of a set of widgets in the Kiwi.com affiliate program:
- Flights widget
- Search form
- Special offers widget (vertical layout)
- Special offers widget (horizontal layout)
- Result widget
- Single O&D widget
- Full widget
Some affiliate programs, such as the Tripster affiliate program, offer context widgets. This is a special tool that analyzes the text on the partner’s page and displays the most relevant offer for the audience. For example, the contextual Tripster widget displays excursions in Georgia on the page about travel to Georgia and displays excursions in Paris on the page about Paris.
The uniqueness of context widgets is that the partner does not need to manually configure which offers to display, while the offers displayed are as relevant to the audience as possible. The relevance of offers is the best way to achieve high conversion rates and generate a lot of sales.
In reality, widgets can be anything. You can display anything that will help your partners sell more. Another example is the KiwiTaxi testimonial widget:
Landing pages
You can provide partners with ready-made landing pages on your domain or give partners the source code to place on their own domain. For example, in the Aviasales affiliate program, both options are available:
Landing pages are a great alternative for driving traffic to your home page. Landing pages can be ad hoc (for example, to promote a seasonal offer) or permanent (for example, a promotional code for new customers).
Providing the source code and sharing the ready-made landing page will give partners additional opportunities to work with traffic. In this case, partners can place a landing page on their domain and attract any traffic there, which is then sent to your main site. This is a convenient solution for working with some of the traffic sources that are prohibited directly in your affiliate program.
White Label
White Label is a tool that allows a partner to offer your services under their own brand. For example, such a tool is available in the Aviasales affiliate program:
A demo version of the tool is available at: https://whitelabel.travelpayouts.com/. Other brands also have White Labels (for example, this tool is offered by Kiwi.com and KiwiTaxi).
White Label tools can be either a separate page on a subdomain or embedded in partner pages. This tool does not require a partner to have serious knowledge of programming and is actively used by site owners of various levels.
White Label tools should be provided if you want partners to grow their own brand on the basis of your technology. Among partners who are willing to create their own brand, usually there are many site owners with a high traffic volume. Thus, White Label solutions serve as a kind of key to attract partners.
White Label technology can be used not only for the web version of a site, but also for the mobile application. For example, there is such a tool in the Aviasales affiliate program. You can find out more about this solution here.
API
API stands for application programming interface, which allows partners to receive data from you and then process and output that data in the required format. The following APIs are available in the Aviasales affiliate program:
- API for accessing data on flight tickets;
- API for exporting affiliate statistics;
- Flight search API;
- Hotel search API.
You can also share a variety of information with partners in any volume or quantity. API information can be provided in real time or historical data can be transmitted.
As a rule, only advanced webmasters use the API tool, as it requires certain technical skills. Using this tool, for example, partners can receive data on available flights in a given direction and display them in any format on their website.
Right now, just a few brands have API tools in Travelpayouts, but this is the tool most often requested by large partners. Most brands that have the API tool only provide it upon request and pre-moderation. A number of brands monitor activity related to using data and, in case of a violation of the rules, disable access to the API or make other restrictions.
As an alternative to the API, you can provide partners with data in other formats, such as by uploading data in CSV files. This does not provide full-fledged opportunities, but will help some partners manage their online business by filling the site with content or updating outdated information.
All APIs and data feeds are described in the Help Center.
SDK
The Mobile SDK stands for “Software Development Kit”, which is a ready-made set for creating standalone applications. With this kit, partners can create a completely new application for iOS or Android, or extend the functionality of their existing applications.
You do not have to be a programmer to create SDK-based applications. This is a fairly simple solution, so it is available to many partners and sometimes yields amazing results. For example, an application powered by Aviasales technology from a partner in India has already attracted over 1,000,000 installs to date.
Other
Your set of affiliate tools can be broader if your brand has additional options for interacting with the audience. For example, you can create a splash screen for browsers, as done in the Aviasales affiliate program in the Inspiration Tab extension.
All partners in the Travelpayouts platform have several common tools that are relevant for all available brands:
- WordPress plugin with which partners can quickly add available tools to their websites.
- A browser extension that allows users to create an affiliate link while on a brand page or any other page by simply opening the extension and selecting an affiliate program from the drop-down list.
- Money Script for automatically adding affiliate links to a website.
In addition, partners sometimes make inquiries on the basis of which unique solutions are created. For example, a unique API for a large travel website or another tool that allows both the partner and brand to earn more.
Which tools should you provide to partners?
The minimum required set:
- Ready-made affiliate links
- Links generator
Links of various formats are used by most partners. Without them, partners cannot complete any work regardless of their traffic source. Using links, affiliates can attract traffic from various sources, as well as create their own banners by adding affiliate links to them.
To make an ideal starter kit, it’s necessary to add a search form to the minimum required set of tools, since this is the most popular widget among partners. For example, the search form from Aviasales is installed on thousands of websites in various languages. At the moment, only a few Travelpayouts brands do not have a search form, since this tool is necessary for full-fledged work.
In any case, do not limit yourself to just this minimal set. Even to start an affiliate program or test an affiliate channel, you need to provide partners with the maximum possible number of tools, so you will attract more traffic. However, there are no restrictions on the number of tools or their content. For example, in Travelpayouts, there are brands without a link generator (for example, the Trip.com affiliate program), although this is rare.
You can choose which tools to provide to partners based on your product and traffic acquisition policy. For example, if you allow traffic from travel blogs and have a search form on your site, it would be appropriate to provide partners with a search form for their sites as well. If you are ready to offer your services for promotion under the brands of your partners, then a White Label tool or a full-fledged API would work best.
The partners themselves are also a great source of ideas for tools. Based on the results of surveys, you can understand what is missing and which tools should be added next. This allows you to create new widgets and solutions that will attract even more sales.
It is good to offer partners a variety of tools, but doing so is not enough to ensure further successful work. The existing tools need to be developed by improving their features, expanding their number, and increasing conversion rates.
The Travelpayouts team has accumulated over 10 years of expertise and experience in affiliate marketing, which you can use for your brands within the platform.
