In 2018, Discover Cars launched its direct affiliate program. Initially, the program was created for SEO purposes: to attract travel webmasters to increase the number of backlinks and grow the domain ranking.
After a while, Discover Сars realized that an affiliate channel can not only influence SEO, but also bring in sales.
In June 2019, Discover Cars connected to the Travelpayouts platform to increase sales.
Advantages of working with the platform compared to creating your own affiliate program
- The main advantage is the reduction of time costs. For example, Travelpayouts takes care of all the work of attracting webmasters. Discover Сars only needs to approve or reject affiliate applications, because the program has a pre-moderated connection.
- The company was forced to create payment invoices for each affiliate in its direct affiliate program. After connecting to Travelpayouts, numerous invoices were all replaced by one account — on the platform. This greatly relieves the project manager and the accounting department.
- Quick launch. When launching your own affiliate program, you have to solve a lot of technical problems and possibly form a separate team of specialists. The process of integration of Discover Сars into Travelpayouts took no more than two days.
Sergey Kulpin, development manager of the Discover Сars affiliate program, quote:
“We have experience with various integrations, so we have something to compare it with. The integration with Travelpayouts advanced very quickly, and we were happy with it. What pleased us most about working with Travelpayouts was the feedback and constant headhunting. It really is a tremendous amount of work that takes a considerable amount of time. We would need to recruit additional staff to do the same work. That’s why we really appreciate our cooperation and advise other companies to follow our example.”
Discover Сars’ sales growth at Travelpayouts
By joining Travelpayouts, Discover Сars noticed a significant increase in the number of partners. Accordingly, sales began to grow. The year of connection, 2019, was an experimental year. 2020, despite the pandemic, brought +100% growth to 2019 results, and 2021 to date has already shown a 50% increase over 2020.
Development of the Discover Сars service and affiliate program
Sales growth through the affiliate channel is impossible without constant service development. The Discover Сars brand is constantly adding new cities and countries where you can rent a car.
Sergey Kulpin, development manager of the Discover Сars affiliate program, quote:
“The pandemic affected everyone, including us. Nevertheless, we managed not just to stay afloat, but to show remarkable results. It’s all thanks to great teamwork and quick decision-making in critical situations.”
Affiliate tools
Initially, Discover Сars affiliate program had only links and banners. Widgets appeared much later, when the company noticed that competitors were often using widgets.
The type of traffic that brings in the most sales
When launching an affiliate program, it is important to think carefully about its conditions, so that they are convenient and profitable for both the brand and the affiliates. From the very beginning, Discover Сars had an understanding of what remuneration the company was ready to pay its partners. But we had to experiment a bit with the types of allowed and forbidden traffic in order to find out which ones bring good results and which ones are better to be excluded. Travel blogs with content based on personal experience generate the most sales. People listen to the blogger’s opinion. A lengthy article about a location where a person had a great time is the perfect promotional tool.
3 tips from Discover Cars for brands that want to try affiliate marketing
- Invest effort in quality content that will attract organic traffic.
- Think carefully about advertising campaigns and try to make them less intrusive.
- And the main tip — be sure to try affiliate marketing so you can experience what it is and how it can benefit your brand.
