VPN services for affiliates are not the first business applications affiliates signup with, but you will quickly realize how useful they are when it comes to your daily routine.

As a performance marketer, you need some business applications like TrackingDesk to run your campaigns. But sometimes you need business applications which are simply essential to work efficiently. Some applications may not improve campaign performances but are needed to perform your job.

What is a VPN

VPN stands for Virtual Private Network. It is a software which allows you to browse the web as if you were in a different geographic or network location.

A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. Applications running across the VPN may, therefore, benefit from the functionality, security, and management of the private network.

Let’s say you are in Australia and you want to check a website that doesn’t allow visitors outside of the UK. With a VPN, you can connect to the site, through a UK server, showing the site that you have a UK IP address.

Security and privacy matters are obvious when using a VPN, and when you are a digital marketer your VPN needs are quite different.

Why VPN Services for Affiliates?

My daily workflow:

As an online marketer, you often promote offers that have geographic restrictions. Yet, you are not necessarily located in those countries but you still want to check the offer landing page. Having the ability to connect to a VPN becomes extremely important as you don’t want to waste time or be uncertain of the look and feel of a landing page.

GEO Targeting

You also, want to be able to check how an affiliate network deals with GEO redirects on their SmartLinks or when by mistake you might be sending traffic from the wrong GEO. While TrackingDesk has a powerful Fallback feature that can step in when such cases happen, you still want to know how the networks handle such traffic.

Competitive analysis

As an affiliate, being informed of what’s happening in your vertical is extremely important. It allows you to unveil opportunities, to see new marketing methods, to check ads and identify marketing tactics.

It’s very useful to get a feeling about a specific vertical or offer to check on Google who is paying top dollars for PPC traffic. To be able to do that, you must have a VPN so you can easily uncover the advertisers and check their ads.
Another interesting way to use a VPN is to check how advertisers are “retargeting” you and which type of ads they are using.

Quality assurance for publishers

When you run a website in multiple countries, you must pay attention to details to make sure the right ads or offers can be accessed from the right countries. Affiliates in the Gambling vertical have been suffering from regulations since 2006, when the US passed a law against online gambling operators. Those who took their job seriously, have implemented scripts that allowed them to display the right ads, to the right audience. Yet, even when doing what’s necessary, you need to have the right processes in place to be sure you don’t make mistakes.

Affiliates like to travel

Last but not least, affiliates are nomads. This is one of the greatest advantages of being an affiliate. You can really work from anywhere in the world. But connecting from public wifi networks, hotels, or conference halls comes with a certain level of risk. You never know who is listening… Using a VPN gives you another level of security and privacy since you are establishing a secured connection between your computer, the VPN network and your resources.

Those resources can be:

• Your TrackingDesk account
• Your Bank / Paypal account
• Your Affiliate accounts
• Your Ad Networks accounts
• Your email marketing accounts like Drip

To conclude, there are many reasons why you must subscribe to a good VPN service. If 10 years ago, those services were known mainly by geeks, IT people and privacy freaks, today VPN services have become part of our daily life.

The VPN Vertical

Naturally, plenty of providers have seen the opportunity and have turned complex applications into “easy to run software”.

NordVPN is one of those providers, who has been at the forefront of the VPN “democratization” by putting together an amazing software, at a very competitive price and accessible to pretty much anyone who knows how to turn on a computer.

With the popularity of these VPN service providers, came along the VPN affiliate programs. Not surprisingly, affiliates have jumped on those programs. There could be many reasons for this growing success. But from the discussions we had with providers and affiliates, we highlighted the following reasons:

• Recurring revenue scheme which provides a long-term passive income
• The offers appeal to a very powerful “human triggers”: Privacy
• There is a growing need for quality VPN services required to access streaming content
• Increased need to access P2P services.

I am confident there are many more angles that affiliates use to trigger conversions and you are welcome to comment below to provide additional insights into this growing vertical.

Take away

VPN services have grown massively the past years, and affiliates are not only using them for their private and business needs, but they have realized that their needs are not so different than the one from regular internet users.

You see additional reasons to use or promote VPN services? Use the comment box below.