You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by AffIFast.com, the chapter and verse of everything you need for running successful affiliate programs and partnership management. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies and Martech providers who operate in affiliate marketing. If you want to launch, scale, and grow successful affiliate marketing programs, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is changing. Gain behind the mic access to affiliate marketing veterans. Listen and learn tried and tested program management tactics. Discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else.
SPEAKER_05Welcome to this week's affiliate marketing podcast as we wrap up yet another interesting session of interviews, insights, and outstanding thought leadership brought to you by Affiverse, helping the world to do affiliate marketing better. Hello good listeners! Before we get started this week's episode and the season 11 wrap-up, I want to ask you all a quick question. Have you signed up for a ticket to our Elevate Summit yet? If not, you best be getting to it because this July we're bringing you all the best practitioners in the affiliate and performance marketing industry, sourced from around the globe to help you elevate your performance and program delivery and keep learning what's new and trending in affiliate marketing with me. It's two days of uninterrupted live-streamed affiliate marketing insights, workshops, case studies, learnings brought to your desk courtesy of our collaborating partners, publishers, clients, participating brands, organizations, and networks all gathering to support your learning and help development in our community. The best thing about this event is that you don't need to wear a suit and you don't even need to leave your desk to join us. So there's no excuses. Sign up for your early bird access seat for just£49 and become part of our global summit. Network, share, and come along and learn with us. Okay, so let's get it, let's get to it and let's round up this season 11 of the affiliate marketing podcast because I cannot believe that it's come around so quick. But not to worry, we have loads of interesting discussions happening in season 12. So buckle up and take note as I review the season that was, get you fired up for what's coming next, and hopefully get you enjoying affiliate marketing along with me. So this season we had some recurring themes from our steamed industry leading guests, covering the importance of continued self-educ, why building a community around your affiliate program is a good idea right now, and considering diversity and inclusion in your program offering as well. We also took a little bit of time out to talk about AI and Web3. And I think every episode was a mini blockbuster in its own right. But here are some of the things that stood out for me, starting off with community and relationships. Rick McGuinness shared his views on relationship building between partners and affiliates and how this could only be good for long-term business relationships, especially now in this AI-driven world that we're moving fast towards. So listen into the short clip about that right now.
SPEAKER_10What we preach is um building relationships and making sure that your uh your partners and your affiliates are taken care of. The the affiliate model is primarily a performance-based model, but over the years it's it's been getting interwoven into like the flat fees and things like that. But affiliate marketing is still relationship-oriented business, and you have to build those solid relationships from day one with your affiliates and and during any like period of time, whether it be a good economic time or a bad, as long as you have those relationships, you're gonna be okay. And you you you should be able to weather the storm because the trust that's been built, and that's what that's what I always constantly preach is just build relationships with your affiliates. They're not just a number or just not just a revenue generator. They're they're a partner or an extension of your team and treat them like that. And uh if if brands can can leverage that and do that well, they they can survive anything, uh no matter what's what happens in the world.
SPEAKER_05What are some of those relationship building tactics that you've kind of honed over the last 15 or so years that you've been in the marketplace? Because everybody says, I'll build build a relationship, but what exactly do you mean? Because we've got a lot of new people coming into the industry listening to this podcast. And a lot of people mistake affiliate marketing for customer service or a sales role, which you and I were talking about um just before we got on here. But what are some of the tactical things that people can do to keep their relationships fresh right now as we're seeing a challenging time ahead?
SPEAKER_10And what what we do, I'm I'm going from experience of what we do. So everything that I say is is stuff that we do on our end. Every new affiliate that comes in, we reach out to individually, find out more about them, understand their business, what they're looking to get out of this partnership, provide them with whatever they need to get going, and just uh keeping the communication consistent. So when we email them the first time, when they first get onboarded, we we keep it going over time where then as time goes on, they don't feel like we're just transacting. It's a legitimate partnership and that we have their best interests in mind, and then they see that, and then they're they're more willing to perform at a higher level as well, knowing that we we got their back, so to speak. So not just putting them in the program and just giving them banners, things like that. It's actually building a relationship like you would outside like so with with uh with friends and family, things like that. You uh otherwise it's just gonna be some just mundane task you're gonna be going through every day, just trying to go to the program. But if if if everyone is on the same page, everyone's happy, they know what they're doing, they trust, that's the big thing, and they understand that the benefits for for both parties are gonna are gonna be supreme here, then uh that that's that's the way I look at it, and the way what the agency that I operate runs and what I tell the team is you gotta just build these relationships from day one. And it's as simple as just an email or a phone call, but also just checking in on them uh occasionally too, just finding out, hey, uh we we see that your traffic's dipped off a little bit. Well, what can we do to help you kind of thing? It's stuff like that that that may seem small, but it goes a long way into building that solid relationship.
SPEAKER_05As if that's not enough, we lead on with an episode about building community and how this strengthens partner relationships with head of marketing at guild.co, Michelle Goodall. In this very informative episode, we delved into community-based marketing, what it means, and how it works, and why it's so important to invest and build your affiliate community around your program and brand. Tune in for the next couple of minutes to listen to how Michelle shares her views on what building community is all about.
SPEAKER_00So let's start with that definition first. An online community is also known as a virtual community, an internet community, or a digital community. And this is just simply a space or a place where people come together digitally to interact, share knowledge, and build relationships. And, you know, I come at it very much from a marketing perspective, and community or marketing as a definition is the management process which is responsible for identifying, anticipating, and satisfying customer requirements properly. So when you sort of smash community and when you smash marketing together, you've got this thing called community-based marketing. And that's something that uh a phrase that myself and Ashley Friedline um coined in 2021. And this is simply bringing people together around a shared practice, purpose, place, product, or set of circumstances to create insights and to create closer, much more valuable relationships with your customers, with your prospects, with your partners and other stakeholders to deliver value for your organization. So that really simply is it. If you start to put everything through the lens of bringing people together, convening people in a virtual private online space to do good things together and to align to your organizational objectives, then you've got a real understanding behind what community can do for you. And, you know, there are lots of different types of community, communities of place, play, purpose, product and practice, and also circumstance. But in the world of affiliate and performance marketing, it probably is going to be aligned around product or practice, people coming together to learn more, to do more, to collaborate, to share. And as a brand or an organization, by convening people in your space, you're getting some fabulous business benefits, which I can go into some detail because I think you wanted to ask the question around that. You know, what benefits do you get?
SPEAKER_05Next up, we spoke with Mike Schmidt from Shopify Collabs as we delved a little deeper into the idea of gifting with your partners, a topic that we actually touched upon in our Amplify summit earlier this year as well. We also talked about influencer marketing and how that plays a role in your affiliate program, utilizing influencers as part of your program growth and how to enable your publishers and partners to really showcase your program service or product with unique content that converts more customers. Now, I really enjoyed this episode as we dived into so many key questions that I get asked on a daily basis, and Mike was kind enough to offer loads of value and experience from his journey in building Shopify Collabs, which I'm sure most of you are looking at if you're in the e-commerce space right now. So I'd highly recommend going to take a listen to this episode if you want to find out a little bit more. But this next clip is super exciting and interesting for you to listen to too.
SPEAKER_02How do you get the product in the hand of the person that's going to be talking about it? That's the goal. That's the like as quickly as possible. And the reason why I think that there's some apprehension toward this, although there's like not that much for like savvy merchants when you go directly to the merchants, they're like, ask them this question How much are you spending to acquire a customer on Facebook right now? How much are you spending to acquire a customer on TikTok right now? And it's probably the cost of your product. It's probably if you have if you're just starting like whatever else it is, or at least the the cost of the margin. Like what is what is your what is your net cost on this product? Um so I'm basically like, you know, why don't you just send out a bunch of products to your to your favorite creators, your favorite influencers, your super fans that are happen to be creators of some really cool tools out there that will tell you the customers that are also creators when you send them something new? There's two things that will benefit from that. One is that you'll get the product in the hands of the person that can potentially say some really nice things about you on social media. They have friends, fans, followers, whatever else it is. The other thing is that they can give you feedback. What happens if they like hate your product? Well, if someone cares enough to give you feedback on that product, that means you know the the index is pretty high for someone to like eventually buy it because they're willing to give you feedback. The worst case scenario here is that you send a there's like a third case. You send a product to someone, it ends up in their lobby's mailbox, and they just never talk about it, they never open it, just kind of sits there forever, or they end up just like throwing it out. I call that like basically the cost of doing business. So gifting is sort of just like think about also like on the other side as a creator. So as we're just talked about affiliate managers, we talked about merchants, we talked about founders, but think about a creator. Creators are getting bombarded every single day by these merchants that are trying to work with them, right? And you kind of have to like sympathize with this too, even though it's like a ton of opportunity. It's great to see the world of like this economy spreading out. So no longer, you know, Condé Nass taking all the media dollars, it's like all the influencers and creators that are kind of distributing this money, which is great. The economy grows, it's you know, rising tide lifts all ships. It's it's really cool to see. But like when you think about it as a creator, you're like, how do I know this brand is serious about working with me? If they can't even send me a gift or something that's like shows like that intent, maybe a handwritten letter or whatever else it is, how do I know that they're serious? And I think that's like one of the really cool things about this.
SPEAKER_05And let's be clear, what you're saying, you've you've hit the down on the head. Affiliates have a choice of who they can and should be working with. Because there are multiple products that are similar to each other, and they all have the finer nuance. Like I always say, shoes is shoes, whether it's Adidas, Nike, Puma, like how are you going to build that that relationship? And it starts with something as simple as here's a product with a little handwritten letter that makes them feel special, that makes them feel like you've actually taken the time to look at their business, you understand their traffic, you know how you want to get into their community, and that is what actually makes you stand out now as a program manager. It's no longer spray and pray, here's my products. Those that pick it up, hooray, we've made a 10% uplift in sales. Like we have to think a little bit more strategically about how we get our products and services into those niche audiences via our partners and content curators. So I love what you've just said there. It's 100% correct.
SPEAKER_02We're not landing rockets on you know ships, right? Like we're not, we're this is these are simple concepts that are like they're definitely very difficult to execute because you're dealing with people here, right? Like all we're doing at Shopify Collabs right now is trying to execute on the simple things and make it super, super simple. When you go into like any modern product, you open your iPhone, you don't need an instruction manual. You open collabs, you don't need an instruction manual. You don't need anyone to like really tell you what to do because it just makes sense. So I think that there's like a product philosophy in how we're building these things just to like make sense, which is you know why I think like we've got to be like the biggest creator platform in the world at this point. Like, I don't know how the I don't really spend my time on competition or ecosystem or any of those types of things. And given that we're like Shopify, we we love to support uh every single affiliate solution, every single influencer marketing solution. I think there's a world where like collabs is growing incredibly quickly, but like there's also a bunch of other tools and solutions out there that have amazing capabilities that you know promote uh specific use cases. Maybe it's like I am the digital gifting tool or I'm the product to give away digital gifts. And that's like the that's like the niche that you're that you're focused on. Whereas like we're more physical products for gifting. And like we just teach the industry, like the developers and different things like that to build all these cool things and to like adopt the principles, the paradigms, the primitives that we have built inside of collabs so that they can like expand on other opportunities. There's so many opportunities in affiliate, marketplace, gifting, like influencer, creator, artificial intelligence. Like, there's just so many opportunities here, and we're just like kind of at the start of this.
SPEAKER_05And now for a topic that is constantly asked of me as an agency owner, the discussion of networks. Which ones, when to work with them, how to use them, and how to build partnerships in them that support your strategic growth. In this episode, we invited Evan Johnson from AdminTab Midgo to come along and talk about his experiences working with clients around the globe, as he shared some really great points to consider before deciding which networks you work with and what infrastructure, culture, and support they can provide to you as you're starting to scale your program. So listen up to this clip where Evan gives a little bit more insight into just that.
SPEAKER_09And good question. And you're certainly right that it is, it is uh quite different in a lot of these markets. Um, I'd say education is uh one thing to really focus on. Uh, educating um either whether it's partners or brands on how the channel works, what are all the intricacies, uh, like how not just how to work with your platform, but like how does CPA work in general? Like, for example, uh telling publishers that most of the time you have to wait until the advertiser confirms the orders. We uh you can't just demand them the money from us uh hither or whither. Um making sure to tell to educate uh brands, like okay, if you want to have a successful affiliate program, you need to do XYZ, you need to provide uh you know promotional material, you need to provide you know coupons, whether that's um uh on specific sales, you want to have like a newsletter. And we help with all that, but it's just making sure that if uh partners and if brands want to engage with the channel that they do that in an effective way. And uh, as you mentioned, some and some people are kind of learning in to see, oh, what how how can I work with affiliate marketing? And in order to do that, it's best to trust the experts. Um, here it is val it's valuable to work with a network uh because they have to see uh both sides of the equation, and not just do they they see it, but the network only makes money when both the publisher and the advertiser are happy. So we have a financial incentive to make sure that everything is running smoothly.
SPEAKER_05Yeah, I mean I'll call on some of the things that we wanted to get into the nitty-gritty because you mentioned you've mentioned it now already. The explanation of how CPA works, the explanation to the part to the brand that um, you know, there's gonna be have to be an education piece when you're going into the market. So you're not gonna be able to just launch your affiliate program and see sales start coming in. You might have to really nurture those relationships with publishers in India and Latin America who are still on that learning journey themselves, but are obviously quite willing and and happy to kind of invest the time to learn how to scale their campaigns. But I wanted to talk a little bit about the payments thing because we know that that's a huge area of focus and friction between you know merchants and and publishers. And I know that it's a huge area of focus on your network right now. So, what's prompted you guys to develop some of your new products like Instant Payout Pro? And and has this been as a result of some of the learnings that you've had going into these new emerging markets?
SPEAKER_09Sure. So in not just emerging markets, but in established markets as well, the huge concern with publishers, maybe even number one, is when will I get paid? And why is this important? Not just because they want to uh buy a new car, but because a lot of publishers have to reinvest those earnings into their own media spaces. And so we have found that the network, as a network, we have a fiduciary responsibility to on behalf of our publishers to really push the advertisers and say, like, hey guys, can you make sure to confirm those sales? Can we can you make sure to pay us? Because again, in the traditional affiliate model, the publisher only gets paid when the advertiser confirms the orders. However, we found that uh although sometimes the advertisers don't answer as quickly as we like, we can predict, well, with a certain amount of with like over 97% uh probability, we can predict which advertisers will approve which sales.
SPEAKER_05Having access to grassroots knowledge is so important before embarking on expansion plans for your affiliate program. Learning what really works and how to adapt your strategies from around the globe into messaging and promotions that will reach your customers in that geolocation is so important too. And in this episode with Gilles Cateau, we were talking about adapting what works in the market that you want to do business in and how it's a skill that most affiliate managers must also learn to master. The local marketing infrastructure needs to be assessed before you jump right in. And you cannot really generalize what is successful in one region and make it translate directly into another and expect the same results. So tune into this segment where we talked about that and explained how important localization is in your affiliate program scale.
SPEAKER_03Well, you you touched upon it reefy, like you know, it's it's one continent, no two countries are the same. Um, I think both both operators and affiliates need to be aware of the country level, digital adoption, you know, cost of data, infrastructure, smartphone adoption in general. I I think that I think that's the biggest thing. Um you know, the most actionable way of segmenting any African country in my within what we do, um, I find that smartphone users versus you know, uh um uh feature phone users, uh, which again is a very African phenomenon. A smartphone user, you know, probably the most comparable with what we're used to, you know, it's um grade UX, uh data-rich um website, you know, feature heavy, you do it all for the experience, and you got the data as a user as well as the infrastructure to uh to support that experience. A feature point user, you know, uh uh and I'm thinking about countries like DRC, Nigeria, Tanzania. Uh a feature point is optimized to um one have a stable uh a stable experience and uh uh and what's a pretty jumpy um internet infrastructure, so low data close to 2G, 3G, and to use the lowest amount of data possible. Um, you know, this is like link to like payment plants and uh uh and that kind of stuff. Okay, for that kind of fragment that's that data that that data kind of stuff. And operators who have, you know, what what what's referred to as a live version of their website. Basically you have to say that's um yeah, optimized for like Oprah and X tree emoji, uh X free emoji. There's a whole audience there. you know, very kind of like module yet. Uh that that needs to be catered for and that way. Um at the end of the day it's up to the operator to decide which segment he wants to target. But it's very important, you know, it could be both, it could be one of either. It's very important to be aware of that and you know who you go after, who you don't go after because of you know internal, external commercial reasons. I think that's a big one.
SPEAKER_05What I'm hearing here for affiliates that are tuning in is that A, you need to be choosing which operator you're going to be kind of partnering with in the country or region or or state that you're going to be targeting. And obviously you've got to do your research on the data infrastructure, the mobile penetration in in that region. But secondly you need to make sure that the partners that you are joining or the programs that you are joining understand that their platform needs to be adjusted country to country as well in in if you know in Africa. Because here in Europe it's like the same front end website with a different landing page skin for you know Italy, France, whatever. So the the entire marketing infrastructure for um you know operators going into the the African market, there needs to be a lot of thought that gets put behind the product itself. And affiliates need to be you know understanding that and doing their research to partner with the right brands in each country. Otherwise they could be you know wasting their time promoting certain brands that just aren't ever going to convert because the infrastructure isn't right. So it's it's almost quite scientific. So you know we're not without trying to make it too technical the principle is that uh um your front end code is decoupled from um the server where your website is so what what we have done is actually um um a technology that that actually um loads much quicker um so well basically um affiliates will feel this and their conversion from visit to signup um we we've seen it as we tried and tested um it has has has had a massive massive impact particularly um on bound rates and visit to visit to sign up um yeah it it's it's uh uh we we continue to double down on that one because it's made it's made it's been making the biggest difference technology wise we've all been looking at technology ai and web 3 as we've all been a little bit stunned by chat GPT coming into the market. There's not one single digital marketer that I've been speaking to that isn't wondering how it will impact our lives, our jobs, our efficiencies and more importantly our output. In this episode we also got a chance to get really technical with web 3 and artificial intelligence in affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has been around for a long time and it has managed to keep growing thanks to what I have seen as fast adoption of new technology. As we move forward to embrace Web3, which is kind of already here, there's a lot of ways that we can move forward and that we can use this to ensure that we are growing our program strategically in this episode Cole Chapman from Affiliate DAO joined us to explain this move forward and how more is yet to come. So if you're keen on living in affiliate marketing on the cutting edge tune into this particular episode with Affiliate DAO and take a closer look at what's been happening. I think you're gonna find that we're gonna be moving fast as fast as what we did from floppy disk to CD and it's time for you to take note and listen to what's been happening in this space.
SPEAKER_07Yeah I think my biggest piece of advice is get into the communities where this stuff, these conversations are happening. So learn the basics it is a whole new language right just like at the beginning of the internet we talked about what is a dot com what is an at symbol that was so foreign at the time getting a signing up for Facebook for the first time was so foreign but now these things are second nature to us and part of our everyday lives. That's how something like say a crypto wallet is going to be so the the browser is to web two your browser you access the internet web two is what the crypto wallet is going to be for web three. So that's how you're going to access components of the internet is through your crypto wallet. And what that does to advertising and marketing in general is I think going to be fascinating. I don't think we fully understand yet and I and I don't even fully understand it yet but when you're able to see what's in everybody's wallet right what is in everybody's crypto wallet public wallet you know my tokens from Starbucks my tokens from all the brands that I love right my memberships to X, Y, and Z communities that I'm a part of, what does retargeting look like or what do the custom offers look like that you can do when all of a sudden someone signs in and you know instantly what they're associated with.
SPEAKER_05How does that contravene GDPR though? Like I mean are we even going to have to bother about GDPR because I mean there's a company that I heard of called Chain Analysis that can tell you the behaviors of what's happening in every crypto wallet and how often they transact and what kinds of companies they transact to. So that that kind of data it's not personalized so it's fine for GDPR purposes but does give you a heck of a lot of information up front before you've even touched the customer which is like every marketer's dream, right?
SPEAKER_07Yes. Yeah it's gonna change everything. And like you said I don't think any of us can sit here now and predict what it's gonna look like in 10 years just like in 1999 we probably couldn't predict what was going to happen today. But I think what's going to come out of it's gonna be amazing.
SPEAKER_05Following on from that exciting episode where we explored web three and the future of affiliate marketing and then had the thrill of getting back on the mic with Rob Beresford, founder of affiliate.ai now Rob's been around in the affiliate industry for a very long time and it was really great to get him behind the mic to talk about how AI has been impacting affiliate programs and managers positively by improving our efficiencies even at this early stage. We talked a lot about the use of AI for affiliate marketing in this episode and especially in the amount of hours that we can reduce in terms of managing data and reporting and month end and reconciliations, which are often still quite menial and laborious tasks for affiliate managers. It was really interesting to get his perspective on some of the products and tools that he's creating and that affiliate AI is looking to support. So tune into this episode because if you're not yet using AI to make your programs more efficient, you might want to listen to this episode again from start to end and think about how you can be improving your efficiencies in your affiliate programs.
SPEAKER_04That's not to say that the human element needs to be taken out of your account management not by any means but by sure you need to be listening in to see how you can improve productivity too have you written a great piece of content and asked GPT-4 for feedback on that content it does a phenomenal job at spotting your typos, spotting your grammar issues like in a way that before I would write my own content and then spend half an hour like proofreading it and editing it. But now the proofreading process is 30 seconds because ChatGPT can do it for me. Yeah like news sites and things like that like journals can use it as a second you know set by LinkedIn posts I'll stick it into ChatGPT and go, you know, give me feedback on here and they're like here you spell this wrong maybe change your heading here. And again for me this isn't about you know swapping the humans out it's about supercharging the humans and shaving five minutes of 20 tasks a day that's half a day. Like it's incredible. Our parents used to do similar jobs without you know laptops and without computers and like it didn't reduce the need for humans it just a thousand X for we could achieve in our working day.
SPEAKER_05And I think AI will work in the same way that the personal computer that was the other one sort of big question that I wanted to ask you because you've been around so long and I keep popping on about that but it does make a difference. The historical value of the affiliate industry does make a difference in terms of how you view the future what do you think the affiliate marketing ecosystem is going to look like because from my perspective coming from outside of the e-commerce space and getting into the e-commerce space again 10 years later it hasn't changed much compared to some of the other industries that I've worked in where it has changed dramatically and my question is always you know what's going to happen with all of the networks as brands now have tools like AI, Publisher Discovery, you know, Cake and Tune and all of these tracking platforms, where's the value add going to come in? And are these brands going to want to you know cyclically move back in-house and use all of these wonderful tools that are being created or do you just think that the marketplace is just going to keep growing everybody's just going to keep doing their thing and growing organically that's a great question.
SPEAKER_04Like honestly we won't know for a while it took us if we look back through you know the network PC it probably took us five ten years to get any real understanding of what the tool was and that you know the internet was what a decade later same with the mobile and I you know I've I've talked about this before but when the app store first launched the big apps were the beer app and the fart machine app and like flappy birds and you look back so now you have you know the killer apps are like Deliveroo and you know Google Maps where you can actually use all the information that this supercomputer in your pocket allows you to do. The first way like January and February there were people shipping a whole bunch of novelty AI apps and then you know the automated sales wave always comes through after that because that's kind of where the easy money is. I do believe it'll take us time to really understand where the killer apps are and where the value and how that you know how that manifests itself in the affiliate industry I couldn't tell you. I'm hoping we pay less walking talking supercomputers to click drop downs in dashboards, which is effectively what we pay our junior staff members to do. And I know they're junior but there's still walking talking supercomputers that shouldn't be doing dumb stuff over and over again.
SPEAKER_05Next up Edwin McFarlane joined me to talk about the best practices when working with big media publishers. We talked about understanding the payment models and ROAS metrics that need to be understood before engaging in big media as part of your performance program growth. He also touched on this trend where it has become increasingly easier to pump out automated content and how this might impact the way that affiliate managers engage with huge content publishers and media owners alike. However, still like me he believes that maintaining a human element to partnership management will never ever become obsolete. So tune in to listen to this episode if you want to understand more about how to engage with big media publishers, how to create content strategies that really fit with the payment models that they're looking for and how to elevate your performance using content based publishers to grow and scale your program.
SPEAKER_01Yeah like the key golden nugget for me is you know where does a website get its traffic from is the most important question that you should always be asking. And that that's key on both the retailer and the affiliate side. On the retailer side if all of their traffic is coming from brand related terms the chances are they're not really that strong with their content based approach and they're not really ranking very well for more generic terms and what does that maybe say about their products and their level of interest in those products from their prospective users. So for me that's almost a bit of a red flag if a retailer's traffic is almost entirely brandless. And the same can be said from the affiliate side which is if all of the traffic is coming from retailer plus something or other like retailer review, retailer voucher code, retailer cashback or whatever it might be I those are sites that if I'm honest don't really interest me because I believe rightly or wrongly that most of the traffic they capture has probably already been on the retailer site. I think the most valuable sites are the ones that bring somebody to a website for the first time. Give us an example of the type of site that you're talking about one that is good or one that is bad?
SPEAKER_05Oh both.
SPEAKER_01Okay I'll give an interesting example I'll give the example of Hot UK deals like almost all of Hot UK deals traffic comes from people that are looking for like deal based activity but not brand related so they might be searching for like cheapest trainers that have just been released or it might be like best place to buy prosecco for new year. Like those those search terms are gold right because everyone would love to be in an article that talks about the best proseco for new year. Not only because you know you want to sell prosecco but also because it's an amazing placement. And there's also countless websites that rank for things like Best Backpack or best camera or whatever. So th those are the sites that for me are just gold dust. The ones that are not so valuable I think it it kind of goes without saying when you see that 75% of all traffic that goes to voucher site is on a brand related term. And yeah I just it makes me a little bit uncomfortable to push those opportunities in front of a retailer because I do believe they're usually going to buy anyway.
SPEAKER_05In this final episode of this season we talked about affiliate tracking. Now I've been in this industry for more than two decades and along with the founders of Haylink I found this conversation incredibly interesting because over the number of decades that we've been working in this industry we still haven't actually been able to solve this problem. Now Haylink set out to add value to the journey of a click optimizing tracking to show you exactly what links are the ones that are making you the most money. And for affiliates and publishers this is nothing short of the holy grail. So leaving money on the table due to NICR tracking can potentially impact up to double digit percentages on your bottom line profit according to some of the recent studies that I've been reading. And I know that there's a lot of other companies out there that are delving quite deep into looking at how we can optimize tracking across all the different platforms that we use. So we got really deep in this episode to discuss what brands can do to help their publishers get more efficient, what publishers should be doing to ensure that they're working as accurately as possible to promote the right brands to their customers and to understand where conversions might be dropping off. Using tools like this can really help you to adapt your strategies according to what the data is telling you and not on what you are being fed as an assumption of average data, which currently is still what most programs are using and working on in order to deliver growth. So tune into this episode if you want to get really tactical that was what we were talking about and really get to understand how you can utilize some of these tools in your programs to improve your performance.
SPEAKER_08But here's Alex and Simon giving you their thoughts too one word that we always go back to is transparency and historically applient marketing has been a kind of a black book uh not to say uh um it's it's been difficult to to to to to to be transparent on where your traffic is coming from a lot of it so I think when we talk to big publishers the big media houses the big uh online platforms that are sending a lot of traffic they ask for the ability to work more closely with their partners but also to know exactly how much revenue being generated so we see a closer collaboration between advertisers and publishers and on the other side as well we see uh the the the the need for having a closer dialogue with with the big publishing houses when you sit when you're the advertising so you need a platform we're talking about a lot of the partner economy where you where you work partner to partner in order to to to build the best campaigns and build the best just get the best possible revenue um and actual tracking as well to get the best possible tracking on on uh on on on both ends so that's something uh we see it's really important something we see that that that that almost every big publishing house or media corporation is is asking for the ones that we're working with at least that that they're seeking seeking this this kind of uh yeah so the future looks bright if we get better data transparency definitely and then of course during recessions as you said the affiliate marketing is of course one of the most uh cost effective and most secure ways of uh using your marketing budget so so there's there's big interest right now and that's a wrap for what we were discussing in season 11 of the affiliate marketing podcast which I'm super excited to share with you guys now has reached over 100,000 downloads this season.
SPEAKER_05I mean woot I'm so excited to see that affiliate marketing is becoming more of a frontline story than a back office function. We're now cruising into the top 100 weekly around the globe your support is helping us to do that. So thank you so much for tuning in each week to this affiliate marketing podcast, for rating us with five stars and for sharing this with your industry friends. I appreciate each and every one of you because no matter what industry you're working in, our aim here is to help you learn what's useful, give you practical advice and help you understand what's changing and how you can amplify and elevate your affiliate program performance. On this podcast we're learning together and we're bringing in special guests to help you elevate those learnings too. So here's a little sneak peek of what's coming up next season and what I'll be delving into with some of the guests that we've got lined up for you in season 12. We'll be talking a little bit about compliance and how that's changing around the world and how that impacts your affiliate program too. I'll be doing some amazing backstory telling with some of the OGs in our industry who have been around since the dawn of time. Now I'm super excited for some of these guys to come on board because these are stories that we haven't written down anywhere in our affiliate marketing history. So tune in and make sure that you listen to what was happening back then almost two decades ago. We'll be going into the understanding of psychology behind e-commerce in affiliate marketing. We'll be talking about affiliate marketing entrepreneurship with some of the industry's leading entrepreneurs who have built some amazing businesses which I can't wait to share with you guys. We'll also be looking to understand how to sustain your brand and scale it at the same time and we'll be covering a range of other interesting topics as the next wave of industry leading guests, platforms, publishers and networks come together on this podcast to join me behind the mic and talk all things affiliate marketing. Now if you want to have your say on future topics that we're going to be discussing and covering on this podcast feel free to email me on lj athiverse.com I'm going to be doing my best to get these topics covered for you in the future episodes that we're creating to help your affiliate program grow.
SPEAKER_06Thanks again for listening to the affiliate marketing podcast we look forward to seeing you next time are you ready to take your business to new heights the Elevate Summit is coming this July brought to you by Applebird. This unmisable live streamed virtual summit will run for two days bringing the best and brightest affiliate and performance marketing practitioners together to help you grow your affiliate marketing program and partnerships. Why is this right for you? This virtual event is for publishers, affiliates, affiliate managers and staff suppliers who work within the partnership economy. EarlyBoad tickets are priced at just£49 for a limited time only and your ticket gives you access to world class speakers and industry experts who will share tips, strategies and learning. The Elevate Summit is for you if you want to learn with real industry experts. Learn new ideas and tips to grow your program and learn new skills in our masterclass discover new business leads showcase your tech and services and network with industry peers. Let's elevate your affiliate marketing together visit appeverstaferse.com and click on the elevate button to register now at this very special early bird price that's a wrap for this week's affiliate marketing podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down why not head over to Apple IT and give us a five star review. Make sure to subscribe to our podcast and our YouTube channel so you never miss another insightful episode or one of our free webinars ever again. in next week for more digital affiliate marketing insights, trends, tips, and content to keep your affiliate and performance marketing fresh and your partners driving consistent sales.