You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by AffIFirst.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_02Welcome to the affiliate marketing podcast with myself, Leanne Johnston, your host. And today I'm really excited because I've got Matt Ranter, who's the head of practice for digital transformation, e-commerce and strategy from Nimble Gravity joining me on the podcast today. And Nimble Gravity is a consultancy specializing in data science, digital strategy, e-commerce, near shore engineering teams, analytics and organizational strategy. And boy, I can't believe I said that all in one take. So sounds like a mouthful, but Matt, it's absolutely fantastic to have you here and really looking forward to digging into data with you today. So thanks for joining me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, glad to join. Really happy to have the conversation. Should be a fun one. Looking forward to it.
SPEAKER_02Awesome. Okay, so let's get started because we're all into big data at the moment. We're all using data to do intelligent marketing. We're using our data to work with our affiliate partners. But before we get into the data, what I'm really interested in is your backstory because you've been immersed in digital for more than two decades, just like me, and as we got to know each other before coming onto this podcast, really keen to know how you entered the industry, where you came from, and how you landed up being at Nimble Gravity doing what you do today.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, gosh. It's always hard to sum up multiple decades of a history into a short time frame, but I'll do my best to keep it brief so that we can get to the main topic. But going all the way back to 1998, I had graduated college the year before. I was working then at a company called Vans, which was a consumer electronics and major appliance retailer based out of the state of Montana, employee-owned. And I worked my way up through that company. I started in customer service, then I moved into being in the sales in actual retail stores, then managing one of the retail stores. And I found myself in a small town, Hamilton, Montana, sleepy retirement community. I was in my 20s, wasn't really the greatest fit for me. And the company at that point in time had announced that they were building a website. And I knew that e-commerce was going to be huge. And so I asked, is there anything I could do to be a part of that? And luckily there was, and that was really just helping to fill in the database that we would use to power the site with product information. So for affiliates, like this is like literally using FileMaker Pro and going back in time, right? Like dynamically creating pages that I know so many affiliates have done over the years. And that's literally what we were doing to create that initial website. I was bored to death in that town and so was more than happy to take on an extra task to occupy my time during the evenings and stuff like that. And, you know, then I kind of reached a breaking point, honestly, with just being in a small town as a young person and it wasn't a great fit. All my friends were 45 minutes north in the town I went to college in. And I got to this point where I lined up another job and I went to the company and I said, listen, I would love to keep working for you guys, but I can't live in Hamilton, Montana anymore. What can we do about this? If there's nothing, I have another job, don't worry, but I would really love to keep doing this. And I was really fortunate that they then brought me full fold into the e-commerce operation at that point in time. And it was about like four or five people. We literally did everything, everything. We would answer the phones, we would run down to the warehouse and fill out shipping labels by hand. Like we didn't have a printer at that point in time. We would check in returns, learn about a new marketing platform, whatever it was, and go start testing things out. Eventually I took over managing that entire e-commerce operation. Then we grew to the point where specialization was needed. Like we needed a director of ops, we needed like somebody in marketing, we needed people that were just overseeing general sales and all that kind of stuff. And that's when I took on the marketing side of things, jumped into running the affiliate program, oversaw all of our performance marketing and copywriting and SEO, and then grew throughout my career to a point where moved to Colorado, got into building websites, kind of intra websites for franchisees of Cricket Wireless to come in and buy approved fixtures, approved security devices, these kinds of things. Then moved into B2B e-commerce, running a global marketplace for aeroelectronics, selling things like transistors and resistors and capacitors and all the tiny parts that make up a laptop or a phone or whatever to companies around the globe. Then I dove into ad tech and mobile marketing with a company here in Colorado. And then I guess it was in 21, I ventured off on my own for a little while to be a solopreneur, doing some consulting, and then joined Nimble Gravity in January of 22 and have been doing that full time. And now I'm taking those multiple decades of experience and helping other businesses grow their e-commerce operations and doing digital transformations and all those kinds of things. So there you go.
SPEAKER_02So that is like gold because that's everybody's story that came into this industry is that we always came in from either customer service or sales, which is the beginning journey that you had. And then we learned our craft on the job. And this is something that I do want to bring out because I interview a lot of people for my own business when I'm employing people, and I always ask them what's your kind of three-year plan? And they're like, I want to be the boss. But what they forget is they see people like us who are 20 years deep into this industry, and they forget about all the different jobs that we've had to do to learn the craft that we now specialize in today. So this isn't like a quick thing. Nobody becomes a veteran overnight. They have to do their time, they have to see all parts of the business. And I think that's why I love asking this question at the start of every podcast that I ever have is just to get the background knowledge of where you've come from, all the different things and aspects that you've seen, and then how you landed up being the expert that you are today. So thanks very much for sharing that. I know that was two decades full, but it was really interesting. So let's talk a little bit about data because obviously that drives the e-commerce industry forward. And the one thing I do want to say is that I'm seeing a lot of, for those of you that are tuning in from the States, obviously, this is a global podcast. There seems to be a really big hub in Colorado, actually, in terms of digital. So I don't know if that's me over here on this side of the pond. I don't know if that's something that, you know, if anybody's tuning in and they're looking for performance marketing jobs, but there seems to be a lot of businesses and really interesting agencies that are based out of Colorado, for one. But also, I wanted to dive deep into the kind of looking at how brands should be driving their revenue and how they should be using their data and how they should be doing that analysis. So the one thing that I thought was super interesting before I got you on this podcast was looking at your website and seeing how you talk about pragmatic data science. And I want you to explain this a little bit more in detail and why affiliate managers should be adopting this kind of methodology in looking through their data to drive performance-based decision making.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, absolutely. It's a great topic. So typically with pragmatic data science, it would refer to kind of approaching data science in a very practical way in a way that's focused on achieving results. So that's what works rather than what might theoretically be ideal or more complex. And if you boil it down to a business book, it's good is better than great, right? Like in that kind of thing. Pragmatic data science is first and foremost problem-driven, right? What's the specific problem in the real world that you want to pursue data science for and understanding the problems that need to be solved and then how and if data science can actually help, then moving into like a focus on simplicity. And it's got to keep things very simple and that work well over just creating a very complex, theoretically elegant solution. Taking that into a data science language, if a simple linear regression model works and provides a good enough solution, why do you need to move on to the complex deep learning model in order to start actually using the thing and start driving impact into your business? Long term, sure, you could move into a more deep learning model, but why not start with that linear regression? And you could even potentially do that in something like Excel if your data set is small enough and make it more accessible to a larger audience. And then it talks about iterating. Pragmatic data science is about iterative development and goes back to what I was just saying about simplicity. You want to start with the most simple thing and then consistently gradually move forward based on feedback and performance of how that would go. And then you've got to think about like what are your practical constraints, right? Do you actually have 20 data scientists? Do you have the computational resources to run something massive? Or do you have smaller teams, smaller data sets, smaller environments that you're working in? What are you really focused on? And then the other things I would say is it's got to be reproducible, easily maintainable, and really has to focus on actionable insights, right? Like, how can you drive decision making? How can you improve operational efficiency? How can you make a very clear case for data science that it's actually impacting revenue? And then just finally, I would say you got to touch on ethics and privacy too. And if you're being pragmatic, you would have that consideration for those things and make sure that your data sets weren't biased, that you weren't exposing information that was, you know, personally identifiable information, things like that. Right.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. Now, a lot of people will say that the affiliate networks or the tracking solutions provide all the data in a format that they think we need to be looking at it in. But there's still quite a lot of data analysis that's required as part of the affiliate manager role because you can get lost in that data, you can miss things because there's so much data now. There's so many different types of reports that you can pull out of your affiliate network. So taking what you've just said now, can you apply that to the role of an affiliate manager in terms of, okay, so you've got this reporting suite, you've got all of this data that you've got showing you which affiliates are sending you which customers. How do you apply that simplicity to go back to the basics and not get lost in the data? Because a lot of affiliate managers are very good people, but they're out there building relationships, but they don't actually know how to take a really basic look at data and actually quantify it and analyze it so that it gives results. So can you maybe take some of what you've just said now and apply it to an affiliate program? Where do you begin? What are some of the key metrics that you should be looking at and how do you apply this science?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, there's a couple different ways to look at this, right? And I think I'll talk about it from the perspective of you are running an affiliate program for a business, and it's your job to make that profitable and to grow it over time to make it have an impact, right? Yeah. And I don't want anybody in the affiliate world to think that I'm talking about this in a way where I'm trying to steal affiliate sales. But one of the long-term goals is for anybody, for any website, whether it's the affiliate website or the retail business or that they're working with or whoever, is to develop long-term return customers. And uh affiliate programs are great for driving that. Sometimes those those customers are extremely loyal to the publisher, right? Like they love a slick deals, they love a comparison website, whatever it might be. Great. That's fantastic. And continue to work with those people and drive them through. Other times, what you're hoping for is the affiliate manager inside the business is that you're going to win a long-term customer out of an affiliate relationship. And so, in that fashion, you need to understand something that I've never seen an affiliate platform give. And quite honestly, you don't even see it in something like a Google Analytics or anything like that. You have to take your data outside of those platforms and start to do cohort studies. And you need to understand who are the cohorts of customers that are coming to you from which affiliate publishers and partners. And then how are they behaving? Are they consistently going through the publisher partner that you're working with? Or are they starting to return to you? And how are you impacting that? How are you trying to activate them coming back to you directly? And so you might find that you have a really high-performing publisher partner from a perspective of they drive a lot of revenue, but maybe they don't drive a lot of customers to you that become loyal to your business. And you might want to actually focus on a different affiliate publisher partner who does bring you clients and customers who turn into your long-term loyal customers, right? And you will never understand that inside Google Analytics, inside of CJ, inside a share sale, wherever, right? Like you just they don't show up there. Gotta take that data out. It's something that you can probably do in Excel for a lot of businesses, right? It's a pretty simple task, also into a larger data science environment for somebody to take and build those cohorts out and give you that picture. And then that can inform you as to where you want to focus your relationship building based energy on people out there, right? And so you might turn from Tom to Sally and say, gosh, I actually want to spend a lot more time investing in how we work with you and your platform in order to get more of those customers that are going to be good for you.
SPEAKER_02And that's really where it's important that affiliate managers understand what their performance outcomes are. Like what is it that your business is actually asking you to do? Is it to bring in more revenue and pay on performance, or is it to bring in new customers that you aren't touching through any of your other digital channels? Because the two strategies that fit behind those two performance outcomes are completely different. And the partners that you're going to be working with in that funnel to go and find those customers across the interweb, all over the place, TikTok, Facebook, wherever it is that your partners are bringing you those customers are going to be completely different as well. And this is why data analysis and data science is so important in affiliate marketing. And yet many affiliate managers I speak to don't actually know that they need to be looking at their data this way.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah. And you have to, like even if you weren't an affiliate manager, still look at your data this way, right? Any e-commerce operation, any digital business, any business period should be looking at their data in this way. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And I think when you do look at your data this way, you're going to find your segmentation in your program is going to differ too, because you won't just be heavily reliant on e-commerce and voucher code sites, which will bring you revenue, but they're not going to be bringing you brand new customers necessarily, depending on what your analytics shows you. So I think it's very important to have basic skills in data analysis, but also not to get too lost in it, because you can end up going down rabbit holes and actually not getting any conclusions if you go a little bit too deep. So what are some of the simple things that e-commerce companies could do to improve their performance this year? Because we are in a challenging year. And the one thing that I don't want to see is affiliate program managers not utilizing their data to actually increase their profit margins. So, what are some of the things that you see from companies where they're not actually using their data properly? And how do you help them to make that right?
SPEAKER_00This is maybe gonna maybe gonna seem a little less data specific, but it actually is a piece of data. I consistently evaluate websites all the time in helping companies with mergers and acquisitions through due diligence processes. And I've looked at hundreds and maybe verging on thousands of websites at this point. And what I see really consistently is that people don't pay attention to the data points that you can get from third parties who are doing things like speed testing and performance testing of websites. Yes. Which, by the way, this is an SEO ranking factor. So whether you are running a marketing program for a business or you are an affiliate publisher who wants to drive traffic into their website, if you are not paying attention to the ranking factors from an SEO perspective, you're gonna be challenged, right? And so go make your site faster. Go to pagespeed.web.dev, test your site, and then it's gonna tell you exactly what's going on. It's gonna say, hey, you have blocking JavaScript, you have unused CSS, your images are way too big, right? And these are simple, foundational kinds of things that I consistently see people failing at, but they are ranking factors for SEO and they are a part of what like people are starting to focus on core web vitals. It's great, absolutely should, but the simple things behind just even the performance testing actually make up some of those core web vitals, right? So go and pay attention to that kind of thing and that kind of data point about your website. And if your competition isn't paying attention to that, and you are, you're gonna get a leg up on them, right? So I would 100% do that. This is gonna sound silly with the image thing, but it it leads to speed, it leads to performance, it's a it's an indicator. Go change all your JPEGs and your GIFs or GIFs, however you pronounce it. I don't want to get into an argument about that with anybody, but go change them to AVIF or WebP. They're more modern formats and they basically are gonna cut the size in half, right? So your site's gonna load faster, these kinds of things. 100% would just focus on some basic elements that you can pick up on data signals from other people.
SPEAKER_02So I love that because number one, affiliate managers should be checking all of the affiliate sites that they are actually spending money on to make sure that those sites are focused on good web core vitals. And number two, I love the fact that you're telling affiliate managers to check their own sites too, because that I'm pretty sure that affiliates are doing that. And before they come and promote your program or promote your products, they're assessing you as a business and what the customer journey is going to be because it impacts their earnings at the end of the day.
SPEAKER_00100%.
SPEAKER_02So that's very good advice. So, guys, if you're listening to this, like go and have a little search quickly and go and look at your top performing partners and make sure that their sites are good too. Give us some of your growth hacking strategies. What are some of the things that you do with clients with this data that you can actually access both internally and externally through their affiliate programs? What are some of the like common growth hacking strategies that you recommend to clients like off the bat? I know it's a very general question, but some there must be like generic things that happen over and over again that people just don't think about and see. So share some insights on growth hacking.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So every e-commerce business I have ever been a part of is always under-resourced 100%. And I've been a part of major organizations doing billions of dollars in revenue, and we could have used more resources. There's always more to do in e-commerce. And so my mindset always around my affiliate partners when I was running an affiliate program is they're gonna augment my business in total, and we're gonna have a symbiotic relationship together where we're gonna continue to earn and grow. And if we can do that together, fantastic. So, why would I hide the things that work or that lead customers to me? And so here's a here's a great thing to go look at. So if you have Google Analytics and you're running search ads through Google, you can go and look at the queries that people are using to actually drive traffic into your website. And then you can also sort through those and understand. And this is great from an e-commerce perspective, works for B2B and others as well, but you can understand how many goal completions are happening, right? Do you have goals set up like things like add-to-cart and actual checkout, right? If you are doing something like say lead affiliate marketing, where you're driving leads into, say, like an insurance business or something like that, how many form fills are happening for that insurance business? And many, how many goal completions are they getting? And so that affiliate manager can then take those search queries and can say, listen, partners, these are the top terms that are driving traffic. Into our website where people are actually converting with them. I don't necessarily want you to go and compete with me on paid search because that's just going to be murder for all of us, but you guys can go create content around this, and you're an army. Like I can have hundreds of you creating smart content around these terms and around similar longer tail terms that will capture audience that we're not capturing. And I don't have a hundred copywriters, but I've got a thousand or fifteen hundred or twenty five hundred or five thousand affiliate partners. And if I can get some fraction of them participating in that and ultimately funneling that traffic into me and my website, great. Hack the heck out of that all day long.
SPEAKER_02And now you can with ChatGPT. So, you know, like you're it's not going to be a massive issue to ask your affiliates to go and create some content for you. But using that data to actually get them to mobilize and push the competition out of your space is not, it's cost efficient, number one, because it doesn't cost you anything to ask a question. And number two, it gives affiliates really great insights on what they can convert on. And ultimately at the end of the day, what they want to do is in commission, right? So I think that's a really quick hack.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. If you're a publisher, go ask your partners what are those terms, what's actually driving traffic in. Have those conversations.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And it isn't about brand. It's not brand and keyword, it's long tail keywords that are generic search terms.
SPEAKER_00Totally. Yep. Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02All right. I love that. I love that. And that's why I love having people like you on this podcast because with 20 years of experience, these are the little shortcuts that you've kind of ecked out and learned on the job. So it's great that you're sharing that. What about competitive intelligence tools? Because they are expensive. Not every company can afford to have some for their affiliate managers. There are multiple tools out there that help you find and discover and recruit partners. What are some of the ones that you've used? Do you think that they're worth it? Is it worthwhile spending that money? Or is good old-fashioned Google keyword searches still the kind of go-to? I know I have preferences to tools, but what are your thoughts?
SPEAKER_00I love competitive intelligence tools personally. And while the application window for them for affiliate program managers might be less, I think companies in total should have them. And I'll tell you how actually an affiliate manager can use them too. Obviously, you can go look at backlinks, right? And with backlinks, you can find things like, oh, look, here's this whole group of backlinks that have AID equals some number chain or whatever, right? Something that points out this is an affiliate driving traffic in. It's maybe it's a no-follow link and it has that kind of information. Why are you paying for some other platform to go find new affiliates when you as a company could be investing in a competitive intelligence tool like an SEM rush or similar web and getting all the other great data that comes with that about how partners are driving traffic into their business, right? Um, or how competitors, excuse me, are driving traffic into their business. Are they more heavily utilizing social? Are they more heavily utilizing page search? So I think as an operator, it's your responsibility to figure out can we have one tool that replaces three tools, right? That we're utilizing, and can we just have multiple people working inside of that? So I use SEM Rush all the time to find affiliates of one company and recommend them to another company, right? Oh, look, here's these top 10 affiliates that are driving actual traffic through. And if you have a really advanced version of some of these competitive intelligence tools, and maybe your company is doing enough revenue that it makes sense for you to pay for some of the premium level access, like inside of a similar web, you can do things like look at more granular pages of a website. And you might not get down to actual individual conversion points, but you'll get down to things like how many people came into a cart, right? And then if you look at that by source and understand, oh, these big affiliates are driving actual traffic into carts for this business, and I'm not partnered with them, right? That's way better than just here's an affiliate that's connected to this business.
SPEAKER_02It's more targeted.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, 100% more targeted.
SPEAKER_02And that comes back to the outcomes, right? So are we looking for new customers? Are we looking for new customers that buy? Are we looking for brand reach? Are we looking for new regions? What are those outcomes that you're trying to obtain as the affiliate manager? And it's very important that you know what they are because I do speak to a lot of affiliate managers and they're like, oh, I've just got to grow the program. And that's like sending somebody into a nail shop and asking them, go pick your colour, and the wall is full of every range of colours that are out there. And it's like you almost get paralyzed because you're like, where do you begin? What who is the partner that you're looking to partner with and get that top deal done? And this is where the data comes in. It's really drilling down and understanding what's my target, why am I working with this partner, what's the value that this partner needs to be bringing me, and what's the outcome that I'm going to be measuring them against? And relationship management is key. And I know that there are many different types of affiliate managers out there. Some people are more about the sales side and the kind of account management side, and some people are more involved in the data, but it's important that you have a balance of both to be a really good affiliate manager. You know, you might not like looking at numbers all day, every day, but it is a vital part of this role. You work with brands around the globe. You've been published on Forbes.com, like me. So we clearly do know what we're talking about. And you have worked across a number of digital strategies that help businesses to grow. What's the one piece of tactical advice that you can leave with our listeners tuning into this podcast today?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, so if you have ever seen the movie Glengarry, Glenn Ross, and they're talking about ABC, always be closing, right? For salespeople. In the e-commerce and digital world, I like to say always be testing. So ABT, right? Like always be testing. Everything. Test your offers, test your offers in specific channels, right? What works for an affiliate partner probably isn't going to work for a paid search, might not work on social. Like figure these things out. Test those things. Test your landing pages, test where you're bringing people into, test if you need to change what a page looks like for one type of referral versus another type of referral, right? Test your calls to action. And as an affiliate manager, you should be both working with your publisher partners and your internal teams to drive changes into your website that are getting recommended to you. Your affiliate partners are a huge source of intelligence. And right, they can tell you what's working on another website, how many more conversions they're getting from somebody else than they are from you. And you can go look at that website and say, why? What's going on? What's the difference of the page that they're driving these people into versus what I'm doing? Okay, I see it. Let me go change it. So always be testing, always be figuring these things out. Super tactical, right? Get in there and do all the dirty work to do it, but do it all the time. So that's what I'd say.
SPEAKER_02I love that. Always be testing and always be closing. I think ABT and ABC. Those are the things that you need to be taken away from this week's episode. More importantly, though, like a serious question in the 20-odd years that you've been working, what is the potential margin of uplift if you do do this kind of data analysis and testing regularly? Is it five to ten percent that you could be acting out? Or have you seen some brands like totally revolutionize their performance and have 25% increase in bottom line sales? What's the kind of margin? Because is the effort worth a reward, is is really what I'm trying to say. Or are we just looking at one to five percent, which is still significant for any brand on in the bottom line in a complex and competitive marketplace? But is the time spent on looking at all of this stuff, does it really make a big impact, in your opinion?
SPEAKER_00It absolutely does. I've seen and worked with businesses that have had 50% uplifts in conversion across their site based upon very simple tests. I have a team that has driven site-wide margin growth by 6% in under three weeks for an organization, right? Like it can totally be done. And it's just a matter of having a good hypothesis, testing it quickly and iterating, like always iterate and keep going.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. Okay, so that's quite significant because I mean I've always wondered about stuff like this where it's like, oh, you know, test this A B test that. And yes, it's good principles of marketing, but what's the actual reward? If you're like fiddling too much, do you then impact the conversion as well? But 50% is pretty significant in a really volatile market that we're in right now, heading into a recession. If you can increase your revenue without having to spend very much more by that kind of double-digit figure, it's a no-brainer for me.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, yeah, you have to go after it.
SPEAKER_02Perfect. All right. So thank you for being on this podcast and sharing your insights today. Thank you for explaining data science and how it needs to be implemented and how affiliate managers can utilize their data a little bit more efficiently and effectively to move those margins. It's been an absolute pleasure having you on the affiliate marketing podcast with me. And I'm really grateful that you took the time to come out and explain some of these growth hacks that you know you've learned over the two decades of being in this industry too.
SPEAKER_00Thanks so much for having me on. It was a great conversation, and I really appreciate it.
SPEAKER_01This podcast is brought to you by AMP. The Affiliate Manager Performance Program is designed for ambitious affiliate program managers working at brands, agencies, or affiliate networks that are looking to grow and scale their affiliate programs and partner performances. We've already helped hundreds of affiliate program managers from a range of industries get the best out of their affiliate partnerships and build consistent sales within their affiliate programs. With just one hour per week over a 12-week period, this program is unlike any other. Book your seat on our next cohort by visiting our website, affiverse.com, and hit the training menu. From there, you can register your interest for our next cohort launch or contact our sales team to find out more. That's www.affire.com. 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 iTunes 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. Tune 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.