You're listening to the Affiliate Marketing Podcast brought to you by affiversemedia.com. The chapter and verse of everything you need to know about running a successful affiliate program for your business. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers, publishers, networks, agencies, and Martech providers who operate, support, or manage affiliate marketing programs around the globe. If you want to launch, scale, and grow a successful affiliate marketing program, you're in the right place. In this podcast, you'll learn how affiliate and partner marketing is constantly changing, and tune in to industry experts who are getting behind our mic to share tactical insights and practical knowledge to help your affiliate program grow. Here you'll discover what's new and trending in affiliate and performance marketing, how to run your affiliate program successfully, and gain industry insights from experts and practitioners from around the globe. The truth is, you simply won't find this information anywhere else. Now, here's your award-winning affiliate and performance marketing host, an industry veteran, your affiliate marketing guide and the founder of Affiverse, Leanne Johnston.
SPEAKER_03Welcome back to the season finale of season 12 of the affiliate marketing podcast. And I have to tell you, I think that this season really pushed the boundaries of topics that we want to explore in affiliate marketing. If you're just joining us for the first time, welcome to the fastest-growing affiliate marketing podcast in the world. I'm very happy to say that we've hit some pretty big milestones this season, reaching more than 135,000 downloads for a business and news niche podcast. We post more than 505-star reviews on Apple and Spotify, and we are reaching listeners in a multitude of countries around the globe who are launching, scaling, and growing affiliate programs across a multitude of industries. I have to say that I absolutely love this job. I'd love to give a massive shout out to those of you who are tuning in from places like Florida, New York, Washington, Seattle, and further abroad with countries like India, Australia, and South Africa tuning in to listen to what we're sharing with you each week. We're thrilled to have you joining us in this conversation and sharing the tactical information and advice that we're bringing you as being part of our AFFOS community. Now there's plenty to be excited about as we head into season 13. But to wrap up this week, I wanted to share some of the highlights of the guests that I interviewed across season 12 and share some of the exciting things that we'll be delivering in weeks to come. So sit tight, listen up on what you may have missed, and remember to keep liking and sharing the content we're putting together and inviting more people in to listen and learn about affiliate marketing along with us. Here's some of the highlights I wanted to share with you from the previous episodes that we covered in this season. We started off strong by interviewing Sri Sharma, the founder of Increasingly, talking about AI and how he sees technology revolutionizing the consumer purchase experience, as well as sharing growth tactics for improving audience reach and new engagement. There's so much psychology that sits behind this e-commerce journey that we're presenting to customers. It's not just a website anymore, it's like all the plugins and the tools that you've created that are enabling customers to have these wonderful experiences online. And affiliates sit right in the middle of that because they're part of that customer journey. And whilst there's a lot of businesses creating products for brands, are you seeing affiliates adopt some of these technologies as well into their websites to enhance that customer journey?
SPEAKER_07I do, I do see affiliate marketing and particularly publishers, like learning to use, for example, AI for content, you know, without laboring on about ChatGPT that everyone talks about pre-ChatGPT. You could do things where you could test copy, be it for email or be it for landing pages. You're using AdWords already. AdWords is all machine learning. Um it's just now that with ChatGPT you can do even more things, then you can do it by asking verbally, not having to write down, you know, that is the next evolution. So it becomes simpler to do. So yeah, affiliate marketing is already using it. And I do think that affiliate marketing is at the center of all of this. I think sometimes it's not used enough strategically. You know, you said it's a complex I know before it was just use SEO and then PPC, and now it's well, where does your customer journey start? Is it Amazon? Is it TikTok? Is it Instagram? Is it YouTube? Is it SEO? etc. etc. And and affiliate marketing can sit actually at the confluence of all of that because it's about saying to the advertiser what problems do you face? And actually, how can we help you right from saying where is a customer starting, and how can we find more people who are there in terms of publishers, um, through to all the way to the end, which is where we sit, which is well, actually, you're bringing somebody to the site. Do you would you like to actually improve the performance? Um, would you like to eke out 10% more AOV?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and it's I think it's quite promising because we're we're working in a really volatile market right now, and I want to touch on this point because there's a lot of e-commerce people that are tuning into this podcast each week to learn about what's happening, what's trending, and how they can actually move their programs forward. So, can you give us a sense for what you're seeing in the retail sector right now? Because people want to elevate their performance. And as you've got a really cool summit coming up in in two months' time, which is going to be talking about just this. So, what are some of the volatilities that you're seeing with retailers right now and what are they doing to combat this market that we're working in?
SPEAKER_07Yeah, so from a customer standpoint, I think some of the key trends are that I'm sure many people have heard of the concept of essentials, extendables, and expendables. So essentials are, for example, the things that you need for your kids. You know, you need food on the table, things interestingly, also your pets are part of your uh essentials. Uh extendables are things like holidays, and expendables become your personal accessory choices. So, you know, a new top, you know, some new hair products, you know, those become expendables. You know, you can really push them out into the future. So, from a customer standpoint, that's what you're seeing. And that's why when you see, you know, in our data, there are definitely trends where many retailers are seeing a downturn in traffic because depending on the sector they're in, uh, they're facing that. But in some sectors, they're not, because they are clearly essential to the consumer. And then from the retailer landscape, you're seeing volatility because in the US, you would have seen things like Party City or Bed Bath Beyond. In the UK, Misguided and Jules who have filed for bankruptcy. And that's been because of heavy, heavy debt, also for some of them, stores, uh, inflation, and supply chain costs. So it has been a really, really volatile space. That doesn't mean there aren't people who are succeeding, uh, and it doesn't mean there aren't people who are struggling but managing to keep it together. And there are some definite ways that people can do a better job of that. And that's the challenge, isn't it? It's like, how do you ride the storm? For many people, it's how do you ride the storm and how do you find the opportunities? Because in every downturn, there is an opportunity. When you then look back in a few years, every single person will go, do you know what? It led to something. And and I've and I've seen that because I've been through more than one downturn.
SPEAKER_03Next up, we took a more pragmatic approach to understanding data, how to use it to review the results and how data impacts your affiliate program performance. We all know that data overwhelm is a real thing, and we can fall into being overwhelmed quite quickly. But in this episode with Matt Ranter, who details exactly how to break down data into actionable results as well as using it to set clear outcomes, listen up in this excerpt as he explains this in a lot more detail. We 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_01Yeah, 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. But 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_03Yeah. 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_01Yeah, 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?
SPEAKER_07Yeah.
SPEAKER_01And 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. 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.
SPEAKER_03In episode three of this season, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jim Banks, a true industry OG. And we explored affiliate marketing then to now as he shared some of the amazing stories and experiences that he's had working in affiliate and performance marketing for more than two decades. And in this episode, he details exactly how this industry has changed so much in that time. What are some of the big changes that have happened in affiliate marketing over the last let's just talk about the last decade because prior to that it was, you know, like everybody was doing every everything that they could to make a quick buck. But what are some of the big changes in affiliate marketing that our listeners need to be aware of? For me, the kind of rise of the network or the demise of the network, now that we've had such, you know, really great tracking solutions that have come in, like Impact and Tune and Cake. And there's so many tracking solutions out there. Like I think you're spoiled for choice now, whereas back then in the day, you've had the option of I either build it myself or I go to a network and launch quicker. So, what are some of the things that you think are the big changes that have elevated us to where we are now in affiliate marketing?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I definitely think that tracking piece is definitely one of them. I think the, you know, again, it used to be that the tracking was this kind of one element of the equation, but it again, I think the problem that you had was that a lot of the kind of network tracking softwares charged so much money for something that they weren't really adding huge amounts of value to. Whereas I think with you know some of the more robust solutions that are existing today, it's very much a case of, you know, I just need the cape capability to do the tracking. I can do my own recruitment, I can do my own partnership development and you know that type of thing. Again, enlisting the help of you know program managers like yourself to help bring in gaps in my kind of portfolio. Because I always think it's you know, when you're actually running a program, right, you need to try and have a balance of different types of traffic coming in, right? It's not just a case of let's have everything searched, have everything SEO, everything emailed. It's like you need a balance, right? I always used to say to people that that you know, if when we were running some of the programs that we had, we would get an allocation of leads or sales that we could generate in a month. And for me, it would always be a case of I would try and distribute that as best I could across all of the channels where we had different affiliates doing different things. So it'd be a case of I'd say, This, these are my email people, I'll give them the opportunity to promote this program through their email stuff. These are my pay search people, I'll get them to do the pay search. And then we would have our own internal media buying teams as well. So we would try and pick up the majority of the Slack internally, because then we we knew that there was integrity in the results that we generated. Right. If you kind of go out to third parties, then it's uh you know a little bit more kind of a leap of faith and you have to trust the process. But you know, when you've done it yourself, you know exactly that every single sale that you've generated is legit. But I get I guess probably the big the biggest change that I've seen is the industry as a whole has become so much more professional than it was. And I think probably the tipping point on that was the rise of the kind of cashback sites, voucher codes, because I think that brought a lot of money into the industry.
SPEAKER_03100%. I think that shift from traffic driver to brand or problem solver, that has been the biggest mindset change in affinity marketing in the last 10 years for me.
SPEAKER_00When I talk about it, I try to talk about partnerships rather than affiliate relationships because it's you know, it is a partnership. It's got to be a reciprocal thing. You've got to, if I'm running your program, I've got to do what you want me to do, right? But equally, if I'm running your program, you've got to do what I want you to do, right? And sometimes that might be pay me quicker, sometimes it might be give me a better offer, you know, a bump in payout, dedicated landing page. It's just something that kind of differentiates what we can offer versus what everyone else can offer.
SPEAKER_03And us as the affiliate managers and the marionettes of those puppet strings, like that's pretty much what we what our job is. And understanding that and knowing your place and your value and your worth in controlling all of those mechanics is really ultimately what affiliate marketing and affiliate program management is all about. One thing I want to ask you, which is like something that I've been waiting to ask you for a while because I know of your experience in the industry, but what's the one lesson that you wish you had learned so you know? Because you know, hindsight is an amazing thing. I know me, I would have probably swapped to the affiliate side a lot quicker, way back in the day, and made my millions, but I didn't. I stayed on the kind of you know B2B side and actually managing all of the relationships instead, and it's been an amazing career. You know, we get to travel to amazing places, we get to meet amazing people. But what's the one like key lesson that you've learned in your time in the performance marketing economy that we're in right now?
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I think for me it's probably right that I it certainly for the first several years of running it, I didn't really think of it as a saleable business opportunity. Whereas I think now I would absolutely set myself up for success by looking to have a business that I could grow to either buy other companies or sell to somebody. Because I still think there's a lot of there's a lot of demand for people to, you know, again, like you look at your impacts and you know, acceleration partners and so on, they're going around buying companies left and center that fit the kind of gaps that they have in their portfolio. And if you can create something that fills a gap in somebody's portfolio, right, then you have the opportunity to grow a business pretty quickly, right, without much risk, right, and have something that is significantly saleable down the line, you know, maybe two, three, four years down the line.
SPEAKER_03Episode four was a humdinger, not only because I got to interview the lovely Gayla Huber, president of IntegraShield, as we talked all things compliance, but also because I was intrigued to see how she views regulation and compliance in affiliate marketing as a way to propel barons forward versus stifling innovation. In this episode, you should go back and listen to if you're managing a big global program, what kind of points and tips you can pick up on to manage the complexities simply by using Integrity's advanced compliance solutions. So compliance is so broad, right? It's it's it's from checking that the content on the site is compliant, checking that it's not somebody who's like brand bidding or squatting on your brand or doing something illegal on your brand. And then it's also making sure that your brand is being protected in terms of like from the marketing perspective as well. So all three segments are things that your tool can actually help brands develop. Now, what about from the publisher side? Because we do have publishers that listen to this podcast too. What are some of the common things that the publishers are asking you to look for?
SPEAKER_04So we actually have a lot of those as clients as well. Um, when you think of it in terms of a business and long-term success, right, in the compliance space, uh, compliance is kind of a nasty word, nobody really likes it. Think of it in terms of risk mitigation. So when we look at a business and we say, you know, what can you control? What can you not control? Uh, you're really just taking a look at what risk are really gonna put you like in the sites of a regulator or in a lot of litigation, things like that. And so for the compliance side, we tell the publisher side one, you've got to have policies, right? So it's a really important thing that you have a really good vendor due diligence policy, that you're going through all the questions, forming those relationships, um, and then making sure. That you have policies in place that folks need to adhere to. And then from there, once you have it written and you're make sure you're following those policies, then you need to make sure that you're monitoring what people are doing because you really don't want anything coming in from bad sources, essentially, right? And a lot of times it's not what we know, right? So it's probably not the folks that we're working with directly. It's going to be folks that they're working with, but maybe they didn't have the good due diligence process in the beginning or form that relationship. And today, I mean, think in terms of TikTok, there are so many people who just produce content, right? They didn't go to school for this. They have no idea what the regulations are. They're just producing content to get clicks, right? So there's just a lot of education that has to happen. And so it's not that it's always a fraudster or a scammer or a bad guy. A lot of times it's just education. And so when we work on the publisher side, it's really just getting with them and scoping out and looking at their entire network and like where's everything coming from? And then from there identifying who's doing it on purpose and who's not doing it on purpose. What do we need to do to fix it, right? Because you don't, it's all about RY. And so our goal is not, because I've been a marketer, which I think that's one thing that makes our company so different than everybody else. I know that the goal is not to take down. We don't want to get rid of revenue. The goal is just to fix, right? So just fix it, don't take it away. Um, just work for the folks, educate them, make sure that they know what they can and cannot put out there.
SPEAKER_03And I mean, a lot of affiliate managers have to be experts across multiple industries. Because I know what happens in the US is very different to what happens here in Europe. Uh, GDPR rules, and I'm going to bring you back onto that um in a minute because I know that you're doing a lot of stuff with uh US regulation. So we'll we'll we'll talk a little bit about those things. But um keeping abreast of all of that is part of your self-development and learning because, like you said, it's you know, publishers, they're making content. They're either buying ads and reselling that inventory, or they, you know, very good with keywords and SEO, or they nowhere to find, you know, traffic sources that nobody else has touched because that's kind of what they live and eat and breathe and do. But none of them have had this education in terms of like advertising standards codes, which is what we have here in the UK. You know, even in the gaming industry, for example, from the point when a customer clicks on a link to the point when the customer signs up and registers, has to be only three clicks. So if you're thinking about a publisher that has an ad on their website, the customer clicks on the ad, goes to sign up their um account, and the ad that they saw has to give them the bonus that they receive on the end of that click within three clicks. Like that's how granular sometimes the compliance is across multiple different industries. So it's, you know, everybody talks about, oh, you have to be a great relationship manager. Everybody talks about the fact that you need to be a good negotiator and salesperson. The compliance bit is the bit that still gets stuck in the back office, and everybody forgets about it until it becomes a problem. But it doesn't have to be that way.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, absolutely. And so when you were talking about the three clicks, that's funny. Um, we kind of live on a one-click policy around here, just the US in general, best practice, you know, one click away. But it is something that a lot of folks, especially the newer folks coming into the industry, they don't know. I mean, you couldn't even, I think it was probably five years ago I saw the first compliance degree at a university in the US. I was like, oh my gosh, how sad nobody knows what they're doing. And we love our attorneys, right? We work really well with attorneys, and attorneys are great, but they don't really have the practical application side of understanding how all that works to know whether or not how to make it compliant or whether or not it is compliant technically. And so I do think, like, for the folks listening, if we have any of the sort of people newer into the industry, like a lot of our OGs are going to be like, yeah, we've been there, done that, you know, we've lived it all. But for the newer folks, um, I think it's imperative that they actually take the time.
SPEAKER_03The next two episodes covered off both crypto and the iGaming industry and what the latest trends are, both in blockchain and in the SEO SERPs. As we interviewed both Leandro about the future of blockchain and how that will impact affiliate marketing in years to come, and discussed SEO in depth with Julia Logan, especially in regards to what's happening in the SERPs with mainstream media. Listen in for this episode as we explained both of these things. Let's talk a little bit about the preparation stuff. So you've undertaken to develop the platform. You've said that you think now is the right time. Five years ago there were people looking at it as well, but it just wasn't the right time. What do you think is going to lead that at that mass adoption? Is it the fact that cryptocurrency needs to be more stabilized and integrated into e-commerce platforms? And then the second stage would be the tracking, or do you think that it's happening right now? What are you doing at fuel to actually get brands involved right now?
SPEAKER_10That's a really good question. I think adoption will come a lot with regulation, unfortunately.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, it's gonna slow it down.
SPEAKER_10I mean, I think we're actually being slowed down by regulation in general. I think there's not a lot of clarity on the rules. So I think there's lots of brands that are really excited about blockchain, but they haven't went full in because they still don't know the plain rules.
SPEAKER_03So who has to drive that? Is it kind of like how the affiliate marketing industry was 20 years ago, where we all sat around a table and went, okay, this is gonna be what our best practices are? Like who is it the customer that's driving that? Is it the regulatory bodies, the financial regulatory bodies in each country that has to drive that? Or can it actually be the consumer themselves? How do you think that's gonna play out?
SPEAKER_10Yeah, so I I think there's lots of manifestations of customers or consumers that are leaning to crypto because again, like they they understand the value of digital money, digital assets. And you're talking about generational changes. And I look at my nieces and they are playing Roblox or other metaverse games, and for them it's just like so natural to be like interacting, engaging with their friends on a virtual environment. I guess also the same as we used to buy like CDs, now we listen on Spotify, like why I carry with CDs or why I carry lots of books when I can have my Kindle. I think money to some extent, like digital money, also would be an analogy for like bills or maybe having like funds locked into US bank or UK bank, like when you can actually transfer it to anywhere. But yeah, I think regulation is gonna play a really important role here. I think there'll be jurisdictions or countries that will be uh favoring crypto, others are gonna be a dollar crypto.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_10I think that's gonna be like a huge thing, and hopefully this year we'll see lots of uh definitions around that.
SPEAKER_03So you really do need to actually just start reading and listening and tuning in and actually just being aware. That's kind of the main first step to kind of elevating and figuring out what's the next step. But what are some of the essential things that brands you currently work with need to get done first before they step in? Are they technical integrations that need to happen? Are they or does it just all link together? So talk through the practicalities of that.
SPEAKER_10Yeah, so the technical integrations are like very simple. So like we integrate on the website part, like on the front end, we use like something very similar to an SDK or to a Pixel. So that way we can track how different users learn to the advertisers' website to different tracking links, so we can attribute those to the right affiliate. And then for the conversion portion of it, as I was mentioning, it's as easy as having a smart conch address, which is like this public database address that these different merchants or advertisers have. And then we are able to now start reading from this public database all the events that occur. So what advertisers or crypto projects do, they tell us, okay, this is a specific event that I want to reward affiliates for bringing users. So we start listening and detecting those events. We're mostly working with crypto companies, so like they already have their smart contract going on, they're already on the blockchain. But I think as there's more adoption of crypto payments in more like e-commerce or traditional merchants, we'll also be able to tap more into that market.
SPEAKER_03You mentioned that Shopify is already tapped into Coinbase, isn't it?
SPEAKER_10Yeah, it's not like widely adopted. So I think as it gets more widely adopted, there will be more and more opportunities there. But I think a lot of this will be driven by publishers because if you think if you're a publisher, you're an international publisher, you don't pay any like foreign exchange fees to bring your capital. It's like digital currency. You don't have to wait 90 days to get paid for transactions almost real time. So that's great. You get full transparency of what's actually going on at the transaction level. And then last but not least, I think for the very first time, you're now able to get like a an upside on the value that you're bringing to an advertiser.
SPEAKER_02One of the plugins that I have tested gives you suggestions of possible domain names around your topic. Yeah. And then can also check for availability of those domains and even check for the lowest price across a bunch of different registrars. That's saving loads of time for SEOs. Yeah. That's saving loads of time. But what it doesn't do, it doesn't give you the back history of that domain. You don't know if it's just currently become available, if it's never been registered before, if it has been banned from, let's say, Google search at some point, and therefore has been dropped for that reason by the previous owner, if it has been spammed to death and has been ranking for a bunch of unrelated, spammy stuff that you probably don't want to be associated with. But so that doesn't solve all those problems. Let's say if I was building a plugin, I would probably build something that does the research that we normally do manually for our customers. But within that ecosystem, within that interface, that's where I see the opportunity. And it drives them affiliate commissions if they are the affiliates of all those registrars from the actual registrations that happen through those referrals sent through Chat GPT. And what about the content side? There has been some discussion going on whether or not you should close your site's content from indexing by all those AI companies. Like ChatGPT uses for training everything they scrapes from everywhere on the web up to a certain point. At some point they will probably be updating their core base of knowledge. For now, the availability of web browsing in the paid version of Chat GPT enables it to access the live web, what's current on the web. So basically it enables it to access your site. If you don't really want it to access your site, you can put the user agent in your robots DXT and it will not access it. But the question is: do you really want to ban it from accessing your site? Or should you really embrace this as a potential traffic channel?
SPEAKER_03In this episode with Alona Malanowska, the MD of WebGains, we explored back-to-work cultures, what it takes to be an effective affiliate program manager, and how important staff training is in this industry. Alona shared her views on how WebGains is building an inclusive culture in their business and supporting staff to meet the complexities and growth challenges that this industry is encountering as it continues to grow at a rapid rate. You held a webinar recently about Jagging Career and Family. And while working in affiliate marketing is great because you can work remotely, I want you to talk to me about your experience leading a global team and also managing your own family commitments. Because one thing I do see in our industry is that account managers are burning out. Like they're churning out of this industry, they come in, they learn that their skill set drains out with them. And it's because they're not supported in this very complex role. So what are some of the things that you guys are doing to help support that?
SPEAKER_12Yeah, so it's a it's a very difficult topic, and I think we are still at the beginning of the journey. I mean, uh generally, I feel at industry we are fortunate to be so flexible and so uh progressive to an extent with working from home, with flexible hours, with um uh part-time uh uh roles which are available across the industry. But at the same time, of course, it never feels like it's enough because because uh childcare, specifically in the UK, is very, very um challenging and expensive. And so very often the reality is that in order for, especially for mothers to go back to work after maternity leave, um, they need to make very hard choices, and often also uh they their families basically sponsor their careers because uh they end up having a net uh zero after all the costs associated with uh childcare. So and then on the other hand, of course, um companies also need to make sure that these are all the support systems are sustainable for them because ultimately we also need to make money. And so, really, it's just about trying to find this balance to make sure that we are as supportive as we can. Specifically at WebGains, we offer the um remote setups, we offer uh flexible hours, uh, we offer mentorship schemes, we offer uh we have an in-house um uh therapy um specialist who um anyone uh at web gains is uh able to approach them anonymously. I I feel sometimes the reply is not necessarily in massive scalable systems, it's about taking one situation at a time and trying to make it work based on a specific person's scenario and their needs. Because the requirements also change um throughout the parenting journey, right? But what's important for uh someone uh with one year old may be completely relevant for someone with a um child who goes to school, right? Yes. And so being not the biggest company out there, our solution is actually really just to listen to the people and try to find solutions which are perhaps not across the whole company, but something which is relevant to specific people.
SPEAKER_03Do you find that the tenure of your account management team has increased because you've put these measures in place and become a little bit more flexible? And do you think COVID had something to do with that?
SPEAKER_12Well, definitely. I mean, we we generally have I'd say quite a healthy tenure uh at WebGains, and this is something which we are in fact pretty proud of because of course it's uh it helps with then retention of the clients because they know that their account managers will not change every six months or something like that. It can be judgmental. It's like tenure is just as important to build relationships and trust, right? Exactly. Uh it's it's about account managers who know the history of the brand they work with and understand all the deep uh objectives and deep goals. So to reply to your question, yes, I think it uh plays a major role. The flexibility definitely is something which allows us to extend the uh tenure of people uh working at web gains. We have uh, for example, two of our client services directors, both of them uh came from being account managers and then progressed into those roles. They've been at web games for probably six, seven years now.
SPEAKER_03Next up on the agenda was a frank and open discussion about the state of our affiliate nation. As I finally managed to bring Asafdoor, the founder of CellExpert, onto the mic to talk about where he thinks the affiliate industry for iGaming is headed and how tracking solutions need to keep up to fulfill clients and affiliate demands for better data transparency. Do you think that people are becoming more transparent or brands are becoming more transparent with their operators or with their publishers now because of the recession? Like they need to actually be spending their money in all of the right places and at the right times. Do you think that's kind of spearheading that forward? Because it has been a topic that we've spoken about in gaming for a very long time, where data's always been siloed or hidden, or you know, there's never been that kind of level of transparency between brands and and publishers. So do you think that that's changing because of the kind of economy of the state that we're in as well?
SPEAKER_11I I think yeah, I'll I'll separate my answer to two. So there is uh a wave of attention towards uh performance marketing, and that's I think that's uh uh directly uh a result of the of the crisis. So whereas uh companies used to have uh let's say open bill marketing uh uh budgets were fueled by uh VC money, um they they don't anymore. And now every uh every marketing department in the world has now uh very strict targets, conversion performance targets. And um uh focusing their efforts now on performance marketing and uh is uh is the natural, how would I say it is the the most reasonable uh choice for them to put their focus focus on. And we we we noticed this type of attention from SaaS companies and from other providers that were used to running only running their own internal campaigns, typically at the expense of low uh return on investment. Um so that's that as a as a foundation, I think that's true. Um I think the the the um the graduation of operators, of our gaming operators to be more transparent is basically going to be derived from the from the competition. So the more the more uh big operators join the transparency party and basically engage with the partners like that meaningfully, uh it will put the spotlight on the ones that don't and will eventually uh be the most uh dominant factor in convincing them to switch or to or to to open up. So there will be a point in time where a critical mass of operators will shift the default uh behavior, that sort of thing. But I think the trend is towards transparency.
SPEAKER_03Good. I hope that I see that in my lifetime because for the last 20 years it hasn't been there. But I mean, the other thing to talk about is you know, you've spoken about the data transparency, you've spoken about the cadence in terms of how quickly we need to report. But what are as a technology provider, where do you believe that tech should also support relationship management? Because our industry is still very much based around building relationships with partners.
SPEAKER_10Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03So, what are some of the things that you know you're you're building into the platform that can help um affiliate managers build those partnerships and actually segment out their partners properly so that they know how to handle them and give them the right tools and tactics to actually promote?
SPEAKER_11I mean, that's like say relationship. The foundation for for this business is trust. So trust is uh about reliability, reliability in technology, and about transparency in the sense that things so if uh if tracking fails, that's uh uh that's a crisis in in trust. Right? I would I would risk my I would risk my resources in order to promote your brand, and now something is failing at my expense, then we need to have a talk about it, or I have other other options. Um so reliability is key, and we put a lot of effort in Selexport in in uh operating uh a world-class infrastructure product that can sustain any scale. And uh we power we power hundreds hundreds of companies, not just in iGaming, uh publicly listed companies, uh uh vast amounts of traffic and information. And so this is uh this is that's that's uh a very important aspect of that. And it it will it goes back towards the transparency as well. So the more uh consistent you are in results, and the more I mean and the serious affiliates will always test your transparency. They will they will they will verify that what you're saying is true and they will check up on every metric to make sure that they're at the right place before risking substantial resources, which is legitimate, it makes sense. So um the way for us to uh to allow you to nourish these uh these relationships is to allow you to control the level of transparency you have with the partner on an individual basis. And Incel Expert, you can be as transparent as you like to be uh with every individual partner uh down to disclosing very highly granularized. data about about the client's performance in order to support certain uh certain partners' uh operations, allowing them to optimize, opening discussions about the deals. If something's not profitable, then it might make sense to expose, expose the data and have a uh have a discussion about what's the what's the right uh balance between uh between the affiliate affiliate cut and the operator cut. So these are things that I think are are driving the the trust.
SPEAKER_03As we came to the close of the season the lovely Adam Riemer joined me to discuss his views on SEO and program management with decades of experience between us this really was a fun episode to record as we both have very clear views on how partners need to be managed, how programs need to step up to support them. In this excerpt we spoke about video and how to leverage better performance from content creators too. Can you explain the opportunity of video and can you talk us through how you're currently optimizing video traffic for the brands that you're managing and just give us a little bit of insight on what's happening there with rich media.
SPEAKER_06Yeah there's a lot of different tests I've done over the years. So I'll just give a high level overview and then if you ever want to go like deep in we could do one where we optimize videos together on a podcast or something. So there's a few ways I look at video one, do I have content that's not doing well or not converting well? Maybe it's because the content on its own is too hard to follow and people are don't have a good attention span in that demographic. So maybe I'll try adding a video in another thing you can do with that video then is deploy something called video schema. All schema is is a fancy word for some code that you could have AI even start to write now there's going to be errors so you could definitely use a tool like schema app or SEO clarity or something else to create the schema library for you and define to a search engine this video is about this topic. Here's what you're gonna learn in it here's who will benefit from it here's the length of it. And then maybe that's what's going to convince the person and depending on if you use a video overlay you can inject your affiliate links as you're mentioning products. Certain platforms like ShareSale offer video players but that's only for the merchants. So they could actually take the video but that would expose you to other affiliates if it's not a good idea and put the affiliate links on it for you. It just it's going to depend on your relationship with the affiliate manager. The next thing you can do with video is look to see do video results show up in search results. So maybe it's how do I paint a picture and then all of a sudden there's no video showing up. So maybe that's an opportunity because a how-to is a type of search query that normally generates a video result. Find some of your affiliate partners that are in the painting art and crafting niche give them a different topic and probably pay them or give them a higher commission if they do this and teach them how to optimize by using the right wording, the right description setting chapters and other elements and key moments if you're going to upload it to YouTube and then embed. And what's going to happen now is your goal is to trigger the search result to show a video within it. The next one is to go to YouTube. If they have an active channel let them cater to their audience they know what works we can dictate what we want but that's what we want. That doesn't mean it's right for their audience. So give them the control we are not the experts on that. What we could be the experts on though is the opportunities they missed. And that's where we add value to them and help them make money. So maybe so there's a few ways to do research on that one look to see who's already showing up research the titles they're using the descriptions they're using what plays before and after their videos and keep a track of the themes that are currently important to the algorithm. Now go in an incognito window and make sure you're logged out of Google and YouTube and start typing the main phrase so if it's how do I paint a picture so maybe start with how do I paint and look to see what drops down. Then delete that and do paint a and see what drops down. Maybe picture is not the top result. You can also verify by using a keyword tool Google offers keyword planner for free and you can see what the variations are and what the estimated search volume is. YouTube's going to be smaller and it changes because YouTube's more of a question and answer. But this is a great way to figure it out. Now what you're doing is you're optimizing for evergreen URLs or for evergreen traffic that brings money in week over week and month over month and does drive top funnel but you want to make sure your brand is not included in the title and the description instead have the person demonstrate your product during the solution and say if you want to purchase the same one that I'm using maybe it's the paintbrush maybe it's the canvas maybe it's a certain type of rag or cleaner I'm looking at the picture behind me which is why I came up with painting. And then what you've done is you've one you've opened yourself up to a much larger audience because the search query is not brand dependent to if that brand shuts down their affiliate program now you can change the link out for the same exact product at a different store and you may be able to make more money. And three, you can keep the disclosures in place and you can test where am I making more money? Where does it convert better? One thing that a lot of affiliates forget to do is look at the demographics on your content, whether it's a blog post, an ebook or a video and then compare it to who shops at the merchant. You might love the store but if your audience isn't you and has different needs maybe a competitor to that store has the same audience and by matching the audience with the product you may get better conversions and revenue from it.
SPEAKER_03Finally in this last episode of season 12 we reflected back on my recent trip to Vietnam where I spoke at the CPA affiliate conference which was hosted by XNES affiliates team. Together we reviewed how this emerging marketplace is tackling customer engagement online and discussed what it takes to build solid affiliate relationships in Asia to drive incremental growth opportunities for your business and to be interested in what is happening and changing in emerging market growth.
SPEAKER_09There are some uh differences between countries and you're absolutely right saying that the maturity is another bottleneck for uh can be another bottleneck for for the affiliate business if you wrongly chose some some some location some some country or geo and you cannot operate well there if you're not enough customized to this market. But uh for us it's very different.
SPEAKER_03But at the same time we have the the same product uh the same IB product the same CPA product but we always try to be closer to the partners to see what they need actually as I let's say in Latin America compared to Asia like Thailand or Vietnam it's a bit different but uh it it it's just a a big a big way a big path uh you you need just to speak uh with the with affiliates more you need to to hear the right signals from them the feedbacks and everything and sometimes you can be uh you can customize the product but uh the approach can be quite quite the same in general in general terms I would say I don't know maybe Janik has some some more specifics because uh she used to work with so many affiliates in different parts of the world so maybe uh she can give some um other perspectives well um yes talking about the commercial models I would say that the revenue share is still most more popular on the Asian market because maybe it's more clear for them it's more used to them but as for the CPA it's uh become more and more popular because the commission is higher and uh they want to get uh faster and more profit you know so um actually the the Asian people they learn very fast they are uh very techy guys so they can drive uh lots lots of uh volumes so traffic volumes even like take China uh it's like it's fantastic what they're doing um new attribution models they can uh drive traffic quicker better actually uh during our CPA meetup we also had a very nice and interesting conversation and discussion panel about the specific of the Vietnamese market and uh we were discussing uh the differences also between the north and south uh Vietnam because it's uh uh very uh different the audience is very different and uh for example um for the north region them they're more politically economically mature and northerners are the uh they're more concerned about the status and wealth and the South people for example consider themselves uh the more dynamic and tolerant and easy to go people let's say and they tend to follow the influencers and bloggers and the more liberal for for their money let's say and uh this could be a very uh good um taken into the consideration while you're doing the new business in Vietnam for example you need to target the relevant audience and speak with them in the their own language and of course we were discussing that the one of the main points here uh to speak in Vietnamese language with them so all your ads and promotional material should be localized for sure it's a very important part uh Jan mentioned because uh everything starting from the colors of your creatives uh ending up with the right wording matters for them because Asian people are more specified on um individual uh signals and uh they they feel so uh they're very sensitive in the way in in this way so it's it's really it's essential to to to to these to have someone from the team local who can review the funnel the promotion materials whatever and give you right uh feedback about that about the translation quality or your you chose the wrong colors at all it's not the right time to go with these creatives because they have the like a special local holiday anything so it's many things uh actually yes and you know another interesting thing that we found out uh that the Asian people truly believe in luck and they adore the any kind of ruffles giveaways so if you want to have a successful yeah so if you want to have successful business um and present your brand effectively so use this luck and draw raffles or any kinds of this stuff wow as you can see we packed quite a lot into this season for you to consider but next season will be no different as we look forward to new trends discover more OG personalities who are sharing their time stories and tactics with us as well as learning new tips, tricks and tactics to help you elevate your performance and keep your affiliate program growing I'm really looking forward to bringing you more insightful content to listen in each week as we continue explore affiliate marketing as we're helping the world to do it better. Thanks so much for tuning in to this final episode of season 12. I hope that you've liked what we've been putting down and that you'll give us a like and a share with your colleagues too. I can't wait to start season 13 with an interesting two partner that you certainly are not going to miss.
SPEAKER_08See you all soon if you're looking to launch an affiliate program but aren't 100% sure where or how to begin or you've launched your affiliate program but something isn't working and you're struggling to scale, we can help. Book a free 15-minute strategy call with our Affiverse agency team to find out how we can help you get to where you want to be we offer a range of affiliate program management services from strategy and consulting to technical setups and complex affiliate program migrations. Our award-winning agency team handles everything from affiliate strategy to affiliate partner recruitment and deep dive affiliate program audits we help you make affiliate marketing simple don't waste time struggling to get the results you need and deserve visit affiversemedia.com and click on the agency button to book a call now 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