Hi and welcome to the Affiliate Insider Podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers in the iGaming industry. Listen up as I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scrip on what's occurring in affiliate marketing. Join us as we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliates and tech entrepreneurs, and discuss the latest affiliates and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place.
SPEAKER_01We can help hundreds of random outgrowth of multi-million dollar programs across a range of industry forms. Why not book a free scoping tool and let us help you expand your reach forward with the possible affiliate marketing for visit affiliateinsider.com and click on agency to find out more.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Affiliate Insider's Affiliate Marketing Podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. And today I'm super excited because I've got Mr. Chris Tradett, the CMO of Publisher Discovery, with me on the podcast today. Hi, Chris, how are you?
SPEAKER_03Hi. Hi, fantastic. It's been an amazing year or so. So and some interesting things been happening, have it or not?
SPEAKER_02That's correct. And that's exactly why I've been itching to get you on our podcast this season to talk a little bit about some of those changes. Um and to talk a little bit more in depth about uh partner discovery, which is a really key factor for affiliate program managers at this point. And we're gonna talk a little bit about how that's changed, you know, pre-pandemic, post-pandemic. Um so tell us for the listeners that are here with us today that maybe don't know a little bit about you or are new to the affiliate marketing industry, talk to us about your business and how uh you are joining us here today. So give us a little bit of the backstory.
SPEAKER_03Wow, okay, yeah. Um, well, I'm one of the oldest people around the affiliate space, so I guess um I started off in affiliates back in 2003, although had kind of a collection before that, so 2001 or so, with uh perfiliate technologies as it was in those days. Um and I joined Biat, which was what perfiliate became in 2002, and uh we pretty much invented an affiliate network on the hoof, as it were. Kind of um I do recall the first book being that uh Paul and Malcolm had made a couple of programs work that we'd been doing on the other side, the fundraising side of it. And uh at the end of the first month, I had to go and tell Steve Brown that uh actually we've we've been uh we've got some affiliates doing stuff, so we need to pay them. Oh, okay, right. So that's how the affiliate programs, affiliate network started there. Um, we were there and uh grew that from the four of us in one room in Newcastle um to I've forgotten how many staff. I think it was something like 50, 50 or 60, maybe even 70 staff, and tens of millions turnover, I think it's 57 million turnover sold to AOL in 2000 and something rather than 2008, I think it was eventually. Yeah, and then um AOL, as they usually do, they don't know what they bought, sell it two years later for a massive loss. And AWIN scored for what was effectively, I think when we had it, buyout was one of the biggest networks. Um, I recall because I was in the sales side at part of that, um, one of my accounts was uh Sky TV, and that was turning over well, sometimes up to almost half a million a month. So it's uh it's a massive one. Um, we had things like the three mobile program, which when we launched was doing a million a month in commission. So there's some chunky stuff going on there.
SPEAKER_02I remember those days. Um, so we've got a legend here with us today, people, and I hope that you're tuning in and turning on those ears because there's going to be a lot of golden nuggets that are going to be shared with you. So I wanted to sort of move forward and talk a little bit about um a report recently that the IAB uh released about the growth of the affiliate marketing channel. Now, you and I both know, I mean, this this industry we've been in it for almost well decades, and it hasn't stopped growing yet. So um I think they reported something like a 10% growth in revenue during the pandemic compared to other uh digital marketing channels. Um so why do you think that this channel is so important for businesses right now? Um, and why have you spent your career developing products and services that actually help this channel to continue to grow?
SPEAKER_03Well, I'll talk a bit about why I'm doing what I do. And part of my role as AOL was I'd moved over to finding new affiliates, publishers. At the time there was a thing called Centrix, which is a bag of spammers, to be quite honest.
SPEAKER_04Remember that.
SPEAKER_03And we subscribed for 18 months and realized after about 10 that actually it's the same data, they hadn't had any refreshes, so they'd lost their data source, it all went kind of and from then on, and when I moved client side uh after Awyn brought us out, um it was I realized how tough it is finding affiliates, and it's you know, keywords in in uh Google or Bing or whatever it might be, Alta Vista maybe in those days. Um, but yeah, um it's all keyword search and finding websites, and then there's a thing, are they affiliates? Do they know what they're doing? Um and you spend two-thirds of your life explaining what the affiliate marketing is, which is pretty counterproductive, and they say, Oh no, we use CPM. Okay, so that's my morning's work completely down the Swanny. So um I ended up with an SEO SEO platform, LinkDex as was, um, because Dr. Steve Brown, ex-biat, uh, was investing in LinkDEX and became chief exec. And uh, well, basically he says, I think we need a bit of tragic around here. So uh I joined them, had a look around what they're doing, so how we can find affiliates with this. Um, and to do that, they had to completely re-engineer how the SEO map platform works. SEO platforms only go so deep. We have to go about a hundred times deeper to find, if you can imagine about say top cashback, for instance, use an SEO platform, you'll go that deep in it, and you'll find several hundred pages. We have to have all 33,000 that are on that page on that site to find all the links, otherwise, we're only scratching the surface. So that was part of the issue. Um, and kind of finding that, then how you structure it, it was all SEO structured. Over the past few years, we took it private, we were taken over, and the current setup, we are now re-engineering all of that so to make it life simpler. Um, but why are people doing it? Why are people leaping at affiliate? And from my perspective, it's fantastic that so many brands are moving towards affiliate because they're all wondering how on earth can we find these new affiliates then. Um, but why they're doing it is because so much of stuff is done on trust, and you have programmatic things happening, and it all happens in this kind of thing you throw money into a swamp and stuff comes out. They've no idea really what's happening. Um, and yet you can put stuff on a website, you don't necessarily know where it's going unless you've got some really, really good analytics. Um, but of course, then COVID hit, and so many big brands cut stuff. Um, huge budgets for for display were just kind of completely stopped. Um, offline was partly stopped as well. So nobody's traveling and why would you put a 48-sheet bull billboard up? I wouldn't. Yeah, um, so yeah, so money was being piled into digital, um, and as you say, 10% uplift. Overall, digital advertising had a 9% drop, but affiliate actually matched the top five wall gardens, eBay, Amazons, etc., with 10% growth. And that is because you only get what you pay for, you know, you can pay for what you get, and that's the beauty of affiliate, it's totally performance-based. So, yeah, you can put your advert out there. If the affiliate won't per doesn't perform, they don't get paid. And you know, it's the nub of it. Um, and that's always been a beauty of affiliate, and that's why that's excited me. Um, having spent money in the past on you know, kind of display adverts and what response, who knows. Um understanding that your affiliate stuff really does it cuts the mustard, and it just does what it says. You get you get the money back for what you're spending.
SPEAKER_02I mean, the other thing as well that's interesting about the affiliate, and we are getting a little bit off script here, so I'm throwing this at you, but I mean it should be fine. Um, affiliates are becoming experts in their field, like an email affiliate, a you know, voucher code affiliate, a SEO affiliate, a PPC affiliate, and brands actually don't have the budgets to invest deep into each of those channels. So they're actually leveraging that expertise from their affiliate.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. And one of my bugbears is one of my bugbears is people call affiliate a channel. It's not a damn channel. Affiliate is a model, it's a payment model, and there are there's a dozen different variations in that, whether it's CPL, CPA, whatever, cost per install, um, it might be a revenue share, it might be all sorts, but they're all an affiliate model. The channels are SEO, they're PPC, and you get experts like UK Web Media who are absolute phenomenal experts in page search, and they will probably outperform your in-house page search team a dozen times over. Your SEO experts, they will outperform.
SPEAKER_02And it's the same across every channel. Like we're talking retail now, but I can also say from a gaming perspective, you know, you've got um SEO expert affiliates, you've got PPC expert affiliates, and all of them have got different types of channels and traffic sources within their makeup, within their network. Um, and leveraging all of those partnerships is part of the strategic side of affiliate program management, and that's that really for me is why I love this job or this role, and and why I'm encouraging younger digital marketers to actually get into this channel as a career choice because of the breadth of experience that you get across multiple different channels when working with affiliates. So you actually your knowledge base increases exponentially. So just moving on a little bit because I wanted to touch on the white paper that you guys recently released, which had some very interesting stats that I want affiliate managers to listen to. Um, in in particular, the research that you did around networks, their partner reach globally. Um and I wanted you to talk through some of those findings because a lot of affiliate managers think they need to be either in multiple networks in order to get exposure, um, or they think they need to build everything in-house. And and in-house versus network has always been a big topic of conversation in in iGaming, particularly where the in-house reach is more prevalent. But talk about some of those stats with us and let's kind of open that conversation a little bit wider.
SPEAKER_03Okay, um, yeah, um which ones particularly?
SPEAKER_02Which networks to choose, i.e., all the publishers are on all the networks, or uh like how deep did your research go into that?
SPEAKER_03Well, we analyze whatever we've been asked to analyze by clients, and in reality, um we the main networks are the key thing. We've we've we're not really um gaming specific, we don't have that kind of gaming viewpoint. Um, unless one of our clients says, right, I need to understand all of the gaming advertisers, in which case we'll index all their tracking domains. But I'm acutely aware that within gaming, uh, unlike something like Forex, the tracking domains will vary almost weekly sometimes. And so keeping up to date with all of those things and the way things happen, um, different affiliates will have a specific tracking domain, for instance. Um, that's not something we're actually kind of aimed at at the moment. But if you're looking at CJ, ShareSale, AWIN, all of the others, we analyze um about 400 different tracking domains. So kind of CJ have got six, for instance, Pepper Jam have got six, um Impact now kind of up to several hundred. Yeah um and so kind of we pull that in and we can understand what the share is. Um CJ is a behemoth in terms of how many, yeah, how many publishers we see, and it is into the the hundreds of thousands of publishers. That's with live links. Every network will say they've got two million affiliates signed up to them, but I'm signed up to loads of networks and I'm inactive. Never sent them a click.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So yeah, the two million publishers is is uh yeah uh a smoke screen. Um we see just the live links, so uh, and of those, globally, 15.7% of all live links that we've seen go to CJ or via CJ to an advertiser. Um and that's live links. We see stuff which goes into say quicksurve.com or um androses.net and whatever it might be. Um if they don't go to an advertiser, we don't count them. So we see about three and a half million websites roughly uh going through the kind of the general affiliate landscape, put it that way.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And um they link through to about 573,000 advertisers last time I looked at account.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_03And we analyze about 2.7 billion links to assess those and understand them. Um so from that, what we can see is that uh uh it's about six percent. I I think it's actually kind of matched up very much to a recent Forrester report was saying that um 20% of publishers work with five or more networks. Absolutely. But only six percent work with a single network. So all these people say they have exclusive affiliates, it's just BS, so much of it.
SPEAKER_02Um you hear the year first people.
SPEAKER_03Well, if you're one of the networks that's got all those six percent, then fantastic for you, mate. Yeah, uh, but we also see a very a difference between the number of publisher sites we see and the number of links. So AWIN, absolutely massive, they're notching it up. 24% of all the links went via AWIN.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Now that was probably a massive, and 15% of CJ still. So I've not sure what the reasoning is, and I'm sure someone like Adam Ross might be able to enlighten it if he were ever wanting to. Um, that the AWIN is so strong, possibly because of the way, firstly, they deal with um uh all of the kind of data sources and uh things like kind of uh and there's a lot of fashion on there, so yeah you're probably dealing with quite quite a lot of quite a lot of actual SKUs. So you're talking about somebody taking on a travel and a and then a fashion um client and matching all of those SKUs to a page on their affiliate site, that kind of tends to generate vast numbers. So that could be with the difference there.
SPEAKER_02I suppose the other thing as well is also to think about publishers. I mean, some publishers have got multiple forms of traffic, you know. So you so you're looking at like AWIN and they're they're really big in fashion and and travel, for example, but other networks might be bigger in other verticals, and that one affiliate that is in AWIN and also in CJ, for example, could be the same person.
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02I think the the question that I typically get asked by clients is which network should I go into? And the and the short answer is pick anyone and and build your house in anyone that suits you based on price and structure, because the the research that you've just released and had a look at now in the in the global landscape, excluding iGaming, of course, is that affiliates are are everywhere. They're you know, only six percent of those people that you discovered aren't actually are only in one or or two networks. So the the difference in terms of picking a network as a as a brand starting out isn't really the key thing, it's what does that network do for you and what other resources and and you know budgeting factors need to be taken into account in your strategy?
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and I would say that potentially I mean I'll go back to when I first went client side, I I was in the same quandary. We had some stuff with about three can people on has offers when back in the day when has offers was tiny, and so we had no traffic at all coming into this program. So I set up a program, I thought was in web hosting, where do you go? Where are all the web hosters on CJ? So if I want web hosting affiliates, put my program on CJ so it's easy. And that can be a finger in the wind thing, very simple. I would also say do a bit of research. We've got a fantastic little tool with the thing we've been building for the past seven years or so. You can have a look at where all your affiliates are, you know, see which programs they're on. Uh, have a look at your main competitor. If you're Macy's, you look at Bloomingdale's, you know. So and if you if if you're for X Yard, you look at eToro, you find where the affiliates are and what they're doing, which networks they're on, then it's easier to pick them off.
SPEAKER_02Now that's obviously a little bit it's a little bit harder in iGaming, but actually the thought process rings true. It doesn't really matter what technology stack you're using, you need to make those decisions based on price, on strategy, on you know, looking at the end game and figuring out what tech solution actually fits that that's that structure that you need to build your program on. Sure. Um so let's move on a little bit about affiliate program launches and life cycles and and what you can advise new brands to do to launch their programs successfully and build the momentum, because we all know that the hardest part of launching an affiliate program is finding partners to actually join it.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because the builders in their will come scenario just doesn't exist anymore. Like it takes a lot of grunt work, a lot of effort to build trust, to build relationships, to do outbound sales, to do social selling, all of these things that go hand in hand with the actual partner discovery function which your tool actually offers. So talk to us a little bit about that. Um, you know, about how you think brands should be building momentum successfully in their affiliate program.
SPEAKER_03I would first stick the cart before behind the horse, not before it. So don't don't start off with launching your affiliate program. Start off with your site, make sure it converts. So too often you see people, new brand, set up an affiliate program and their site isn't actually converting. You can't use affiliates as your guinea pigs. So that's your first point.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely.
SPEAKER_03Once you actually understand that your site converts and that people are buying from you, great. You can then tell an affiliate and actually persuade them, yeah, I'll be a good bet for you to promote because this is how we convert X percent, blah, blah, blah, basket value, all of that stuff. And that's the kind of stuff you need to persuade an affiliate why it's worth their time, changing their efforts from a tried and trusted partner they're working with currently to somebody new. So that's your that's your main hurdle you've got to jump over. Um, again, use an analysis, find out where your where the affiliates are, where they're currently promoting, and trying to entice them across. Um, I would also say the most important thing is remember that affiliates are people, they're not just like a media buyer, it's not a programmatic spend. Um, affiliates are people, whatever size they are, whether it's a niche blogger or whether it's something like um small business owner. Whether it's top cash back, you know, multiple continents, you're still talking to James Little, and he's still kind of a decent bloke, you need to talk to him one-to-one, get an understanding of what he's after. And remember you're selling to a person and communicate with them, engage with them, become part of their community. Um, if you're not already part of it, find people who can introduce you. Um, LinkedIn is great for this.
SPEAKER_02Social selling.
SPEAKER_03Uh, if you're setting up a program, you've got a good brand, set up another Twitter handle for you know, so brand underscore affiliates or brand afs if you've got a brand long brand name fits in the numbers of letters. That way, if you're reaching out to somebody, you find an affiliate you really want to connect with, you might send an email. Great. That might get looked at by an intern at the end of the month if you're really lucky. If you engage with them with brand underscore afs and you follow them, they'll get a notification on the ch on the email they check 20 times a day saying, Oh, why be followed by that brand? It's a new one. They follow you back, you start chatting. It's that simple, it's not rocket science.
SPEAKER_02Uh and that works for Twitter, for LinkedIn, for Facebook groups, for Telegram groups. Like people, if you're listening to this, get onto your social channels to engage with your affiliates.
SPEAKER_03And if if you're in fashion or or makeup or whatever, Instagram's your baby, you know, so go for that one. Absolutely bang on.
SPEAKER_02Okay, so putting the cart um behind the horse, or no, not before, as as we would normally, I think that's a really good piece of information to take away. Um, for so let's talk a little bit about affiliate programs in the retail sector because we do have a lot of retail clients that listen to this podcast as well. Okay. Can you give me your thoughts on the big topic of debate at the moment, which is third-party cooking tracking models changing, and where you think server tracking, naked linking, and multi-touch attribution will be coming to the fore in affiliate program strategy and planning?
SPEAKER_03Well, I would say most of that is already there, particularly in so many major networks. Um, there has been huge investments across pretty much everything A Wing, Partnerize, Impact, Tune, the rest of them. Um and third party cookies were dealt with about six to nine months ago by most major networks. Um, you'll find some of the smaller network providers. You may have issues. Um, however, quite a lot of the new providers, the new new tracking systems, even things like, you know, I'm trying to think, uh kind of i dev affiliate. Well, they're not that new, but you know, all the small ones that are popping up. Very often it's first-party cookies because it's going from your subdomain to your domain. You know, simple things like that. It's a first-party cookie, it's not going to be a problem. Um, so third-party cookies are a massive problem for SEO agencies, yeah. Because they're all dealing with stuff that now can't be seen in Google analytics. So um, if they're using UTMs, move to a network very fast.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um and I'd I'd say it's been dealt with. Attributions, another thing it's been talked about since I think probably the first A for U expo I went to seven, eight. Well, I mean it was a topic at the roof gardens, um, if you remember that one back in 04, I think it was.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Uh the very first one at in South Kenzie. I am old, you're young. You're a child when you joined the industry.
SPEAKER_02I did. I was.
SPEAKER_03Um attributions there. I mean, in reality, uh, so many programs, particularly in the retail sector, um you have to take regard of what's happening because influences are important, they're entering this space, and you really must make sure that everybody within the cycle of your sales funnel is rewarded for their input. And it last click cannot be the thing that wins, you know. Um otherwise your influences will disappear and they'll talk to somebody else, so you've lost them, and that can be absolutely massive, particularly in in things such as nutrition, uh, in things such as um health and beauty, the whole health and beauty, fitness sector, even fashion sector. You know, the last thing you want is your major major influence. Say, oh hang on, all my commissions are being nicked by Top Cashback and Quidco. Um, they will walk and they'll take take their half a million followers with them.
SPEAKER_02And the gap that they leave behind is the fact that your brand is not kept in the forefront of your end user's mind. Because that's the biggest thing about influencers, which I'm trying to explain at the moment, is you know, influences play a vital role in the consideration awareness part of the customer journey, and they also promote brand loyalty.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So when the sale isn't happening, but the repeat purchase needs to come along, that's where your influencer channel plugs in to actually help reduce your costs.
SPEAKER_03So I think they're the A, I, and D of the ADA thing. So, you know, if you haven't got them, you haven't got any action at the end of it.
unknownAbsolutely.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. I love it. Um okay, so tracking, I mean, you know, we're kind of all looking at how this is all gonna work, but it's not really such a big issue like everybody's making it out, um, because we we we're kind of sorted in the affiliate channel. So if if you are in paid advertising yet, another reason to distribute some of your budget into performance marketing. Exactly. Um, so big key point there for for people that are listening to us. Um the other thing is is you know, you and me, we're both veterans in this industry. We've seen the affiliate channel evolved, you know, many times in our lifetime, and it will continue to evolve. Um and it's actually been reported, and I can't remember who said it, I think it was maybe Linda O'Connell on on my CJ panel um at PR Live recently, um, where uh she had report or she had read a report that said that the pandemic had actually fast-tracked um affiliate marketing by almost five years in terms of the way we market and sell to audiences and engage with audiences online. So, do you think that affiliates will remain at the forefront of brand performance strategy and and like user engagement? Do you think that it's going to become a bigger piece of the kind of brand awareness and brand engagement journey that that companies will look to you know kind of grow?
SPEAKER_03I think more than that. I think affiliate as a model has proved itself undoubtedly over the past year or so. Um it's now definitely on the roadmap on the radar of C-suite. And uh, as um Sean from uh PartnerIs said in his session, that it really has become part of, you know, they want two years ten years two years ago, even um uh CMO would not really have an understanding what affiliate was, and they would cut. I mean, hey, even this year, um Marriott last year, they cut everything, so they cut they closed their affiliate program. There's a CMO who has not got a clue, um, and they really did not understand. Yes, somebody might make a booking, but the affiliate won't get paid till the person pays the cash. So and they just did not have an understanding. Most, however, do fully understand, and they really understand that it is performance, and so whatever happens, the performance will happen. So it's it's about the only way of marketing where you have a guaranteed return on investment.
SPEAKER_02I kind of want to quote the phrase, it's the only channel you can count on, yeah, because you literally counted when it when the sale actually happens, otherwise it's just brand awareness all the way. Um, so I I totally agree. I mean, you know, I've been in love with this channel for 20 years now, and I think it's you know, I've loved it longer than what I've loved my husband. So, you know, it's kind of like it's always gonna be my first love. And the the the one thing that I can say though, and and you and I'm pretty sure you're gonna agree because you've been around as long as what I have, is that in this channel you continue to learn. You need to be a lover of learning, you need to be an eternal student because every single year something new is happening in this in this framework that we work in, because we I I don't want to call it a channel. Yeah, um and you know, I think that's that's the thing that excites me about this. And and I really want to thank you for coming on the podcast today and talking a little bit about you know partner discovery and publisher discovery, your tool, and and you know, the impact and the powerful um data and intelligence that it can bring to you know brand marketers, and doesn't matter whether you're working agency side, client side, network side, the tool has a function that can help you to actually seek and find and discover new opportunities for your business. Um, and really that's what performance marketing is all about. It's about you know collab finding collaborators, finding partners that can put your product and your service in front of customers that want to engage. And you've just automated that process for everybody. So if you haven't um you know had a look at this uh platform and you are in the retail space, I think you should have a look at it. We'll also link to um the report that we um mentioned earlier on as well, so you guys can download it and read it as well. Um and I just want to thank you for coming onto the podcast and sharing your years and years and years of experience with us, Chris.
SPEAKER_03Absolute pleasure, Leah. That's gonna be great. Thanks.
SPEAKER_00And that's a wrap for this week's Affiliate Insider Affiliate Marketing Podcast. If you're loving what we're putting down in this series, head on over to Apple iTunes and give us a five-star rating and subscribe to our podcast channel so you never miss another insightful episode. Tune in next week for more digital marketing insights and traffic driving tips, tricks, and strategies to your digital marketing program and your affiliate program driving consistent failure.