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 scoop 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 affiliate and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started.
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SPEAKER_04Welcome to Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast. And today I'm super excited to have Seth Rubin from Grow Um Network. Hi Seth, how are you doing?
SPEAKER_02Hi Dan, I'm great. Thanks. And thanks for having me here today.
SPEAKER_04It's amazing to have you on this podcast. I've been dying to get you on for a while now. So thank you very much for making the time. Tell us a little bit about Grow and tell us a little bit about your experience in the affiliate marketing industry.
SPEAKER_02So a bit about myself. I started working for a well-known network when I first moved to London in 2008. And I've done pretty much every job network side over the last 13 years. I've led various international teams and customer success, technical support, integration, and product development and engineering. As you said, I currently work for uh Trade Doubler, where I head up the small business network, which we've called Grow. We launched Grow in October last year, and we've already had more than a thousand clients sign up from all over the world. So it's been quite an incredible, yeah, it's been quite an incredible um start for us. But we designed Grow really with the goal in making affiliate marketing smart, simple, and accessible for all businesses, but especially for smaller brands. We've seen that over, well, I've seen over the years that typically small brands have very limited access, you know, to the channel. I say this because traditional networks, they they kind of do they prevent smaller companies from accessing the channel? Not directly. Most businesses, let alone small ones, they're just not willing to commit to long-term contracts. And as an example, and you know, most networks typically ask for one to three years. Um and also network setup and and ongoing service fees are generally quite high. And this also prevents smaller brands from entering the marketplace. At GROW, we pretty much we just smash these barriers apart. Our clients get 30 days free trial, so they have the opportunity to test whether their programs are going to work or not, and there's no further commitment. Uh, we also don't force them into long-term contracts, they're free to leave whenever they want. In fact, they can do that within the platform. There's no like dodgy conversations or anything that's trying to keep them. They if it's not right for you, then you know that's your that's your decision. And ongoing fees are really low. So I think for the UK, it's it's just under £45 a month to join. And again, the first 30 days are free. Uh, and speaking of the platform, it's it's fully automated, provides the tools that you you'll need to run your program. It's also a very good way for agencies to test if the channel will work for their clients because again, there's no commitments or any ridiculous fees.
SPEAKER_04What are some of the biggest things that smaller brands should consider before leaping into investing in launching an affiliate program?
SPEAKER_02I think for a small business or a startup, it's setting up a program is is really a no no-brainer.
SPEAKER_04Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Um obviously, there's there's certain things that you need to take into account. There's no silver bullet in online marketing, there's no get rich quick schemes or any guru guides.
SPEAKER_04I love the fact that you've said that because I say that all the time.
SPEAKER_02They're all pretty much rubbish, right? Yeah. What they are essentially are affiliate programs in themselves. Um sign up here and learn how to make money online. That that just doesn't exist, right? There's three kinds of things that come to my mind. Um, the first is budget. So, like anything in life, you get what you pay for.
SPEAKER_04Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Um, you know, you should engage with the channel knowing that affiliates are also businesses, they own their own inventory, their tech, and their content, and it all has a value. Effectively, when when you recruit them onto your programs, you're you're recruiting an extension of your business into your sales team. So I think that in order to make the most of any of these opportunities, you need to be willing to allocate budget towards the growth of your program and towards building the affiliate program.
SPEAKER_04It's kind of like small businesses need to think that they uh they're actually investing in the long term because a lot of people think, oh, I'm gonna start an affiliate program, I'm gonna turn it on, I'm gonna get into the network, and then everybody's gonna want to come and promote my product. And the strategy and the marketing plan that sits behind the technology that now powers them to move forward. And with your platform especially, it's a really cost-effective way to enter the space to test the channel. But if you enter the space and test the channel and you still don't have a marketing plan or a proper strategy of how you're gonna grow this program, chances are it's not gonna work.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I think the next couple of things then are timing. So you've you've got to um I remember starting my first day, I was pretty green and and I walked into the business and their kind of um motto was results through relationships.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, totally.
SPEAKER_02And and that's kind of stuck with me since that day. Like for me, that's still the crux of what affiliate marketing is really all about. And the timing, like like I said, is is pretty important. It takes time to build those relationships, to nurture those relationships and to let them grow and and and to flourish. Not to mention, I think in the industry, the most networks or any network will tell you if they're being honest, it takes around three months to kind of get your program started and then up and running, and then another three months to start realizing any form of decent performance. Um, we do it a bit quicker and grow, but that's because of the nature of the businesses and our businesses are driving traffic. Sorry, our businesses are asking for traffic that's more at the bottom of the funnel. So they're looking for conversion and not so much traffic. Essentially, unlike Google or Facebook ads, it's a long-term um, it's a long-term activity, and you've got to optimize it over time. So you do you need to take a long-term view. It's called a program, it's not called a campaign. And some of the most well-established programs, I think, have been running for what, more than 20 years.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I've managed programs for 10 years in my career, so and they were still growing.
SPEAKER_02So I guess you can't just like we've said already, you can't just set something up and let it run by itself. You need to know what you're doing, and it's also quite beneficial. I think we've spoken about it before, where you you look, you work backwards. So you start with like your end goals and things that you want to achieve and what you want to achieve, when you want to achieve it, how much do you want to spend, and where do you want to spend that, and then work backwards. How does this look? Okay, month one, I'll do this, month two, I'll do that, and uh, month three, this. I guess also that's where an account managed service or specialist agency can really help.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, this is kind of what we do and how we work with our clients is to help them plan that and to help them execute and to make sure that all the right steps are being done in the right order so that there is a successful outcome. And more often than not, we are also saying the same thing that you're saying, in that it takes time to deliver. It's not something that you turn on and turn off like a Facebook campaign because relationships are the thing that drives this entire platform forward. So building those relationships and establishing relationships with affiliates is incredibly important. But I like to loop back to something that you said at the beginning of the podcast as well, which was affiliates are also business owners and their inventory and their uh time and their resources have a cost and a value. So whilst we do want to work on the performance model and we want to, you know, pay on delivery, which is really what the affiliate industry does, it's key that clients understand that the cost modelings and the pricing and the commercials and and the negotiation part of affiliate program management is also very, very important.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, yeah, most definitely. And the other thing is most of the bigger affiliates are way bigger than some of the brands that they work for. I don't see as many brands advertising on TV, for instance, here in the UK as I do some of the top affiliates. They've got their own objectives, their own strategies, their own targets, and they're selling their inventory. You'll notice also a point I was going to touch on is that if you go onto one of the top uh publishers' cashback sites or voucher code sites here in the UK, all that inventory you see, all the ads and the brands you're on the home pages and the category pages, they're curated. People have paid for those placements, they're not just there because A, B, C, D. And I think that's quite important to know, and that's what you're paying for, especially for a small brand. If you work with a large cashback site, the chances are you're not going to drive much sales or much traffic. No one knows who you are. You're not on the home page, you're kind of hidden between within a category. And that's where tenancy and things like that really come in. And you should be willing to spend a little more in order to get that exposure to drive the traffic and then convert the sales. Their users are very engaged.
SPEAKER_04I think that's one thing that has come quite a long way in in the affiliate space, is that the relationship between publisher and brand has been extended past just performance. So it's it's actually branding. But the affiliate channel, whilst it is there to drive sales, it's also there to help you build your brand and expand, expand your reach. And for taking programs global, sometimes those tenancy positions can help the rest of your marketing strategy if you're a new brand to enter a market. So really thinking about the affiliate channel in a much bigger way than we have previously, because all of these lines are blurring, is incredibly important for smaller brands to think about in terms of where they leverage their budget. It's not just for the sales, but also for the brand reach.
SPEAKER_02Definitely. And we've seen, I think over the years, look back 10 years, and most of the affiliates were kind of pop under PPC type. We'll take a chance and quickly uh convert a sale that you may or may not have already got. And like you say, we've seen a lot of development in the space, especially the types of affiliates, the tech partners that have come along that do work full funnel now. You can pay a publisher to work on display for you, on performance where they'll arbitrage or buy the ads and then take a CPA. We see this now with influencers too. Look at Instagram, the stuff you see on there, like you won't see anywhere else. And people are buying it.
SPEAKER_04Um and even streamers, people that are creating their own content, because quite frankly, anybody can now become an affiliate because we're all publishers that will have access to social media channels.
SPEAKER_02I think I saw one of the most interesting trends we saw when the pandemic hit, besides gym equipment, the the gym, the gym and fitness equipment going through through the roof, was uh you couldn't buy a webcam anywhere or a microphone. Very true. It's quite incredible. And then TikTok came along and and everything kind of just went from there. Um speaking of TikTok, it's quite good. Shameless plug if that's okay. That Trade Doubler has uh an exclusive partnership with TikTok. So our clients have access to to TikTok inventory through an account account managed service. Um and for Grow clients, especially, there's been really good uptake. We've seen there's so much interest, and it's it's all done on CPM. So again, looping back into that conversation about how diverse the affiliate mix is now and how far up and down funnel we can we can reach.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, absolutely. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what some of the common mistakes are because most people listening to this podcast are gonna want to know what I can avoid, what can I do better? What are some of the common mistakes that you've seen in your very long career in in performance marketing? And and maybe let's talk a little bit about that around surrounding the kind of power that batch codes and and loyalty sites have. So give us give us the juice.
SPEAKER_02Um, I think the biggest mistake is that they underestimate the amount of work involved in running a successful program. I'm not sure where it comes from.
SPEAKER_04100% agree.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, some people really believe it's a set and forget activity. And I have these conversations uh with clients, unfortunately, quite often. The other thing is I guess that people that are working at smaller businesses uh where resources are really limited are really good at wearing many hats, but obviously very time poor as well. Yeah. Up front, it takes a lot of time to get a program up and running, a lot of not a lot, but effort. You have to put in a certain amount of craft, and and what comes out the other side is often a success.
SPEAKER_04But a lot of that craft is often hidden. I think clients don't really understand. I'm preaching to the choir here. So uh a lot of clients that we speak to that don't really understand the resource intensive time that it takes to go and leverage partner discovery, onboarding, you know, campaign management. There's a lot of background administration work that goes into managing affiliates properly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and I think also, again, this is where at the start, having a consultant or specialist affiliate agency really can help. Even if it's kind of like you meet with the client, you decide on the strategy you plan, you can you can guide that and lead that. But then you can also go away and kind of run it in the background and just report in or or or catch up every now and then to to make sure everything is still on track. And again, this kind of leads to the next point that like the other thing I see, unfortunately, is just lack of planning. So strategy is one thing, and that that's fine and launching correctly and all of that. But you need to plan. You've got all these different sales periods in the year, you've got a whole marketing calendar that needs to be filled with smart activity, you need to know which partners to engage when, and and this can only really come from experience, and and you need to have the tools uh and the relationships you need to kind of launch this, and that comes through through planning. So, yeah, I think you mentioned about voucher codes and and things like that. From an operational point of view, I think one of the biggest mistakes I see is where merchant like gets really excited and goes and creates a really strong offer, like a really powerful voucher code, and then sets it to be generic. And then it kind of floods the whole, yeah, it just floods the whole internet, and all they do is kind of cannibalize their own sales, unfortunately. I think that sounds probably quite obvious to you, but you should really focus on on the promotion. So let's say you've got a strong voucher and you want to put it out for a certain campaign, you reach out to one partner, set it exclusive to them, you'll get that extra exposure, which we spoke about earlier, in the form of an exclusive code or an increased CPA instead of having to pay for a tenancy. And there are other ways then to look at that, but that's definitely one of the biggest mistakes.
SPEAKER_04So being exclusive isn't actually wrong. Being exclusive actually makes it perform better. I get, and I think this is something else just that we see on our side as an OPM is we have clients that sometimes come to us and they've got three different affiliate programs or three different networks, and we're like, why? Why? Why do you do that? It's really, really bad. At best, you would have an in-house program and a long tail network to supplement your strategy. Being on three different affiliate networks has little to no benefit to your business and it's increasing your costs. Yeah. So if anybody's listening to this, please, for goodness sake, speak to an agency, pick a platform and get focused on on you know partnering with the partners that are going to be able to drive you the traffic properly.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, and besides like some of the smaller networks, all the top networks, there's a few of us have pretty much the same selective publishers. So choose a platform, choose a company you're willing and happy to work with, and then and then bring everyone on to there. There's no point spreading yourself so thin. Same with cashback. If you're running a cashback campaign, don't don't give the increased cashback to both of the big cashback sites. Do one, test it, see the results, and then go to the other and do something similar or something different, even and make sure that you've you've spread. But they've got different users. You you're you're targeting audiences the same as you would through a search campaign. So everything you're doing needs to be, again, strategic. It needs to be planned for and back to the strategy you you're trying to execute. Both vouchers and and cashback do provide great incrementality, but only if used correctly and and not just spread across the internet because you need to, I don't know.
SPEAKER_04That's the other thing. It's lack of experience that actually ends up costing people money when it comes to running an affiliate program. Honest to goodness, in the two two decades that I've been managing programs, I have actually taken programs that were making a loss. And you think, how on earth can an affiliate program make a loss when it's only paying a percentage of revenue? But it can because of all of these mistakes and all of these margin impacting decisions that are being made in the background around strategy that the client doesn't actually know that they're negatively impacting their program overall. Just really understanding the numbers and understanding which publishers work best in different regions, for example. Like there might be one cashback site that has really, really great traffic and an amazing use base in the UK, but then work with another one for the US. Test what can be done and test how you can grow and look at all the different options because all of the traffic that's coming to those cashback sites are changing every month as well, because they're doing their media buys and their advertising on the telly and doing all sorts of things to build their own brand. So just constantly testing, I think, is another thing that clients don't do that could be also construed as a mistake. Also looking at publishers that don't perform, like really analysing why, rather than just cutting the relationship because it's taken you so long to build that relationship in the first place, trying to figure out the optimization strategy sometimes gets lost because of a lack of patience, basically.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I see. Um unfortunately, another mistake that we see quite often is that, and I don't know if this is more for larger brands than on smaller businesses, probably is that uh because they're reporting upwards, they get measured or they get happy about the number of affiliates on their program.
SPEAKER_04Not even relevant. So I totally agree with you. I have run affiliate programs with 30 publishers that have been way, way profitable and did the job that a client wanted to do, versus running programs with, and I've I've run programs with outputs of 5,000 publishers.
SPEAKER_02I've seen programs with thousands of publishers with 20 that are sale active, but totally agree. First question is how many new publishers do we have, or how many publishers do we have?
SPEAKER_04Irrelevant stat.
SPEAKER_02Your revenue is going up, your number of sales has increased like tenfold in the last um you know month or two. But hey, how many publishers do you have?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, totally agree. It's quality all the way, never ever quantity. And that's something that I'd uh you know really want people to take away with them. So as we kind of round out this podcast, to bet you have given us so many great nuggets for brands that are looking to start and or are not performing in the affiliate space right now. What's the best piece of advice that you can give to anyone listening to this podcast who is currently in a stagnant position? Like, what are the like one or two things that you would recommend those guys do to continue their growth journey?
SPEAKER_02Plan some more, create a strategy. I think we've touched on quite a lot of that. You can't set a program up and hope to make a success of it without planning properly. Obviously, engage with your affiliates, work with them closely to help increase sales for you. And again, you can't do this with thousands of publishers unless you've got a team of thousands of account managers. And also remember they're an extension of your business, their objectives and yours are very well aligned. I think if you have a program that's stagnant, you're out of ideas on how to grow it further, then it's best to speak to your network or a consultant or again ask a specialist agency to audit your program at least. So if you're not taking them on, just have a chat with them. Um, a fresh pair of eyes is also usually a very helpful way of finding gaps and opportunities.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I think sometimes we have clients that have had like natural tunnel vision. When you're working in-house, sometimes you you get kind of blind to where opportunities are. And I think just doing a mini audit, getting an agency or a secondary account manager in a network or something, depending on how you're running your program, to just take a fresh look at your at your sort of campaign strategies, looking at the partnerships that you've got can sometimes uncover some amazing that can really just re-energize your team, even and and get you kind of back on track. So I totally agree with that. If I gave you a crystal ball, what could you predict the future of affiliate marketing looks like in 2030 and beyond?
SPEAKER_02The scary thing is 2030 is not so far. Having been in the industry for for so long, I've seen so many changes already. And I'd wish I like had a crystal ball back back then. I'm sure that that a lot will change in the next couple of years. It's almost impossible to talk about it now, but I I think there's there's certain areas that that we as an industry are really heavily focused in, and I think this will be more in the next kind of couple of years than than than. But I think the biggest challenge we see right now is with tracking. There's a lot Of increased regulation, there's new privacy laws all the time, and there's a lot of technology restrictions. I think this will be like the main area of focus as an industry uh in the near future. And I think also there's this whole other thing going on with the bigger tech companies with Apple, Google, and Facebook, where they're kind of fighting for ad space and and eyeballs, and then doing that, they're restricting their competitors' cookies and their competitors' tracking technologies. And as an affiliate network and any other online marketing technology, you're kind of swimming in the wake of that and always trying to make sure that you can still track and you can still do um what you need to do based on what they what their changes are. And there's a lot of these things we probably don't have the time to go into it right now. Then there's a couple of other areas I think for partner acquisition, we're seeing already the use of um AI and and machine learning.
SPEAKER_04Very much.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, so I think now it's also all about connecting the right affiliates to the right brands to maximize returns. And this is still very much in the in the infantile stages, but we are seeing that starting to come through. A lot of the products we're developing are like that as well. That kind of intelligent partner matching also will save a lot of time and hopefully remove a lot of the admin and guesswork out of the partnership side of it.
SPEAKER_04The thing is, though, is that even though you're matching to partners, because there are quite a lot of like independent platforms that are coming through. I think Publisher Discovery is one, but Breezy is another. But there are a lot of sophisticated tech that's coming through that sits alongside the network, or the networks are creating their own, as you've just said as well. But even with that matching capability, you still need the human relationship that can quantify those numbers and go, is this right for me? Because data is amazing. And I see a lot of affiliate managers and program managers, working client side, they just get lost in the data. They have like data paralysis. So still having the understanding and the quantitative analysis in your team to actually work those numbers is still going to be important, I think, as we move forward, but we'll just be able to be more intelligent about the relationships that we build and make and the timing of when we actually do the deals, which you touched on already. So I think it's quite exciting to see AI come into this industry because it will allow us to become more um adept at where and how we spend our clients' funds.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I guess as well though, at a network side, and again, from experience sitting on network, account management teams and service staff just spend way too much time doing admin. So, like where you talk about published discovery and these kind of tools, they're looking off platforms. So they're saying, okay, here's the internet. Who doesn't work with you, you should work with them. What we're what we're doing is looking at our own data. So we know, okay, programs like you, which may or may at this stage not be exactly like you, do well with these partners selling these these products. And we're able to then use that to present it to to the agency or to the account manager and say, we think you should work, these these um brands match with these affiliates. What do you think? And take it from there. Instead of saying here's 180,000 publishers, which we have, go find them yourself. So I think it's that kind of it, it's a it's a useful, helpful tool as opposed to a thick year and automate.
SPEAKER_04And what about consolidation? In in the gaming industry, we're seeing a lot of publishers buy different publishers and you're getting these huge conglomerates. Do you think that's going to happen in the retail space?
SPEAKER_02It's happening because and it's accelerating because of the pandemic. I'm not so sure on the small on the small business side, but we saw some of the biggest uh retailers in in the UK disappear earlier this year, and and at the end of last year, Acadia Group, Devonans, these are big hundreds of years, yeah. Um, it is definitely happening, and it's happening. Part of those businesses were bought by pure pure play online businesses. Um, so there's a definite trend there, yeah.
SPEAKER_04The future is bright. As we've always been saying for the last two decades, the affiliate marketing industry is continuing to grow year on year. It does not show any signs of stopping, and the future is bright.
SPEAKER_02It is, and I think also again the pandemic did it accelerated all of this. We saw on a network level more than 30% growth in the last year, and that's with the travel sector totally dead. And again, it's just indicative of how the how the world has become. The online space in retail has accelerated everything, stores were shut overnight through lockdowns and things like that, and budgets were moved straight into online. Now you in a risky situation where you've got a whole lot of unknowns. What do you do? You go to a channel where you can kind of predict where if I spend X, I'm going to generate Y. And so affiliate really benefited from all of that, as did other channels, but big uh offline budgets were moved straight into online where there are much more efficiencies.
SPEAKER_04That's exactly what we want to hear. So thank you so much for being on the affiliate insider affiliate marketing podcast with me today and sharing all of these nuggets of wisdom. We look forward to having you on the on the chat show again, uh, maybe in another year's time to see what's what's changed. And yeah, we we look forward to seeing how the affiliate industry is going to grow.
SPEAKER_02Thank you very much, and thanks again for having me.
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 keep your digital marketing fresh and your affiliate program driving consistent sales.