This week we covered the highlights in terms of the top industry and affiliate marketing status that were shared by our expert guests as we delivered this season of Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast. Tune in next week as we explore more about what's happening in the affiliate industry as we get ready to launch season five of our chart-topping affiliate marketing podcast. We'll be bringing you more industry experts, insights, and knowledge sharing to help you grow your affiliate program and partner relationships.
SPEAKER_02And 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 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 net SEO platform, Link Dex, as was, um, because Dr. Steve Brown, ex-biat, uh, was investing in LinkDEX and became chief exec. And uh, well, basically 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 bill 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.
SPEAKER_06I wanted to touch on the white paper that you guys recently released, um, which had some very interesting stats that I want affiliate managers to listen to. Um, 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 and let's kind of open that conversation a little bit wider.
SPEAKER_02Okay, um, yeah, um, which ones particularly?
SPEAKER_06Which 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_02Well, 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, never sent them a click.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, the two million publishers is is uh yeah 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_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02And um they link through to about 573,000 advertisers last time I looked at account.
SPEAKER_06Wow.
SPEAKER_02And 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 is 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_06Um yeah first people.
SPEAKER_02Well, if you're one of the networks that's got all those six percent, then fantastic for you, mate. Yeah, um, 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_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Now that was probably a massive 15% of CJ still. So I'm 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. 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 stands to generate vast numbers. So that could be with the difference there.
SPEAKER_06I 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 A Win 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 version.
SPEAKER_02Yes. Exactly.
SPEAKER_06I 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.
SPEAKER_00And on the topic of numbers, we invited Kevin Edwards from AWIN, a leading affiliate network, to share his views on where the industry is heading and why affiliate marketing is leading the way as one of the more popular advertising models.
SPEAKER_06Um I know that you guys have done um a really great report that gets released every year, and I I do read it every year, and it's quite in-depth, um, even though it's not specifically around the iGaming industry, but there's a lot of insight that comes out of that report, and I really wanted to start up podcast today, um, just jumping into some of the questions around some of the learnings and the brand-to-brand partnership rise, if you want to call it that, um, and just talk to our audience a little bit about what you guys are seeing with this global view that you have.
SPEAKER_04Okay, so yeah, thank thank you for the plug. So the the Avon Reports in its its fifth iteration, uh, we we try and publish it every year. Um, and what we try and do is sort of encapsulate um the themes that we're seeing as a network, but also kind of more broader macro trends that we're seeing and how that's impacting and how the affiliate industry is impacting them, and vice versa. So um every year we kind of sit down and try and understand, we look at what's happening from our perspective, but we try and understand sort of how we can focus in on a couple of key themes, and and obviously the pandemic was a really significant thing for 2020 for anybody working in digital marketing, uh, be it positive or negatively. Um, so inevitably it was going to sort of focus in on that. We wanted to obviously try and avoid some of some of the cliches around it. I'll try and avoid some of them today. Um, but really we what we did is is is we came up with two key themes which we felt really signified how affiliate marketing performed last year, which was and and continues to perform at the moment, which is um the themes of resilience and reinvention. So I'll probably come on to talk about some of the more reinvention stuff in terms of sort of some of the trending things, but just in terms of sort of focusing in on on the resilience part. So actually, I don't know, don't know whether you've seen we're uh we're recording it in April, and the IAB have have released data for their ad spend survey, which which they release every year. Yes, and as part of that, they break down all of the different constituent parts, the different channels, and actually the affiliate channel grew 10% last year. Phenomenal.
SPEAKER_06I mean, absolutely phenomenal.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean it's it's incredible really when you consider that so many brands pulled their campaigns, certainly brand campaigns, and ads, but so and there is obviously associated cuts elsewhere as associated with with those brand campaigns, but actually the digital industries as a whole shrank nine percent. Wow. So for affiliate to grow 10%, which incidentally was the exact same percentage growth as the big five, so you know, Facebook, Google, etc. Yeah. So for us to be able to say we're growing as much as those huge big tech giants, I think is a really, really important statement.
SPEAKER_06Now it's also important though, because it just shows how much trust the affiliate channel is now having with brands. Whereas previously there was always a mistrust of affiliates, you know, that and especially in the gaming industry, we still struggle with that today. There's a misconception about what an affiliate is and what an affiliate does. So to hear figures like this on this podcast, it really is um, you know, just another sign that this channel isn't going away. You know, it's it's expanding, it's growing, it's developing, it's diversifying. And this is why I wanted to get you on the podcast because you guys are at the pulse of this and you can share what trends are happening.
SPEAKER_04So it's so what what one of the one of the reasons I think so I think that we have like this reasonably narrow window now to try and consolidate that and build upon upon that success, you know, probably take take take advantage of that momentum. But one of the things that I think proved to brands last year and why that growth sort of happened was because I think the brands wanted like a sanity check. They wanted numbers in, they wanted sort of sales through through the door, the online door, as obviously their shops were closed. Um and they wanted that that kind of money in the bank. And and really, because affiliate is at the sharp end, you know, it's it's it's the the nuts and bolts, it's it's the sales through the door. I think that they really focused in on that and thought, you know, I I need the sanity check of the numbers, like I can't really afford to invest in my budgets in things that don't necessarily have an ROI associated with them. So that that's really why I think that that we're able to post such impressive numbers. Um now you could say, well, inevitably that was going to happen with the affiliate channel, but I think when we looked at some of the other data, um, we saw things like new customer numbers. So again, affiliates are always challenged on that incremental piece, which I'm kind of I always sort of roll my eyes slightly because the the the idea is that if you're not driving incremental sales, i.e. sales that are um qualified, that you don't add any value. And as we know, affiliates add value across the whole purchase.
SPEAKER_06To add the entire journey, absolutely.
SPEAKER_04Um but we were able to say, well, actually, we've seen new customer numbers increase by 35%. We saw we saw last year in April. April was our kind of big new customer number month.
SPEAKER_00We also had an interesting discussion around partner growth with Alexander Phillips from breezy.io and the complexities affiliate managers face in terms of deciding which partners in the universe of potential publishers are best suited to develop growth relationships with.
SPEAKER_03When it comes to finding your idea partners, you mentioned keywords. That's actually still the uh one of the main components of Breezy's discovery today. And the reason for that is we haven't yet identified every customer base and quantified it for every entity. That's a very big task. We estimate that there are globally about 100 million businesses uh worth their salt. There's also about 100 million content creators, including uh 38 million influencer accounts, uh, seeing a lot of overlap between one influencer who's on three different social media platforms. So this is a job in the long run of categorizing every entity for the purpose of matching them. And that's very different from categorizing them for say search or categorizing them for another purpose. Uh and the kind of things that you're looking to understand are obviously one of those main things is who is their customer base. Now, because we don't yet know who their customer base is, uh, unless they come in and tell us, uh the best thing to do is to use search. Uh the the the person that is ranking for your keywords is either going to be one of, or the entity that's ranking for your keywords, is either going to be one of two things. They're either going to be a competitor, which is useful to know because you can learn more about your competitor landscape. And also, as I'll get to, you can use that to search new partners using Breezy, or they're going to be an entity that talks about the things that you sell or talks to the customer that you're selling to in some way. And that's all about using smart keywords to run these searches. But historically, it's always been really challenging. You type a keyword into Google, you have a hundred sets sort of results to go through. So, how do you do that at scale? So, what Breezy does is it takes two sets of data, it takes a list of keywords that can be directly the keywords you rank for, directly the keywords uh see the keywords that your customers would search to find entities like you, and it runs them across search into search in high volumes and pulls all of the results combined. So if you run 100 keywords, we'll pull 10,000 results. If you run 500 keywords, 50,000 results. Then in parallel to that, it says who's linking to your competitors. And if you don't have a competitor, because I know there are some brands out there that like to say they have no competitors because they are so unique, but yeah, exactly. But I've seen quite a lot of that, and uh it will be who well, if you don't have a clear competitor, who is the closest thing? And if it's not even that they sell a similar product, then what are brands that you can think of that sell things to your target customer? Yeah, and you go more lateral, and so we will ask for that, and we'll then pull all of the links to that data, we'll combine it all together, all the results for the keywords and all the results for backlinks to your competitors, uh, which you historically would have to use SEO tools like Moz and Ahres and SEMRush, great tools for SEO to find, or you'd have to manually search and Google or build a scraper to do so, and we combine that all together, and that for us is what overlap looks like. So that's the current snapshot of the first stage of saying, Oh, whoever overlaps with all that stuff is either going to be a competitor. Oh, great, then I can add them to the competitor inputs, or they're gonna be a potential entity, and that entity may not be a traditional affiliate, they could be an incentive site, they could be a blog that works on affiliate, but they might be an editorial magazine or a PR partner, and that's why Breezy is a discovery tool for finding the third-party entities and not just for finding affiliates. So I don't know if you've ever seen content uh uh website buyers where you have an agent uh that basically it has a reject, negotiate, reject, counter, accept functionality. We want to create a place where you can see the target on both sides and literally speed up that process by forming the uh the negotiation in real time, the same way you might negotiate with uh someone on Upwork to develop the ideal uh freelancer relationship, um, building the terms of service of your relationship and setting out clear KPIs, clear accountability around which the state which stakeholders in the company are responsible for what, uh, and really develop digital frameworks and user experience around the frameworks that keep relationships from failing. So there is a 70% failure rate in partnerships. It's a McKinsey statistic, and it's not just affiliate specific, it is broadly speaking, all partnership types, and the reason for that is misalignment of goals, yeah, misalignment of expectations. Yeah, so the way to solve that is uh is uh by by filling holes and bridging uh well, making improvements at every step of the universal funnel that you sorry, the universal journey of a partnership, yeah. So that means refining discovery and improving recommendation and uh uh matching, right? But in between that, there is really no network that feels like a CRM.
SPEAKER_00And lastly, we looked at the convergence of influencer, social media, and video content creators now joining the lineup as partners in your affiliate marketing and performance models. John Cole from Lad Bible shared some interesting stats for affiliate program managers to consider about what works effectively in social channels like Twitter and the value of building community and rapport around your brand with your publishers and affiliate partners.
SPEAKER_01The reason that we've we've had the success and the growth that we've had, I mean, to give you an idea, we reached 658 million people in in December across our um Facebook and Instagram allowance. So that's not accountable for the website on Lab Bible, which is the second biggest um news site after the BBC in the UK, and then you've got Sport Bible's own site, which is the biggest sport website in the in the UK, as it's done. So it's it's all I think about fundamentally understanding that community bond. It's not about telling people what to think, it's about understanding what they want to know about, being on the pulse of that, and and inspiring, as we say, our communities to laugh, think, and act. And that's essentially what we go to social for. You want them to be entertained, to be encouraged, to find out things they didn't know. You want them to think about the world around them and to have different opinions, but not force that opinion upon them. It's about bringing that opinion in and that community together from all different sides and then to act and to get people to mobilize. So we've done campaigns around inclusion in sport, mental health, for example, and things like Blood Without Bias as well, which is to do with restrictions that existed on gay men and blood donation, which actually changed UK UK government policy around that as well. So it's a big, big umbrella that everything sits under. Obviously, we're we're kind of active Facebook, Twitter, Instagram. We're one of the biggest TikTok publishers on TikTok, should I say, Snapchat. And that that's really important to consider is you know, you're not just talking about a brand that sits within a traditional environment or might have one or the other. It's about thinking as how they all kind of live together as an ecosystem. And I think that's really that's the job for us to do and for us to think about is that how we bring brands on that journey with us, how we let them understand that ecosystem, how do we engage and try and fundamentally understand what you get out of it to start to sort of stop applying traditional thinking to what isn't a traditional medium and has a completely different means of of reciprocal communication built into its very nature.
SPEAKER_06So yeah, I mean I think you touched perfectly on the fact that it's community. We we often think of like the operator, the customer, or the operator affiliate. And actually, what you what you need to think about your brand is that you are building a community with people, with humans, even though the social platform is so accessible, um, you know, we forget that conversation needs to still happen. It can't just be about push notification all the time. You know, here's a promo, here's a an offer, here's what our new product is. It's about taking that conversation and that narrative and moving it further. That's something that you guys are incredibly good at doing. So, you know, we spoke a little bit about um affiliate marketing and how that term is becoming really archaic. And like you don't you guys don't really consider yourselves as that, you consider yourselves as a publisher and a partner and an influencer all molded together. So I'm of the opinion that affiliate managers need to be kind of like fund managers, they need to understand all about all aspects of digital acquisition, as they need to make informed decisions about where they advertise their brand and where they acquire new customers. Um, and this is something that you you guys do incredibly well. So talk us through that partnership, what actually happens when you start working with a brand in the iGaming space.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sure. So for me, I think fundamentally it's understanding, and it sounds obvious, but it's what you want to achieve, and as a and as I touched on it, and you mentioned around sort of community and that that you can still deliver those messages, you can still focus on product, but it's how you interweave it into a narrative that that gives a value exchange with that community. And I don't mean in the offer itself, I mean that they're taking information away, it's content that they want to engage with. Um, because you you start to look at it from the sense of if we can understand, say, for example, it's a free-to-play product that you're looking to push as part of what it is, it's not only kind of when's the closing date, who are your targets. I mean, we reach two-thirds of all 18 to 34-year-olds across Facebook and Instagram in the UK, you know. So we we can find that audience, we've got the reach, we've got the scale. What's fundamentally important is understanding their behaviours. So when we can understand what it is you're looking to achieve, so if it's a free-to-play game, and we understand that it's acquisition, there's a consideration that's built into it, and then action, we can start to look at how we use our final how our suite, how we use that ecosystem in something we call ad 360. So the top of the funnel is to kind of inspire, which is that kind of awareness. You've then got intrigue, which is consideration, how we build that up, and then into kind of something like action. So you would start to think about we understand when our communities are active, we understand when they're considering placing bats or considering placing products, we understand that behavioural patterns outside of just what we're talking about. So if we've recently done a webinar that you know we'll we'll try and share with you guys if we can, where it's all about understanding where they are. And the data and insight and planning team have worked with us to go almost what's that journey of placing about our consideration or where we're looking to do it. So I tapped on Instagram carousels is actually we know there's again using sport better as an example or something that's free to play, ahead of that that kickoff, the first kickoff of the day, it really ramps up in terms of consideration and access five hours to an hour before, right? So, understanding that, then you can use something like Instagram Carousels to set up someone Saturday morning with all the information they need to know. What do they want to drive into those WhatsApp groups? What's the conversation amongst the community going to be? How can a brand fit with that? How can we align with a brand's product objectives to do that sort of thing? And then once we get in going, obviously Twitter's a huge sort of role to play within that environment as well.
SPEAKER_06And you mentioned we actually mentioned that because you said um you mentioned that there was a tweet that can get upwards of a thousand clicks.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So I mean across the weekend on the carousels, you can get around sort of 795, we were doing on average with a particular partner around a longer-term sponsorship around the Premier League, for example, our coverage of. Um, but yeah, but so it was interesting. We were using tweets to be able uh to push out offers, to interact, to react to what's going on in game. Again, it's about being part of that community, it's not about just serving something. Be fluid to what's happening around you, tailor your creative, allow the flexibility within that to do that. But and and within that, we sort of started polling the community to understand when what is it you actually want to see? What games are you being around? Video is a perfect example, which we haven't even touched on yet. We worked you know with a with an operator where it was a consideration to try and move a football audience into children for that period of time. We saw a 23% uplift in consideration based on the creative that we put off the back of one video as part of that partnership. Um, and you know, we do serialized magazine style shows where we can look at the features, integrate branded content, sorry, integrated brands, objective messaging and products into those sort of things. So it's interesting. I tend to speak, as you say, think about as the ecosystem. They've all got that role to play within that.
SPEAKER_00Tune in next week for more insights on what's new and happening in affiliate marketing as we go behind the scenes of our podcast to bring you an exclusive all access interview with Leanne Johnston, affiliate insider's host and industry veteran about what it takes to build a successful affiliate program and career in affiliate marketing. Plus, she'll reveal some of her top tips to help you grow your affiliate program and to fast track your results.