Hi and welcome to the Affiliate Insider Podcast with me, Leanne Johnston. This is a podcast for digital and affiliate marketers. 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 affiliates 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.
SPEAKER_00If you're looking to launch an affiliate program but aren't 100% sure where or how to start, put your best foot forward and book a free agency call with us today. Affiliate Insider offers a range of agency services from strategy and consulting to technical integration, affiliate recruitment, and in-depth program audits. Our team will help you plot the right course, save you time to launch and scale a successful affiliate program and strategy. As one of the UK's top 50 rated agencies, as ranked by the Drum's Digital Agency Census, we've helped hundreds of brands launch and grow multi-million dollar programs across a range of industries. Why not book a free scoping call and let us help you expand your reach with successful affiliate marketing? Visit affiliateinsider.com and click on agency to find out more.
SPEAKER_02Welcome to Affiliate Insiders Affiliate Marketing Podcast at Mealy Ann Johnston. And today I'm absolutely thrilled to have Zach Measures from Everflow join us to talk a little bit about affiliate marketing around the world. So hi Zach, how are you?
SPEAKER_04Hi, thanks very much for the invite and uh pleased to be speaking with you.
SPEAKER_02Thanks so much for being here. So, in keeping with our theme of affiliate marketing around the globe, which is really what we're talking about in this season, I really wanted to explore a little bit about why SAS products like Everflow are working behind the scenes to improve tracking and data and measurement metrics to support SMEs into the world of affiliate marketing successfully.
SPEAKER_04Got it. Yeah, I mean, this is a good question and it's a good talking point in the sense that I think tracking platforms as a whole have been becoming more complicated in what they can do, but easier from a user perspective to actually engage with that platform and get actionable insight from it. So I mean, if we cast our mind back, you and I have been in the space long enough. It was pretty complicated and quite frustrating 10, 15 years ago to place postbacks and to find affiliates and manually change things and all the rest of it. So here at Everflow, we've got a big focus on automation, on scale, and also how we play with other integrations within our clients' tech stack. So whether it's shopping carts and integrating with Shopify, CRM platforms, whether it's uh the conversion API with Facebook, all of these other modular points are very central to what everyone's doing. And what Everflow does is aim to simplify that and be at the hub of your partner marketing program.
SPEAKER_02And I think that's quite important because efficiency is becoming like the bane of every affiliate manager's life, right? I mean, they spend so much of their time running the administration of their program that understanding that there are platforms like this out there that can help you not only, you know, save time and money and resources, but also help you to develop and scale. Because it's fine when you're running an affiliate program in one country, but when you're running an affiliate program across 10 or 15 different countries and multiple different languages and different currencies, that's when it starts to become complex and you end up having inefficiencies in your program. So let's start with a little bit before we get into the nuts and bolts of you know how to manage big affiliate programs around the world. Let's start with a little bit of a background to you and your experience, and then we'll get into the meat and bones of affiliate marketing around the world, which is really what we're here to discuss today. So talk to us a little bit about your entry and a little bit about how Everflow started.
SPEAKER_04Sure. Well, I mean, I've been in the affiliate or performance space for about 18 years. And to date me, how it all kind of started my journey was I was a media buyer buying traffic for a lead generation business, okay. Uh, which started as 20 people and then we IPO'd and got to 250 people, and it was a really exciting journey. And what I was doing was buying in traffic initially on a CPM basis and working back to an affected cost per acquisition. Yeah. And again, this is going to date me, but I was buying traffic from MySpace. Okay. And I kind of thought, well, why am I buying it on a CPM when maybe I could see if I can buy it elsewhere? And I went to the US counterpart of the person that I was buying traffic from and said, Do you have any UK traffic? And they said, Yeah, it's remnant traffic, but we can sell it to you on a CPA. And that started a whole kind of journey for me in terms of working with US-based companies, helping them to scale in Europe. So whether it was kind of on the email side, uh, worked for a company called Intella, and then I worked for a company called Ad Knowledge, which was at one point like the fourth largest online advertising company in the world. It was a huge business, doing behaviorally targeted email. And then most recently, prior to Overflow, I worked for like a programmatic platform within the app ecosystem, which was aimed at international expansion. So for app owners, how do they speak to potential buyers of their app or potential users of their app internationally? And it was all program-based, machine learning based, lots of reporting within that. And that kind of got me interested in kind of Everflow and Everflow at that time, you know, we're now about 60 staff, but there was about 18 of us then. Uh, when I saw the technology at Everflow, of like, wow, it can pull this instantly. Like these are big things that online marketers do. And that was the kind of journey, you know.
SPEAKER_02So you said you've been working with Everflow for quite a while now, but uh how what did the product look like back then when you first started? And what has been the kind of migration in terms of this deep data diving? I mean, because for people listening to this podcast, some of them might be new to the industry, they might not know where we've come from to understand why data intelligence tools are so important today.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I was thinking about this actually this morning when I went for a cycle ride and thinking how how can one simplify it? Because we often talk within the industry of you know ECPMs and programmatic machine learning and RTB and all this kind of buzzwords. But really, what I was kind of thinking about is like for the purpose maybe of this talk, is like for anyone kind of listening, I think it's really all about squares and triangles, you know, squares in terms of taking a piece of paper and writing down what is it as a brand or a network that I want to achieve? What are the key metrics that are important to me? And don't be led necessarily by what's going on in the industry. And then the kind of triangle is the funnel that we all know, which is like an inverted triangle of going, you know, here's attention, interest, desire, action, moving people down that funnel. But then there's also another triangle, I think, which is kind of where the base is broad and goes up almost like an iceberg. Yeah. And that is what data am I missing? Because people can get very fixated on I've run an email campaign and I've got a 20% uplift from click-through to conversion. But actually, the biggest metric in email marketing is what's your delivery rate?
SPEAKER_02Yeah, did everybody open it?
SPEAKER_04Until you yeah, if you've sent out 100 emails, but only 20 have arrived, yeah, that's the single biggest thing. So I think where Everflow has been focusing on is looking at how we can play with other people's tech stacks. So as mentioned, so whether it's syncing to a CRM or Facebook conversion API or shopping carts, making this seamless so you can plug in for the rest of your business, but then also drilling down and getting more granular and faster on how you can pull massive data sets to give you actionable insight on what you want to achieve. And whether that's optimizing, let's say, on a click for landing pages, because you can do auto-optimization on landing pages and work to KPIs. These are kind of like the themes that we've been building out. And then I mentioned mentioned earlier, you know, sort of campaign automation. Uh, we have something called Smart Switch, which enables anyone to set up, I want this signature of traffic, and the system will automatically start policing the subsources that your publishers are sending you. So it does a lot of the heavy lifting and allows you as a person to focus on things that deliver more value. So whether that's meeting a new big partner for lunch or some of the stuff, the relationship stuff that I know that you value so much and is very, very important and tends to get overlooked, right? In a tech heavy industry, relationships, trust, commercial, all these things are very, very important. And so that's what the system has been working hard to do to have more of these automation features.
SPEAKER_02And like that graphic that you sort of painted with words here on our podcast today, of that everything that happens underneath the waterline of that iceberg. So it's not just about the technology stack to track the conversion between you, your affiliate, and the customer, but it's all of that data stuff that happens underneath this or behind the scenes that allows you to formulate what the strategy is for your program. So, I mean, and especially with us talking about affiliate marketing around the globe, some of the biggest things that are difficult for brands to do when they are taking their program from a one country program to a 10 or 15 country program is automating some of the decision-making processes that need to happen. Because as you listen through this uh series of podcasts where we're talking about affiliate marketing around the world, you're gonna listen and discover that certain countries have certain limitations. And so you can't have a one-size-fits-all program, even from a commercial model, to run your program effectively to you know margins that make sense for your business. So I think that's the important key thing here is just understanding that what sits behind your technology stack of your affiliate program, ultimately, it is the engine that makes your car run. And so making sure that you have a tech stack that is open and can integrate with other platforms like your CRM, your sales, whatever it is, what are the tools that you're using to automate? I think that's very, very important. So we spoke recently, you and I in depth, about user stake management, which is a I love this term. And I don't know if it's something that you guys point, but it relates to how you manage different customers coming into your program and the commercial models that sit around that. So can you talk a little bit about what a user state management means to Everflow and how programs can use that effectively to drive better margins?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, do you mind if I take a step back and just kind of like illustrate where it sits within not just the platform, but how it's useful for marketeers? So within all kind of tracking platforms, and Everflow is no exception, to kind of demystify this, how tracking platforms work is they give you the ability to create unique links for your partners. And the industry term now is for partners, which covers affiliates and anyone else sending new traffic, influencers, yeah, all of that good stuff. And obviously, within any tracking platform or attribution software, you can run reports now at what we call the offer level. So let's say I am an advertiser and I have a specific campaign that I want to track. You can run obviously reports at that level. Within the Everflow platform, we've gone one level deeper at the offer level, and we can also run what we call event level analysis, which is different stages of a single offer. So let's imagine we're a mortgage campaign. There might be a registration, there might be a qualifying call, there might be a credit check, whatever it is that goes through that. And some of these can occur offline. So let's say someone has to phone them, they log it in their CRM, that data then gets piped back into Everflow. So now as an online marketer, I can run different event reporting to say, great, these affiliates or these partners are sending traffic that's only reaching stage two of five. Why is that? I need to look at the speed of the landing pages or change the messaging or whatever that is. So you've got your offers, you've got your events, you can also run things at a partner level. So the different sources of traffic, and you can break that down into subsources and so on. But one trend that we think is coming is the ability to run analysis at an individual user level. And what this enables marketeers to do, and we kind of initially thought of the iGaming space, and three of the four last four clients that I've signed, this has been a big thing for them where it can have lots of applications. So whether it's a crypto platform or even an e-commerce business. But the idea behind it is I want to run an analysis on users. And so what the system allows you to do is to create your own data points, which is basically a way of passing through a numeric value within a string. So let's say order value or wallet value, deposit value, money lost, money won. It could be whatever you want. You can create your own data points here. And the technology works at the postback level, so it's conversion-based. So here comes a user, you need to add in a user ID. So that could be an email address that can be passed within the string. And a sale has been made, or a trade has been done, or a deposit has been done, or a wallet has been topped up. Now something happens. And what the system now allows you to do is to create these data points, which are unique to your business and run analysis to say, I want to see all users that have lost over X amount of money in this time frame. Or I want to see all users who have made trades or wallet top-ups that are X amount over this time.
SPEAKER_02Can you do this to like the game level as well? Because especially in esports and iGaming, it's often quite interesting and intuitive for affiliate managers to know what games a player is playing in order to generate that revenue. So go really deep on are they a casino or are they a table game player or are they actually lacking the kind of scratch cards or are they actually playing the lottery? Because often in these programs, they have one affiliate program that maps across all of their products. So casino sports got uh lottery, bingo, whatever it is. And so that would be quite interesting to actually give that data to the affiliate manager without having to go to the you know internal BI team to go and get this intelligence and wait for two weeks for a report to come back. And by then you've forgotten what you were asking for in the first place. So that's quite interesting. But then I can see on an e-commerce side as well. I mean, even looking at, you know, the last bonus code that a customer triggered and what did they buy, and then upselling with alternative products, that could be a really good way to use this like functionality to get better user state management instead of just looking at the surface line of did I get a conversion, which is often where the kind of data insight stops on an Affidio program, because we just haven't had that level of reporting within the tools that we have available.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So taking those two sectors of the industry, let's say eye gaming and thinking of a practical use of where this can be useful, gambling casinos, you know, they have whales and minnows and dolphins, players that are very, very high value. So you can create data points to say, show me players that have spent over a certain amount or deposited a certain amount, or even one over a certain amount, you know, because sometimes you may not want players that continually win. Yeah. And likewise, you may have regulations that require you to run a report to say which players are actually losing money consistently. You might want to put a stock on that account. Yeah. So what you're doing is creating now cohorts of users that you can, you know, evaluate and analyze and give actionable insight. And then from the e-commerce example, let's say you're a manufacturer of wet weather clothing, for example, and you could run a report to say, okay, maybe let's look at people that are buying uh retractable umbrellas or telescopic umbrellas. Yeah. And then you can use other data points, which are all available within the system. And you run a report and say, hey, look, you know, the people that are buying these retractable umbrellas, they live in metropolitan areas. And the people that are buying Wellington boots live in more rural areas.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_04How is that useful? Well, you can obviously change things like the landing page. And so when a user comes in from London to see someone in a pair of wellies might not be as relevant as someone with a video of someone with a retractable umbrella as they climb into the tube or into the bus and then open it again on their way to the office. So that's where you can get these user-based insights, make decisions, and then we also have something called rules where you can apply rules to the data points that you've uh created and enable an action to happen on that. So let's say an affiliate is passing you users, and if they deposit more than X over a certain time, you can increase commission to that affiliate by Y or something similar.
SPEAKER_02But you know, that's that's pretty big news. I mean, I've been in the industry a long time, and you know, incentivizing your affiliates in a way that's cost efficient for your business is sometimes nine and impossible because we just don't have this depth of data. And often you're incentivizing, and then only a period of three to six months later after you've seen the player churn or the buyer churn through your uh system. Do you then understand, well, did that actually work or or was it adding incrementality, or was it just you know supporting the partners that we already have, bringing us the same customers over and over again? So I think that's pretty cool. And I think that is the way that the future of affiliate marketing is headed, where we are going to have data-driven insights that are going to allow us to do things more efficiently and effectively uh within the management side of the of the actual program.
SPEAKER_04And one thing to kind of add to that, because a lot of as as you said, and a lot of this needs to be in real time, right? And that was one of the one things that drew me to Everflow as uh as someone that joined the team here is that we had in a previous role, you know, we were running very large data sets for individual reports, running SQL queries, which were kind of locking up revenue tables, and and actually it took a long time to actually get this data. We use like the Google Cloud platform and something called BigQuery, which enables us to pull like petabytes of data very, very quickly. So you can make the analysis at the click level. So as it comes in, the system can be policing traffic through the automation that I mentioned earlier, or you can be getting these real insights into we don't need to wait six months and then tell an affiliate, hey, we're going to pay you a little bit more. Those affiliates need to be rewarded as soon as possible. Because, you know, as we all know, with any kind of performance activity, there's an opportunity cost that the affiliate has of running your campaign versus someone else's. And that's for any kind of brand or network out there, which which they know, having an effective program doesn't just mean you're optimizing all the conversion rates, but it also means like real cash to your affiliates and how quickly you can pay them, how much you can reward them, all this good stuff.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, absolutely.
SPEAKER_02Now, I want to kind of tap into that 18 years of experience, media buying stroke, affiliate stroke, now on the SaaS side, to talk a little bit about the brands that you work with around the world, because you do have clients all around the world, both EU, US, you know, pretty much everywhere. What are you seeing as key trends and what are you noticing is happening between more established markets like the UK and the US, where affiliate marketing and performance marketing is very prominent, versus other regions around the world where things are still emerging in this space? Because we are going to have people that are, you know, tuning into this from around the world. And some of the stuff that we're talking about today is pretty technical. But what are some of the key trends that you're seeing happening in between emerging and non-emerging markets?
SPEAKER_04Well, I mean, I think during COVID, which has obviously affected everyone across the planet, um, you know, we saw a big jump in e-commerce. Obviously, you know, Shopify, anyone that's got a Shopify store, can now reach consumers all over the world. We saw a big rise in B2B clients. So people that would usually go to trade shows and meet people for complex sales cycles. This needs to be done online. Yeah. And then to come back to the international piece, I think we're seeing more and more emerging markets utilize influencer marketing, you know, utilizing cryptocurrency platforms. These are big trends. So, I mean, I was saying jokingly to one of my colleagues the other day, sometimes it's a little bit kind of concerning, you know, because we have about 750 clients. You can see a lot of finance and debt consolidation in the West. And then in the eastern markets, you can see a lot of, you know, those are investor-rich countries, people tend to save their money. You can see a real growth of like cryptocurrency platforms, buying Bitcoin, all that good stuff, where they're taking their savings and putting that into outside of fiat currencies, or sometimes it's difficult to get your money out of China and you want to put it in something else. So those are kind of like the the big trends. And then in terms of the some of the clients we have, I mean, this is the most fun part about working for Everflow. You could be speaking to, you know, we have big institutions like uh First American and um Bunk, which is like the Monzo of Europe. We also have big e-commerce guys like Modernisa, who are like the world's largest e-commerce retailer for Muslim women, which is a very interesting market in itself, right? Yeah, absolutely 800 million Muslim females in the world, you know. So that's that's kind of very interesting. And then we also have really interesting kind of like publishers and people doing all kinds of really fascinating stuff. And that's that's the most fun bit, really. All Everflow does is provide a toolbox. And what's really satisfying is to see how people use those tools to help to help scale their businesses.
SPEAKER_02Absolutely. So, I mean, you've got some pretty big brand names out there that you've spoken about, and they're all using the tool in different ways. But what about some of the smaller brands that are just entering into the open ed space? So those tiny mom and pop e commerce sites that have specific products and things that they're selling? Like what are the the things that you can sort of advise to them getting into the marketplace, especially now with the sophistication that we have versus 10 years ago, like when it was still a little bit of a specialist feel, but it's becoming way more mainstream now. What are some of the things that you can advise to SMEs?
SPEAKER_04Well, I think this is another growing trend as well, that more brands, whatever their size, are looking to run activity in-house. And part of that is the simplicity of the front end of the tool. Yeah. Just like our iPhones, you know, my parents are always amazed when they see my kids flicking around the iPad and they're saying, oh, look at them, they've grown up so quickly. And it's like, it actually takes a lot of software to make it as simple as that. Yeah. You know, using your finger is not because they've learned to use an iPad early. It's just that there's so much code there that has made it simple to use. So that's a definite trend. People running activities in-house. And the really exciting thing is if you're a small business, you don't necessarily need to go to some of the managed solutions out there. If you feel as though you are committed enough to run a partner program and run it yourself, I'm sure you would agree with this. There's no magic solution. You can't just switch on and all of a sudden you've got an affiliate program. It does take time. You do need to invest in it. You do need to know what it is that you want to track and have very clear goals and all the rest of it. But you do now have the ability to run activity in-house. There's lots of SaaS solutions out there that can help you. So whether it's Stripe for rebilling or Shopify for your shopping cart, you don't have to build these all yourself. We're a SaaS platform, but we use HubSpot for our CRM because it, you know, you have this kind of modular approach now to different things. So I think the really exciting thing is that less technical people can have access to run successful affiliate campaigns and successful partner campaigns, focusing on you know things like brand and and all this good stuff.
SPEAKER_02My caveat point there, obviously, being an agency owner is make sure you have a plan. So speak to somebody and get a proper strategy and a plan in place. Because if you just go in blind, it can it can be costly and it can be inefficient as well. So talking just a little bit more about the maturity of affiliate marketing in countries around the world again, because you do have a really broad depth and perspective of what's happening around the globe. What can you tell us are some of the big issues that emerging markets are facing right now in terms of managing affiliates? Because there is this, you know, if you come from the UK or the US, you've got all of these strategies and tools and things that you're aware of. But some of the smaller uh emerging markets may not really understand these things yet. And they're and they may not even understand why they need them. You know, they they're hearing this podcast and going, well, I need user state manner, well, I need to have these tools. But what is the reasoning behind why? Is it just cost and efficiency, or you know, are there other things that smaller brands need to consider?
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I mean, there's different mediums that work in different markets, you know, sometimes just because of the uh maturity of that market. So let's say video, for example, is very popular in the US, which is less popular in some other countries. And then obviously some of that is just down to broadband penetration, the speed of the broadband and and so on. So I think if you're coming from an emerging market, there the the challenge that you may have is finding a product that appeals to users because for advertisers, with without painting too gloomy a picture, you know, someone in uh San Diego, as far as an advertiser is concerned, is perhaps what has a higher value just from a pure marketing perspective than someone else that lives somewhere else in the world. So I think having a, if you're in an emerging market, having a product where you have a high margin and can reach lots of people, you know, we we have Malaysian companies and Chinese guys that that use us as well. And they're doing some really interesting stuff.
SPEAKER_02And I think that localization, having a product or a tool behind you that can allow you to customize and do localized types of marketing with different types of graphics and and all the rest of it, is something that you do need to look at if you are getting into this space.
SPEAKER_04100%. So I think if you have an international affiliate program, like a very simple thing to think about is do I have different landing pages for different users in the world? And that can be obviously, you know, a standard desktop page versus a mobile-friendly page, but it can be language-based on browser settings. And you can get pretty creative there because you know, whether it's you know, featuring a page in Catalan if someone comes from Barcelona versus Basque, if someone's in Bilbao, rather than just Castillian in in Spanish, you know, you can get very granular. And the systems now can actually help do this automatically. So there's various verticals that really like different offer URLs for the same offer. So here comes a user from Sweden, let's show them the price in Swedish krona. And here comes someone from somewhere else, let's show them it in Euros and in their native language. You know, these are very sort of basic ways of localizing but maximizing you know the appeal because you have to tailor everything to fit that audience, right? Even a company as big as McDonald's, it's different to how they do, you know, McDonald's here in the UK versus the US.
SPEAKER_02So yeah, and I think that's a key thing is again comes down to your strategy and your planning. If you are going to be, you know, scaling up and going into other countries, there are a number of things that you need to think about. And we're gonna be exploring all of that on this uh podcast series. So hopefully you'll be tuning in to listen every week and learn something new about different places around the world. What are some of the variants for brand to engage with affiliates, ambassadors, and influencers? And we did touch on that a little bit earlier before we got on this podcast in terms of the fact that affiliate is a word that no longer encompasses everybody that's in the whole publisher universe. But where are some of your clients seeing success right now around the world in terms of their affiliate program growth? Are they investing more in influencers and you know social content creators? Like what are some of the growth points that you're seeing, you know, from the breadth of everything that you see?
SPEAKER_04It's a great question. There's lots of different things that are working for different people. I mean, influencers are huge. More and more people are looking to influencers and using things in a creative way. You know, I mentioned video being a big thing.
SPEAKER_03For sure.
SPEAKER_04You know, we see people paying influencers for unboxings and things like this. So if you have a physical product, yeah, send that to the influencer. You can pay them on uh either on a cost per sale or if it's just a simply an unboxing, you can pay them on a cost per thousand views, you know, a CPM model. So these kind of things are are very interesting. And then also, you know, working right across the spectrum. You know, you meant we know we're saying affiliates is a bit of a sort of slightly dated term, but people are using partners now as yeah, okay, I want to see a unified dashboard of everything that I'm doing because a problem for a lot of brands, small and large, is you've got this modular approach to buying media now. I'm buying on Facebook, I'm buying on LinkedIn, I'm maybe doing some you know, PPC or SEO. At the end of the month, you know, I know I've sold a hundred units, but Google's telling me I've sold 90, Facebook's telling me I've sold 10, and someone else is telling me I've sold 15. And I know I haven't sold 115. So, how do you stitch this all together in this unified dashboard? A feature that we have is something called first touch attribution, which allows marketers to say, where has someone first engaged with us? So whether it's going to a LinkedIn page and then Googling your site and then coming back and making a purchase or your Facebook page or whatever, you can start to really see how the ROI on these channels is truly measured. So I think that that's kind of an emerging trend that that people should think about, definitely.
SPEAKER_02Especially with the whole first party cookies scenario that we're all working through right now to figure out well, how does this actually impact the rest of our media buying? This is where your partnerships actually become super important because you know, this is basically what an affiliate program is and does. It sends you the customer to track and you then have that customer for their lifetime. So I think that's pretty cool. The last question I want to ask you is if you had a crystal ball, what are some of the things that you'll project will change in the coming year as we move forward from a somewhat disruptive period in affiliate marketing? What what do you think is going to happen? What's your crystal ball moment?
SPEAKER_04Well, I think there's going to be a lot more focus on device signals. So, you know, with personally identifiable information being a sort of hot topic and GDPR and every CCPA in the States and so on, there's people are are very wary of doing anything that's identifying a user and obviously cookies and you know the fact that cookies are going away eventually. You know, this is dropping cookies on your browser so that they can track you round the internet.
SPEAKER_05Yeah.
SPEAKER_04I think the next thing is that you know, our devices, the our devices give off tons of signals. I mean, when you actually see it, it's it's kind of scary. It is. You know, is the device uh flat? Is the device uh facing you? Yeah. Um you know, all this kind of it are you moving with the device? So if someone's you know, uh it's facing them and it's moving, you can infer from that that this person is commuting or something like that. And so I think this kind of like the blend between how am I different from my device? Yeah, I'm really not that because you are really what you do, not what you say you do, and your device gives off all of these signals. So I think there's going to be more and more focus on device tracking and those signals being coming back and then triangulating that data around to make inferences on that data.
SPEAKER_02Okay, that's amazing. I think you're right. I what does scare me though is the fact that we can make point of sale messaging a lot faster through devices, especially if what you're saying is true. But if I know somebody's walking around a town center at a certain time of the day and they happen to be walking past in the shop, I can push notification message them if they are in my kind of trackable universe. I think that that is something that I think is coming in the future as well. And especially that offline to online connection through device tracking. I think that's incredibly important and something that's going to be quite exciting for affiliate managers to actually think about in the future strategies. So I think we'll see a lot of that coming to the fore, you know, sooner rather than later. So that really m pretty much brings us to the end of kind of the global marketing feature and how your tech stack should be supporting your global scale and you know, making sure that you have the resources and the data to make informative decisions, especially when you're going to expand. So I just want to thank you for being on the podcast today, for sharing all of this insight. Hopefully it wasn't too technical for the people listening in, but also that it makes them think about what their strategy should be for their program.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, thank you. And and what I would just say is for any online marketers that are out there, like it's important to ask when you don't know something. Like, you know, no one knows everything. I don't know huge areas of the industry. So don't be bamboozled by the numbers. To go back to that sort of square of paper, what is it you're looking to achieve? What numbers are important to you? And then really focus and double down on those big numbers because they'll they will make the difference. The fact that you've got some crazy KPI that is increased by 5% or 10% can take you away from what you really need to focus on, which is the strategy, the big picture stuff.
SPEAKER_02Yeah. And if anybody is listening to this and you do have questions that you want to ask, we have another snippet feature called Ask Affiliate Insider. And the link will be below this episode. And you can just tap in your questions there. Needing my cycle, Zach, will get on another Zoom and answer them for you. So thanks very much for being with us today, Zach. It's been amazing speaking to you about affiliate marketing at a global scale.
SPEAKER_04Pleasure. Thanks for having me on.
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