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KEY HIGHLIGHTS

🌞 How to evaluate if affiliate marketing can be a strong channel

🕸 Understanding the web of affiliate marketing

🌩 When to move from third party partnerships to direct partnerships

🚗 A typical user journey for users coming in via affiliates

🏖 A tried and tested user journey that worked for Dora’s team

🛤 How is attribution different in affiliate marketing?

🧰 Best practices to scale affiliates as a channel

❌ Common mistakes made with affiliates.

KEY QUOTES

When to start thinking of direct partnerships

My recommendation would be, do your homework at the beginning, identify who are the bigger players in your vertical, who are the ones that will generate a lot of traffic. But, be mindful of something. Some of them are very good for brand marketing and some of them are very performance based. So don’t get fooled by just the size of the website and their volumes, because sometimes they don’t necessarily convert, they’re just there to establish your brand.

Work with partners that allow you some control

Work with a network where you can establish a little bit of the groundwork saying, I want to test this channel, these are the types of websites I want to go after, partners I want to go after and these ones are the ones I don’t want you to talk to yet.

Designing a typical user journey

As marketers, we’re hooked to the type of marketing we’re doing, the numbers, the conversion rates. But at the end of the day, the customer doesn’t know any of it. So it’s important to put yourself in their shoes and go and explore exactly as they will explore. So as a user journey, just go to Google, type some of the main keywords that relate to your company, your vertical, and find out what people are seeing. You’ll be surprised sometimes what comes up next to your company name, next to the search terms, it will help you understand what’s going on, related to the search queries.

Why a landing page trumps the App Store in a user journey for services requiring information

If you send them to a landing page, there is no commitment. The user can read further, they can educate themselves, or they can even open it in the browser and then do something else, think about it, let it sink and then come back to it later or even go to the App Store organically. In that sense, I would say sending users to a landing page could be very beneficial if your product requires trust.

Capturing data of users likely to switch devices or platforms

We have seen that in the past with Facebook A/B testing, sending users to a webpage or to the App Store. We actually noticed that quite a few people are jumping from one platform to the other and it can become very difficult and tedious to really track them. So the best way is if you can capture them in some way on web, so when they decide to switch platform, and even organically just go to the App Store, you have an identifier to match them with and say this is a person that we have seen came from this source, and then decided to continue on a different platform. So in affiliate marketing, if you have this kind of identifier, given of course by the user, that will be the best way for you to understand this cross platform situation that’s happening.

Testing out your new subscription plans

The first thing we look at and say, where can we test this so that we can see what actually happens in terms of who converts: new to us, light users, heavy users. So you do that in a very small market and you would be really clear about what is the worst case scenario of every single person in this market that is a valuable customer to us, which is what is the cost of this big mistake. So that’s the first thing that you want to do is understand those dynamics in a small way. And then once you learn from that you can adjust the offering, so you can raise the price. You can remove benefits and say these benefits or add ons later. You can do a lot of things with the offering and then you can test it again.

Best practices to scale affiliates as a channel

If you really want to run affiliation at scale, then a third party network comes into play because they are connected to the majority of publishers, not all of them. And then you can really be able to appear on small and medium and big websites and tap into all kinds of audience, including niche audiences, or some people that are a little bit harder to reach through other channels. So I would say best practice there would be to diversify your basket. Make sure that you have these direct deals and you also have some brand marketing, where it’s just that the website talks about you without necessarily having to perform in terms of conversions. And then you also have a third party network, this will allow you to really expand. 

So diversify, diversify, diversify, that’s all I would say.

The potential of affiliate marketing as a UA channel

I think affiliate marketing is not a well understood channel. It’s a very underestimated channel. It’s not as popular as the social media channels. So people tend to ignore it in many verticals, but it has very big potential, especially in the FinTech world, where people are going proactively to look for information, so you need to be there.

FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW

Shamanth  

I’m very excited to welcome Dora Trostanetsky to the Mobile User Acquisition Show. Dora, welcome to the show.

Dora  

Thank you so much for having me. I’m very excited to be on the show that I like to listen to. 

Shamanth  

I’m honored to have you because we have crossed paths digitally and I’ve heard very good things about a lot of your work. I’m excited to talk about some of the things you’ve been exploring lately. Today we’re going to talk about affiliates in mobile marketing, which is a very unique strategy. It’s not something that a lot of people have tried so I’m interested in diving into this. To start at the beginning, how did you evaluate that affiliates could be a strong channel?

Dora  

Happy to tell you everything I’ve learned in the past few months. I’ve actually recently joined the FinTech universe, I previously worked in very diverse companies, from music to gaming and have seen quite a bit. But this is very new and very different from everything I’ve seen so far. And it’s also the first time that I really get to explore affiliate marketing more in detail. 

So how do you understand that affiliate marketing is a good channel? I think it depends on your industry. I don’t have experience doing affiliate marketing in e-commerce. I know that a lot of companies do so. In the FinTech world it makes a lot of sense, because it’s about building trust. When we talk about financial products and about people investing money, you have to build trust with your audience. They are inevitably going to research a little bit more on the topic and compare you to other companies. So it’s important for you to be out there educating people, discussing different options, comparing you to others.

Shamanth  

And when you started, what were some of the first steps you took to educate yourself, and to understand what this means?

Dora  

I definitely recommend that you first go and understand who the big players are. When we talk about affiliate marketing, this could be approached in several ways. It’s a pretty standard model where you look into direct affiliation with some websites, with some bigger players in your field, or just go through networks. There are a few networks, some of them are specialized in some verticals, others are a little bit more generic. For example, you might have heard of Finance Ads, and a few more players out there. So these are third party partners that allow you to tap into a pool of websites without you directly managing the relationship and being able to scale a little bit faster by also onboarding all sizes of websites. So these are really the two models that we look into. 

Are you going for a direct partnership? Are you going for a network? Of course, read on the internet, but also go and talk to these different partners and ask them how they have been doing things for a while. They’re very happy to educate everybody who’s new.

Shamanth

Are there specific milestones or levels of scale at which a direct partnership starts to make more sense rather than other third parties?

Dora

Actually, yes, it starts with you having the capacity and the manpower to manage directly.

My recommendation would be, do your homework at the beginning, identify who are the bigger players in your vertical, who are the ones that will generate a lot of traffic. But, be mindful of something. Some of them are very good for brand marketing and some of them are very performance based. So don’t get fooled by just the size of the website and their volumes, because sometimes they don’t necessarily convert, they’re just there to establish your brand. 

So make sure to do your homework. Ride the ones that are big already from the beginning and then you can approach one or two of them, just to test the waters. And also

work with a network where you can establish a little bit of the groundwork saying, I want to test this channel, these are the types of websites I want to go after, partners I want to go after and these ones are the ones I don’t want you to talk to yet.

Shamanth

Just to switch gears a bit, you talked about how critical user journeys are, and how critical it is to understand these. So for users that come in via affiliate marketing, what are the typical user journeys? And how do you work with these?

Dora

I’m actually a big fan of user journeys. This is something I like doing, regardless of what type of marketing I’m doing. Because

As marketers, we’re hooked to the type of marketing we’re doing, the numbers, the conversion rates. But at the end of the day, the customer doesn’t know any of it. So it’s important to put yourself in their shoes and go and explore exactly as they will explore. So as a user journey, just go to Google, type some of the main keywords that relate to your company, your vertical, and find out what people are seeing. You’ll be surprised sometimes what comes up next to your company name, next to the search terms, it will help you understand what’s going on, related to the search queries. 

User journeys are dependent on the type of product. Let’s say you have financial products, you want to really establish trust. So you want to make sure that the user has a cohesive journey, something that really makes sense to them. So for example, they land on a website that educates them about how to invest their money, or explains just the basics. When they click on an affiliate link, you want to link them somewhere they can get even more information and really earn their trust. They have already shown interest in your brand. So make sure that you have this consistent user journey that also brings you from the source to your website,but in a very uniform way either by creatives or the type of information that’s being delivered. It becomes more complicated to really control that when you’re at scale, because of course, you’re not gonna be aligned with all of your sources.

But be mindful of what the user might be willing to learn more, do you want to send them to the App Store directly if you have an app? Do you want to send them to a landing page that is specific to their search? There are really a lot of options. And it depends on the product.

Shamanth

You spoke about how user journeys need to be seamless. So they need to come from the affiliate site to your site and there needs to be a single cohesive sequence. Do you find that it’s impactful to send them from their website to the App Store? From your website to the app store? Or are there other possibilities of user flows that could work well?

Dora  

These are questions that I had myself. Is it better to send users to the App Store? If you think about it, when you send users of the App Store and your product requires trust, you won’t download it without checking it out. It requires a little bit more commitment. Then the question is would an install happen because it’s seen as a commitment? 

So imagine you are not really certain what to do and what type of product you want to explore and then you learn on the App Store. You just have the screenshots, of course, that could be extremely decisive. But it is a commitment to hit the download button, it feels like you’re committing to something. 

If you send them to a landing page, there is no commitment. The user can read further, they can educate themselves, or they can even open it in the browser and then do something else, think about it, let it sink and then come back to it later or even go to the App Store organically. In that sense, I would say sending users to a landing page could be very beneficial if your product requires trust.

If your product is more of an impulse product, then I would definitely not dismiss the App Store but either way, I would say do both, check for your product what works best or maybe they’re both working, maybe you can have buckets of users that react better to one or the other. At the end of the day, it’s all about  A/B testing.

Shamanth

Especially for high investment products, I can see why having more information to build that trust can be so critical that that actually makes sense. The other aspect that I’m very curious about is how attribution happens. Obviously, ATT has been top of mind for everyone. Can you help understand and explain how attribution happens and if this is impacted by ATT at all?

Dora  

Attribution is important to every marketer out there, regardless of what type of marketing they’re doing. But in affiliate marketing, things are a bit different. Because it depends on where you’re sending users to. Let’s assume that you send your users to a web page. And once you send the user to a web page, for quite a few companies, what they’re doing is they’re using a different identifier. When it requires registration, users are giving you a piece of information at first. So you can ask them to give you an email address, for example, to start the registration or a phone number that can identify them and use this as an identifier. What users really love to do is switch platforms. 

We have seen that in the past with Facebook A/B testing, sending users to a webpage or to the App Store. We actually noticed that quite a few people are jumping from one platform to the other and it can become very difficult and tedious to really track them. So the best way is if you can capture them in some way on web, so when they decide to switch platform, and even organically just go to the App Store, you have an identifier to match them with and say this is a person that we have seen came from this source, and then decided to continue on a different platform. So in affiliate marketing, if you have this kind of identifier, given of course by the user, that will be the best way for you to understand this cross platform situation that’s happening.

Shamanth

Right. So because you’re able to get the info on the web, like email, once you have that email that’s mapped to a specific affiliate source, and then you can basically follow that user when they transact. I think that makes a lot of sense, right? And presumably, that’s also where you’re able to follow them across multiple platforms. They’re on the web, and they go to mobile, even if they change devices, you’re able to continue following that.

Dora  

Yeah. So you understand the quality of your channel performance.

Shamanth

That makes a lot of sense. And I realized, just capturing that info early on, it’s not something that a lot of products can do or are able to do. But sounds like that’s something that’s very vertical specific that you guys are able to capture.

Dora  

Actually a lot of services have a registration. Even ecommerce have registrations for you to access sometimes, or at least try to push it as soon as possible. So it becomes quite common, or it’s already common actually for users to register. Music platforms for example, just have this gated content in a way.

Shamanth

Let’s assume you’ve been testing affiliates, things are working, you did third party platforms, you did some direct deals. In order to scale affiliates as a channel, are there specific best practices that come to mind?

Dora  

Absolutely. I’ll say it again, it depends on the size of your team or strategy, what your ambitions are. But I think as a general rule, when you want to scale, you have to make sure that you either have the manpower and you have your prioritization in check, because what you can do, as discussed at the very beginning of this conversation is, identify who the big players are, who are the ones that potentially can help you tap into a wider audience or a very relevant audience for your user and talk to them, try to make direct affiliate deals with these players. 

And

if you really want to run affiliation at scale, then a third party network comes into play because they are connected to the majority of publishers, not all of them. And then you can really be able to appear on small and medium and big websites and tap into all kinds of audience, including niche audiences, or some people that are a little bit harder to reach through other channels. So I would say best practice there would be to diversify your basket. Make sure that you have these direct deals and you also have some brand marketing, where it’s just that the website talks about you without necessarily having to perform in terms of conversions. And then you also have a third party network, this will allow you to really expand. 

So diversify, diversify, diversify, that’s all I would say.

And if you really, really want to grow and invest money into this activity, then make sure to invest in hiring people, as I’m learning every day. 

Shamanth Rao

You talk about hiring people, is that because you need somebody to manage these relationships and talk to all these people?

Dora  

I’m a big fan of having in house folks. So it’s good if you have someone from the inside that really understands the subject and can work together with third parties. This person will be talking to the direct partners and also to indirect partners and that allows you to tap into more resources and really assess the performance and has the best interests of the company in mind. Because partners are great out there, and there are many you can trust. It is however ideal to have someone that also understands the goals of the company, the KPIs that need to be reached and really strives and pushes the partners to go in that direction.

Shamanth

Certainly, and what would you say are some of the common mistakes that people make with affiliates?

Dora  

Not diversifying. Counting on one player, working with only one partner, putting all their eggs in one basket. I would say that’s a mistake that I’m seeing. And also,

I think affiliate marketing is not a well understood channel. It’s a very underestimated channel. It’s not as popular as the social media channels. So people tend to ignore it in many verticals, but it has very big potential, especially in the FinTech world, where people are going proactively to look for information, so you need to be there.

You have to be part of this, you have to stay top of mind. So definitely an underestimated channel that has a lot of potential.

Shamanth  

Yeah, definitely underestimated and a big opportunity for a lot of products. I think this has definitely been very interesting to explore a theme that hasn’t been talked about at all, actually, or not that much. So thank you for sharing all your wisdom with us. This is perhaps a good place for us to start to wrap. But before we do that, could you tell folks how they can find out more about you and everything you do?

Dora  

I am active on LinkedIn. I like following companies and colleagues. I’m also on some Slack channels. There are quite a few of them nowadays on growth marketing. So I recommend joining one of them and seeing what people are discussing when you have a spare minute or even ask your own questions. I personally have asked questions and I had some really great discussions. And conferences are another thing that I absolutely love. I think conferences give you great output that you can try at work.

Shamanth  

Great, we will link to your LinkedIn in the show notes, but for now perhaps is a good place for us to wrap. Thank you so much for being on the show.

Dora  

Thank you so much for the invitation. It was great to be here.

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