Welcome and Guest Intro
Speaker: Hey, what’s going on? Welcome to the Doug Show. I’m Doug Cunnington, and today we talk with George Barbosa from We Can Track.
George is a veteran of the affiliate industry with over six years of deep rooted experience in marketing and performance analytics. Originally from Portugal, George started his journey on the publisher side, managing paid ads and analyzing performance for various large scale websites. Today he’s a key figure at we can track an all in one suite that empowers affiliate publishers through advanced conversion tracking attribution.
Data integration. He’s here to share his insights on how publishers can stop guessing, automate their reporting, and truly understand what content is driving their bottom line. He gives us great insights around what affiliate marketers can do, whether you’re on the, you know, website publishing side, if you’re on.
Say a social channel or YouTube or wherever your platform is, you’ll be able to take advantage of some of the data that’s available, and we get into the details, but think of this as a way to aggregate a lot of data across affiliate networks
so that you can understand what content is most valuable, what traffic is most valuable. Maybe you have an ad campaign that you need to optimize, that sort of thing. And again, we get into all the details. I’ll stop rambling here. Be sure to check out the link and the description so that you can go to, we can track and learn a little bit more.
Without further ado, let’s hear from George.
George’s Affiliate Origin Story
Doug: George, what’s up man? Good to see you. How are you doing today?
Jorge: Yeah, I’m doing good, Doug. It’s nice to meet you. Good to see you as well.
Doug: Yeah. And we were just chatting before getting started here, and it’s been, uh, fun to get to know you a little bit, but I’m curious how you originally got started with affiliate marketing and how you dipped your toes in, in the early days.
Jorge: Uh, well, I, I think it was. Many people in the industry. I got started in affiliate marketing a little bit by chance, so I was not specifically looking for a role in affiliate marketing, but rather in digital marketing, content marketing. And eventually ended up getting a job with a, a publisher, a global publisher with a network of websites.
And that’s basically how I first got introduced to affiliate marketing. Very little idea what it was about. And then it was like, boom. Uh, all of a sudden you, you see this whole new world, uh, of performance marketing, affiliate marketing. Yeah. And it was super exciting. Super exciting. Yeah.
Doug: Very cool. What was your, um, background like to get that, like a general business?
Or were you a writer? How did you come in the door?
Jorge: was, uh, mostly with a little bit of content marketing and some data analysis. So in the early days using GA four, there was a lot of manual work before ai, so also using a lot of Google Sheets at the time. And that’s basically what got me into the door for the, uh, that affiliate marketing role.
Doug: Got it. And when, when did you get started? Because Yeah, like when people think about. Google Analytics and all the data that you can get and you know, running ads and all the different pieces and really the analysis that you could do on it. So with the data background, pretty important, but yeah. When did you get your first gig there?
Jorge: It was around seven years ago. Yeah. Okay. I think seven. Yeah. That’s when I made the switch and, uh, when I started working more, uh, in depth with data analytics and, and affiliate marketing as well. Yeah.
Doug: Okay.
SEO Updates and AI Shockwaves
Doug: So one of the reasons why I wanted to have you on the show is with your role at, we Can Track, you’re able to see what a lot of publishers are doing out there, and of course, since you got started.
Seven years ago in, in the industry in general, basically you had a few years of, I would say like stability. There were Google algorithm updates that were pretty big at the time. Things were shifting already. But then when AI really got a foothold. Things changed even more pretty dramatically and very fast from how content was created.
And content publishers were you know, kind of getting rid of writers or using AI to help the writers write faster to now people basically use the internet differently than they did just a few years ago. So how did the changes in SEO algorithm updates in AI impact? The experience in the industry just in general.
And you could, you can give us some nuts and bolts sort of industry, uh, professional answers, but also just like the psychological, um, toll that it takes on, you know, someone in the industry where you don’t know if the jobs are gonna be around in the same way. So we’ll take the, the professional answer first.
Jorge: Okay. The professional answer, uh, that’s a good one. So it’s, it’s been quite a roller rollercoaster for affiliates in, in the past years. You know what? Traditionally worked then all of a sudden no longer worked. In 2023, a lot of affiliate websites were penalized. They lost rankings. A lot of them were relying on SEO, which was a.
Great strategy. Also still, when I started working with affiliate marketing, it was pretty predominant at that time. And then all of a sudden they all got hit, uh, many of them lost rankings. Um, we’ve seen publishers, uh, lose from, from several studies that are also out there. They lost 90%, 70% of their organic traffic.
And we be, uh, the revenue as well, so. It, it was, um, I think a lot of people were freaking out at the time when that happened, but on our position that we can track. So, that actually opened up the door for us to do even more. Publishers have, uh, an affiliate conversion tracking attribution and integration system that we provide them with.
They have more visibility, so they can see. Where they lost rankings, they can see where they lost revenue. They could see important pages that were, uh, big revenue drivers, uh, when they were relying only on SEO. And that also gave them the opportunities to adjust some of them, adjust their strategies, adjust their traffic sources.
But yeah, that it was a big shift. Shift. Uh, we’ve seen businesses that completely went out. Many of them didn’t. Some of them. Did something else. But there are still a lot of strong affiliates out there, uh, especially affiliate websites. And of course with the ranking laws there were winners as well.
But there was a big, a big shift in the industry. So doing. Things more and less, let’s say, or putting out some, some content. And just at the time our AI was already there and just putting out a lot of content with ai that didn’t, uh, cut it anymore. And, and, and all of those, of course, were affected by it.
Yeah.
Doug: Yeah. Super dramatic. And I think, you know, from my position, I saw maybe the most heartbreaking stories were. People that got started when things were shifting and they were putting in a lot of time and effort. They were putting in resources, not just capital, but their time, which, you know, you can’t get that back.
And they were in it for the long haul. Like they, they were learning to look at 1218. 24 months. We’re talking two years of effort before they get a big return, which is pretty significant. I mean, that’s like whatever, opening a restaurant or something like that. Yeah, it’s really competitive. There’s a lot of effort before you actually start making some money on it.
And things shifted then and they were devastated. Some people. Putting in, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of, of dollars plus all their time, and then essentially had nothing to show for it. Okay. So dramatic stuff. Yeah. Personally, um, how, how did you view it? I mean, you’re like, like I said, you’re, you’re, you’re a pro, but at the same time you have to pay the bills and you do have some cashflow needs that you, you have to support.
So how did you view it overall?
Revenue Recovery With Better Tracking
Jorge: Well, I, I mean, for us, we. We, the impact was felt, of course, in our customer base. But since we work globally, it was not so dramatic in our own experience since we don’t run our own affiliate websites. But, but we do work with the industry, so we, we felt, it was a quite a stressful time, of course, because, uh, we also didn’t know what would happen with the industry if this was a one-time update or if this would keep affecting affiliates heavily.
But that just showed us the importance also of the product that we built that we can track. Because we built a product exactly for that situation where a publisher loses revenue and, and they lost, uh, rankings. Like you said, they put a lot of effort. They spent two years working on that project. They started seeing some, some, some returns and then all of a sudden they lose it again.
But that’s where we came in because that’s not the end, you know, uh, for many publishers. It’s just well, uh, it’s a big setback of course. But with the system that can track and with the system that can provide you with visibility on where all your transactions are coming from, um, which pages, which traffic sources, you can then switch your approach, you can change your strategy.
And that’s what we’ve seen as well in the last year. So. It was concerning of course, but then it opened up the door for us to help publishers in different ways because they started focusing much more on paid ads, for example. So let’s say you have a blog. You had a, you had a niche website or or about a specific type of product.
You were affected by it. You lost 50% of your revenue. If you’re using, we can track, you have the visibility of which content was performing before with organic traffic, so you can easily just, uh, switch to paid traffic and drive traffic to your best performing pages, articles, the ones who generate the most revenue, and that can bring up a, a, a revenue recovery for your business.
So. Of course that means another investment because you have to invest as well in paid ads. But the benefit is that you know exactly if it’s working or not. So we push data into the campaigns as well. So if you’re running Google Ads, if you’re an affiliate, you are doing it just like an e-commerce business because we push your conversions, your commissions, to your Google Ads campaigns.
You can see which keywords are profitable, which ones are making a loss. You can use automated bidding strategies. So after the dramatic phase and, and, and after the, the shock, let’s say that all of us in the industry kind of add. Especially at, we can track. For us it meant a period of also being more close with certain clients, being more close with certain affiliate businesses working with them on their data.
And also, uh, we’ve seen many of them grow. And paid traffic from multiple sources. Like we are talking Reddit ads, Google ads Bing, uh, uh, Microsoft, uh, which is Microsoft. They all became, uh, significant to these publishers. So, yeah. I was not specifically on the publisher side. I think if I was a publisher myself and I had my own websites, I would freak out more.
But. It’s been great to see what, what they are doing, uh, nowadays, to be honest.
Doug: Yeah.
What We Can Track Actually Does
Doug: And I was gonna say, you’re, you’re a great podcast guest because you kinda led into some of my next questions here. Without being redundant. I wanna make sure that we, we don’t go over the same stuff again, but you kind of hit Yeah.
Some of the context for people, like what we can track does for folks. So there’s some advanced features which we’ll probably talk about. I have some notes to, to mention those. But at a high level. Like, what does we track? We can track do.
Jorge: So basically the, the high level, like I’ve mentioned before, like you said, let’s not make it redundant.
We, we are, we are an affiliate, uh, a conversion, attribution, and integration platform. So basically if you’re an affiliate publisher. And you work with multiple different networks. You have your own website or you have an application or the price comparison website. Uh, basically any niche or business that you monetize with affiliate marketing, um, you have a few pain points.
You have, uh, your data is scattered across platforms. That is the first one. So you need a system that pulls in all your commissions, all your transactions into one place, provides you with a quick reporting, updated hourly hours updates, hourly, for example, and you can clearly view your performance in in one place.
Apart from that, we then give publishers those tools which are not available to them through affiliate networks. Most of them, which is our integrations. So if a publisher wants to experiment with traffic sources. Our system will provide a detailed reporting on the sources, on where the traffic comes from, where the sales come from and also push all that data into all the different platforms.
So that is how most of our clients are using our systems as well. It’s for our affiliate dashboard, which is an all in one tool of analytics, performance data, and then our integrations, which allow them to. Basically automatically integrate all their conversions into all the different tools and, and marketing tools that they use.
So it’s a game changer when, when you think about, uh, affiliate seven years ago when this was not. Available and only a few of the big players maybe developed similar systems and they could have some sort of automatic tracking to nowadays where basically any affiliate can have access to these level of data and they can of course, uh, then compete much better in the market.
Yeah.
Doug: Okay. And I’m gonna make up like a hypothetical example ’cause I think probably some listeners out there. Or thinking, ah, like, is it really that helpful? But again, I’ll just make up an example. Let’s say I have a page and it’s reviewing maybe, well, let’s take like five different products. It could be SaaS, it could be, um, actual, you know, whatever backpacks, like physical products.
It could be microphones or camera gear or whatever. But let’s say I have a few different affiliate partners out there and they pay a different percentage. So let’s say it’s camera gear. And electronics and stuff like that. Maybe streaming gear. So there’s like BNH camera, there’s Amazon, there’s um, Sweetwater, which is actually like a big music retailer, but they have camera gear and stuff.
They all pay different amounts. So let’s say I have this page and they’re just three different three different affiliate I guess schemes out there that I could get paid in different ways.
Jorge: Yeah.
Doug: We have traffic that could be coming from different sources. So let’s say it’s Reddit ads. Let’s say it’s Google, SEO, let’s say it’s email marketing and maybe some kind of YouTube marketing campaign.
Well, maybe it’s really cheap to get traffic from Reddit, but they don’t convert very well. But maybe it’s more expensive for YouTube. But YouTube converts really well with, um, B and H or something like that. So you have these different combinations. That can take place. And unless you have all the data in one spot, you don’t know that, oh, actually these ads that are more expensive from YouTube, they convert really well in this one specific case.
And that that information can be teased out from the analysis that you can provide in the dashboard. But if you just have some spreadsheets and you’re like, oh, this is so expensive. I’m spending so much on ads, you don’t know. So is that a good hypothetical example?
Jorge: Yeah, that’s, that’s a perfect hypothetical example actually, because that, that’s really.
What it’s all about. And imagine that you also have the same partner placed on multiple different content pieces because they have different products, right? So you have, you have the same partner being promoted in 10 different articles. You can add some statics by these to it, and you can have it.
Pretty clear idea which pages the sales are coming from, but you don’t have, uh, session attribution. You don’t have click attribution. So that’s what we can track those automatically. A user lands on your article. We track the source, we track the session, it clicks on the outgoing link to go to the partner to purchase the product.
We track the click and then once we receive the transaction from your partner, we are able to automatically attribute it to the page session click source, and you view all that data automatically. So, I can give you some examples also on, on, on, on publishers that were relying purely on SEO. So even for those, it, it is helpful.
There is still publishers who get most of their traffic from SEO and even for those, uh, for example, I can there was publishers with articles getting thousands of sessions. But their conversion rate and their commission levels and revenue generated on that article was much inferior to a different type of content piece that they had where they promoted the same partner.
So that content piece got maybe 10% of the sessions, but actually generated more revenue and converted much better. So that is the type of visibility that allows publishers to then make uh, choices within their content, within the, the, the growth and the scaling of their website, which partners to work with.
Other examples are also, like you’ve mentioned, you have a listicle with five partners. Um, you’re running multiple traffic sources to it. Um, you might, uh, view that, for example, traffic from YouTube is converting on the number two partner on your list. And traffic from Google Ads is actually purchasing the most on the number four.
So that allows you to even split your, uh, landing pages, split your communication and your strategy, and speak to the different audiences that reach your website. So you improve your conversion. You then have a dedicated landing page for Google Ads visitors, which focus on the product that they are looking to buy.
Um, and then you switch and, and, and you also have one for YouTube, for example, which has a different message promotes, uh, different product with different benefits. So that is the level of detailed optimization that the publisher can do and once done correctly, of course, that means a lot of revenue and, and a significant increase in conversion rates because you can.
See everything that’s happening on your website, you know how to choose the traffic sources. That’s also something funny because I’ve, I’ve worked with, with, with cases as well in the past that publishers, for example, were spending heavily on a traffic source, um, and they thought that their traffic source was generating.
Most of the revenue on those pages, and it was actually the opposite. So one of the traffic sources that they were only sending, let’s say hundreds of visitors to that page, was actually the one generating 70% of all transactions. Yeah. Wow.
Doug: So a couple of follow up questions. How much traffic. Do you need to see before you can have like statistically significant conclusions?
Because obviously if you have whatever, a hundred sessions on that page per day, you might need to get whatever months of data, and then there’s seasonality that can come into play. So how much data do you actually need? How many sessions before you can make some good conclusions.
Jorge: Uh, that depends on the sources that you’re actually running traffic to The website.
I mean, I would say if it’s organic, you have a little bit more space to, to analyze. If you’re actually running paid traffic, then that number gets smaller. There is not a specific number that I would say, okay, you need 100 sessions to evaluate the page. But there is things that we show that we can track that can quickly give you an indication if you are actually doing it right, or if the page or the campaign needs adjustment.
CTR to Conversion Analysis
Jorge: So, uh, let’s say we track also CTR, so that is. Pretty standard. And if you run 100, 200 sessions from Google ads to a page and your CTR is only 10%, then I would say maybe evaluate the, the strategy, evaluate the campaign, the keywords, the targeting, try to adjust it because there are some benchmarks and, and some numbers that maybe you could look out for.
Highly dependent on the niche. So this is all a little bit broad, bear in mind. Yeah. But I would say if I have a 40 to 50 to 60% CTR on my traffic, then I’m doing something right. And then we move on to the next stage of the analysis, which is conversion rate. Like I got 200 sessions. I got 50 to 60%, uh, CTR on that.
So I got a significant number of users clicking out. Did I generate any conversion? I didn’t. Uh, and then you, you go over and you analyze again. You also have many cases where. You start running traffic and everything just works because your website was already SEO optimized, your content is good quality, and then you start running paid traffic and you’re like, oh, wow.
I’m, I’m, I’m making sales. My conversion rate is great. I’m profitable already. You know that, that scenario also happens. But many content publishers, many affiliate websites. That is possible. Old way of, of, of doing affiliate tracking and affiliate reporting in-house, especially with, with smaller and medium affiliates. Um, and it’s, it’s valuable for them to know that there are tools nowadays like we can track that can automate your entire data analysis and, and can give you this level of granularity that’s super relevant for your strategy, you know?
Yeah,
Why Benchmarks Fail
Doug: we can track, has a lot of clients across many industries. So one, one thing not even a question here, but you could just nod your head probably in agreement, but it’s really hard to make conclusions. Like if you turn all your buttons red, your conversion rate will go up. ’cause it, maybe it won’t, maybe it worked in some instances.
So it’s hard to draw conclusions in every. Like website, even landing pages can react different based on the products, based on the traffic source and, you know, the, the mental baggage that someone brings from Reddit just to pick on Redditers, um, versus someone who listens to podcast or whatever. So is that generally it’s hard to take like a, a broad conclusion and apply it to everything.
Jorge: Yeah, definitely. It’s, it’s every, every case is a specific one. You know, there’s no secret of course to how to be successful in it. But, um, but it is, me personally, with my experience at We Can Track, it’s been enlightening to, to work with all these different types of publishers because you see that one.
Key factor in, in, in success is measuring data, is having performance analytics and attribution dashboard that already gives you an edge about the specific strategies the publishers use. We also don’t interfere much with it. We don’t, we, we don’t really provide, uh, specific guidance into how to generate more revenue, but we do provide our clients with guidance into how to analyze their data and that gives them the tools to, to, to go further one step and then start their own strategies and their own campaigns, et cetera.
But we, we, we try to. To, to remain neutral. Of course. Also because we do have, we work with a lot of different industries. So if we start giving advice that is also a conflict and, and, and about data privacy and everything. Mm-hmm. And also it, it is, um, then your clients will have a lot of expectations if you start telling them, ah, you should run a campaign for this, for this page.
And then they will be like, oh yeah, but this didn’t work. Yeah. Like you said, different niche, different website. There’s a lot of variables involved.
Doug: Mm-hmm.
Jorge: But the, the base, um, is the tracking and integration. So if you wanna scale dependent on the niche that you’re in, if you wanna scale within paid, paid ads, you need the tracking tool and you need the data analysis tool so you can see what’s working, what’s not.
Yeah.
Doug: It is like a therapist, like you don’t give specific directions. You just say, what do you think you should do with this information? Right.
Jorge: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It’s, it’s, it’s quite fun to be honest, to work. Yeah. Because you, you work with a lot of different people and you also advise on technical setups because these setup is only possible because of our technical click tracking and our, uh, tracking systems that are implemented on the websites.
So it becomes quite fun when you meet a new publisher and you look at their business and you already know what kind of setup they need, what is gonna be useful to them, and what do they wanna see in the reports. Because we do customize reports depending on clients that is quite a few levels of data that they can get.
Just to throw out another example out there, if it’s okay. Yeah. So let’s, let’s say you have a, a price comparison website. You know, you, you, you have all these products, all these retailers. You land on a page, you can track clicks, and you know that you’re generating transactions on that page for a specific partner.
But you don’t have access to product names that were sold with most of the affiliate networks like Awin. Uh, Awin does provide for some, but many don’t. So, with our click tracking technology, you can actually send us all this information when a click happens on your website. So let’s say I click on a product, you can send to us a product title.
You can send the partner name, you can send the product price at the time that that click happened, for example, so you can track all these data on your affiliate website. We report it automatically to you. You can view which are the best performing partners on each page, and you can go one step further in automation so you can pull that data from the weak and track system.
Apply it into yours and you can automatically sort your content on your product comparison pages and place the most relevant partners on top place them by order of, uh, um, your audience clicks and transactions. So you always show the most relevant retailer for a specific product that the user wants to purchase.
So that is also quite. Advanced options. Once you start step by step, you can then, uh, start basically your journey as an affiliate to automate, uh, to provide better content to your audience, you know, and of course that results in, in, in, in more revenue for your business as well. You.
Tracking Enables Pivoting
Doug: So I’m gonna give like a preamble.
There’s a question in here, but we, we talked, we can track, solves a problem of like having to log into multiple networks, look at manual reporting. If you don’t have any kind of data aggregation, you’re looking all over the place, you don’t really have conversion tracking in a very clear way based on the session.
And because of that, it’s hard to understand the ROI on a specific page or the revenue generating pages, especially in a ranked fashion. And when you do have that data, you know, a publisher. Can pivot and hopefully make some better decisions and understand better traffic sources, what ad campaigns are working really good partners out there, and so on.
So you’re able to pivot, pivot with that data. Do you have any examples without compromising any, you know, uh, confidential. Client information, any poor examples of pivoting where people had traffic things, uh, shifted. Algorithm update. They tried to pivot and they kind of tripped up a little bit and ran into some issues.
Jorge: I cannot really tell you very specific examples about these, but I mean. I’ve seen so I’ve worked with, and we also get new clients every day. I’ve worked with different websites, different publishers, and I, I’ve seen publishers that got, are still stuck into the SEO and they’re still trying to kind of revive and, and, and, and spin their, uh, websites or their product and, and get rankings again.
And it, it works for some it is possible. I’m not saying it’s not, uh, but in my professional opinion, uh, it is a, a doing a poor job of pivoting because you have to keep up with the times. And if, if these changes affected your business, why not try different avenues, right? Why not try different traffic sources?
Why not take action? Because you have all these data available, you are already one step ahead of many of the websites out there. So just go one further and, and try something new. I’ve seen a lot of people switching, a lot of people trying this. So there are also many good examples of of these. I would say a bad example is the publisher keeps trying to do.
The same thing that he was doing five years ago, which doesn’t really work anymore to the extent that he’s used to. And, and that kind of, I do understand their position as well because that’s what they know. And they did it really well, many of them for many years. But the landscape today requires a little bit more, uh, if you wanna reach that threshold, if you wanna get that revenue in.
Um, you need to pivot, like you said, and you need to, to try different sources. Building also databases of emails. Quite important. You can track performance of email campaigns. We, we can track so you know, what’s working, what’s not, uh, which campaigns generate the most transactions for you?
Who It’s For and Setup
Doug: We covered a lot of sort of the, the basics, the, you know, entry fee for using, we can track, I know there’s some more advanced features out there, so let’s talk about some of those before we get to it.
Like who is the right sort of user and customer for, we can track,
Jorge: Well, the broad answer to that question is every publisher, every publisher, every affiliate publisher will somehow promotes affiliate URLs. We also work with YouTube channels. We also work with some influencers as well. It’s not specifically for website tracking, but there is ways where we can help influencers and creators track the performance so we can aggregate all the transactions.
And we also provide some advice on how to, uh, have more visibility into the performance of their contents. So they add a specific cloak, QRL to there. Uh, YouTube video descriptions, or they place it into their Instagram. And then that can, uh, reflect automatically and we can track, we can track every click that happens on those URLs.
They can see the performance, they can see how many sales of course it’s not as complete as a website tracking, but it’s also important. So I, I went a little bit off topic here, there with me because forgot to mention them, but basically we can track works for every publisher, like I’ve said, and, um, we work from small publishers to, large media publishers as long as they are already active in the affiliate space. So as long as they already have a website or a channel or they already generate a couple of transactions, they can probably benefit from our system in one way or another depending on the niche or the specific network that they use, of course.
Doug: Okay. And then just to press you on this a little bit more. As long as they’re earning some money, some transaction. So like as long as a publisher, whether it’s, you know, any platform, as long as they have some links that are being clicked and they’re making say like a hundred or $500 per month or like, what’s the bottom threshold?
Jorge: We don’t really have a bottom threshold actually. So we, we do accept every account. But of course to make the most of our system, you should have already a basic understanding of affiliate marketing, generate some revenue, because then you can make the most of the analytics that we provide. But we have plans that start small.
So if you are starting, if you have a website, generate a couple of transactions. And if we, of course, cover, uh, the network that you’re using, we currently have more than 450 affiliate networks integrated and we can track. So we, we cover most of them globally, at least the bigger ones. If we don’t, we also add them if, if possible.
But if you’re starting out, I would say you can also use, we can track. It’s, it’s super easy to to to get it installed. Um, we also have detailed guides that you can learn from. We have like an affiliate marketing with Google Ads guide, pretty detailed on, on how publishers can start their first Google Ads campaigns.
So that’s also helpful. Uh, but I would say if you’re not, if, if you didn’t start with the field and marketing yet, then our service is not the right fit because we don’t provide any support, like I’ve mentioned with setting up your website, setting up your content. Yeah. So,
Doug: okay. And then before we hit the advanced tools.
How long does it take to, to set something up? So let’s say a small, humble publisher like myself, I have a website and I have a YouTube channel, and I want to integrate. I wanna get some tracking. I want some of this sweet, valuable data. How long should I set aside to, um, integrate and get things set up?
Jorge: it depends how, how quick you can do it.
I mean, uh, if you have like, I would say like five, six affiliate networks and one website you can integrate it with, we can track in under one hour. Um, it’s pretty straightforward. Uh, you just connect the networks. You have two methods of adding your website. If you have a WordPress website, you can just install our plugin.
Um, so it’s pretty quick for the standard use case, um, there is cases where the publisher has a custom website or yes, some, uh, custom cloaking on his URLs. And then you will need to do some additional steps to connect to our API and for us to track the clicks. Uh, in those cases it could take a couple of hours.
Uh, but, but. I would say maybe 80%, um, 70% of of publishers can get started within one two hours. Get the account set up, we start pulling data immediately, and then in the first day, you can already see some. Some metrics. Metrics and some pages and some clicks and maybe some, even some transactions attributed.
Yeah.
Doug: That’s cool. Yeah. And one of the headaches, I’m, I’m becoming a very old man. I’m just like, oh, I have to change things up. I’m like, it’s gonna take forever to migrate or, or whatever. But under an hour, if you have a more complicated setup, maybe a few hours, but it sounds like even if you’re distracted and.
You can’t focus, you could do it in a day. You could probably do most of your stuff in a day. Okay. Low, low, yeah, you could. Okay. Very good. Yeah, exactly.
Advanced Link Automation Tools
Doug: Alright, let’s, let’s talk about these advanced features. What do you, what kind of stuff can people get into, let’s say they’re established, they have, uh, maybe a handful of networks and maybe a couple ad uh, campaigns are running.
What kind of data can we tease out?
Jorge: Uh, well, they get the standard data that I, I’ve spoken about, but, uh, we, we have a couple of advanced features. So especially in the event that you wanna, uh, generate more content, uh, you wanna manage the content with your teams. So we have an affiliate link generator as well.
So users can generate links via, we can track for all the different, uh, for the supported networks at the moment, which are a couple of big ones. Um, but you can generate affiliate links for your website automatically through our API. So you can send a request to us, you don’t have to go anywhere to create an affiliate URL, and we just provide you with track affiliate URL from that network.
Um. We also have a link monetizer, uh, which is pretty cool for uh, content publishers as well, that they can add our link monetizer script on their website and basically we can track will turn. Outgoing URLs into affiliate URLs within your content. Uh, we work with your networks. So we, we don’t work, uh, we are not a network ourselves.
We don’t do any monetization ourselves into your content. But if you are a partner of Awin, for example, impact, um, you have partnerships with these networks and you’re promoting these brands on your website. You don’t have to create affiliate links anymore because you can install. We can track, we will find out where that partner is mentioned, and we will turn all your outgoing URLs into monetized affiliate URLs.
Plus you get all the attribution that we’ve previously spoke about. So there is a few tools that can make your life much easier in case you are thinking about scaling further. You are already existing operations or even opening up a new affiliate website. Um, there is also a link tester, which is a, a very useful feature if you are already out of a certain size, and let’s say you have thousands of affiliate URLs in your content.
One of the big issues is that links can get broken. You have outdated links in your content. You are losing monetization opportunities there. You’re basically losing revenue. If I click on a broken link and. I land on, on a page or a partnership that’s not active anymore. Um, you can test these with, we can track as well.
We have advanced APIs that you can send batch of URLs that are on your website to us. And we give you a detailed reporting if URLs are working, if a product is out of stock, for example. Uh, so you can then of course update these and. Yeah, ba. These three features are, are, I wouldn’t say some of them are very advanced, but I say together they make up for a very advanced setup, especially with our monetization, which is something, uh, that’s not very common and easy to find out there.
Um, so yeah. If, if I was a publisher, uh, I would definitely use some of them to make my life easier, to be honest. Yeah.
Doug: And there is, um, yeah, the link monetizer, you can’t, um. You can’t underestimate how much time you’ll save with that because it basically, it means a person doesn’t have to go around and update every single link, or even if they’re more advanced, they used to do a database search and replace, which is a dangerous thing.
You can hose your whole website. If you’re on WordPress and you’re doing a global search and replace, you could. Fuck things up like pretty quick and um, yeah. Yeah, the link monetizer. Very good. And you, you mentioned something, I want to emphasize it as well. You’re like, oh, you guys don’t monetize those links, right?
So there’s other tools where if you do not monetize that link, they will monetize that link and then they, they get that. So that’s a kind of a big deal that you guys are not an affiliate yourselves. Right? Did I catch that right?
Jorge: Yeah, exactly. We are not an affiliate and we are not an affiliate network as well.
So, um, our clients pay us for their subscription, monthly subscription and that’s it. We, we don’t monetize the, the content or we don’t basically make any revenue out of our clients in any other way. Um, we also don’t have thresholds, so. Our pricing is based purely on performance, on the data we track from the affiliate websites or the clients.
Um, and we do provide these tools so they can of course, uh, better run their business and generate more revenue for them. Um, the link Monetizer is pretty cool. Uh, we, we’ve released it this year. Um, if somebody wants access to it, uh, they can. Talk with me directly as well because, uh, I would be happy to, to implement that on a couple of websites.
Um, and it can save them a lot of time is what you’ve mentioned. If, if you don’t have any longer to generate all these affiliate u ls all, like you’ve mentioned, find, replace all of them in the database constantly, then you can just focus on content, uh, with a content strategy running pay debts. Yeah.
Doug: Where should people go if they wanna learn more about, we can track and you can let us know how folks can connect with you.
Jorge: Uh, well, our website, pretty comprehensive guide there about everything that we’ve just discussed. So, um, they can just go there. Try out an account. Uh, it’s, we have a free trial and they can reach out to, we can track support, mention my name, I will pick up a conversation with them, uh, Apley if they wanna discuss anything about their specific business or website and what kind of tracking setup would benefit them.
happy to, happy to share knowledge and, and, and to just, uh, talk with another publisher.
Doug: Thanks George. Really appreciate it. We’ll put links in the description and all, you know, wherever people need to go, we’ll make sure it’s in there so they can learn more. So thanks a lot. Really fun talking to you today.
Jorge: No worries. It was a pleasure, Doug. Thanks. Have a nice day.