Their marketing strategy changes especially as they evolve in performance marketing. This is a short roadmap of what the changes in the KPIs were Hey, guys. Okay well firstly, Affiliate World. You did an amazing job. Amazing people are here, mingle like have a great time. I came to the conclusion that there’s probably three main reasons why they invited me to come talk at the Affiliate World. Reason one is obviously because of my killer British accent, so everything I say you’re automatically gonna believe. Second reason is, there’s a bit of a quota issue. Let’s be honest. You might not have gotten a job because of this quota issue. It’s the redheads. They’re not like shown enough, so you just get more redheads in this industry. The third main reason is because I’ve been doing this for nine years now, so I started off nine years ago in affiliation, and what I’ve seen the trends, the ups, the downs of the industry has blown my mind, totally addicted to this in every way.
There’s four main takeaways I’m going to take on this talk from my experience. What we’ve seen in the last year and a half with performance marketing for apps, a lot of huge companies are shutting down. This is an incredible opportunity for affiliates now to really take advantage of these ridiculous companies who didn’t really know what they were doing, and to really take a share of this market. Let’s get started. Key takeaways from this talk. Number one, the 80/20 rule. This is a phrase that our company has come up with, which is basically majority of affiliates in the industry in general, have 80% of their revenue and profits from one advertiser one product, one big f*cking well basically. Now the problem with this is that, that well is going to die and people aren’t prepared for when it does die, so they need to get a lot of the smaller companies, they basically need to diversify their portfolio a lot more. Second main takeaway is communication.
You need to really learn how to communicate better now with your clients. Clients want to get more personal. They don’t want to be talking to robots. We are people. We are in this industry. We work hard 24 hours a day, basically we are on call. This is not easy, so we need to have fun with this at the same time. So really learn to get personal with your clients. Number three, most importantly, understanding the KPIs. This is the most important part of it because when dealing with the Asian market or Latin America, you really need to start understanding that there is a cultural difference here, so the KPIs need to be clear from ground zero, and you need to build it from that.
This means everything needs to be done in email, written clearly before you start a campaign. There’s no hesitation of what’s to come. This is actually one of the main reasons our company has not even a one percent deduction rate at the end of the month. This is a huge deal because this is unheard of. Number four stand out. Like I said, we are working hard. We are doing this with mass, mass, mass competition here. You have to stand out. You have to have a personality. Be funny, send a joke, send a stupid meme or gif, or something, like get personal with your clients and make sure that they remember who you are.
We’re going to go basically one continent at a time. I’m going to show you three case success stories that I have, and hopefully you’ll be able to kind of duplicate this model and this strategy. The whole point of this strategy is to create a secure cash flow for your companies. Let’s conquer the world. Latin America. What an incredible market. Everyone goes and it’s a cliche, US Canada, Europe, CES, these are all countries that everyone already knows how to do. Latin America is growing at such a rapid rate and you’re able to get in there and buy traffic for cheap. And this is what’s really important. One of our biggest clients who I love and respect totally is Rappi. Rappi was one of the first food delivery apps that was out there, before Postmates even. Now, they started only a couple of years ago and went from a company worth of $1 billion to $3.5 billion in one year.
This is crazy. How they did this was through branding obviously, but very much so through performance marketing. And they work on a model that is the trending model now in app promotion, which is a CPO model. So we get paid when they get an order, so it’s a win-win situation. There’s reasons why it’s win-win, no deductions. They’re getting paid, we get paid, there’s no problem here. It’s very simple. Communication here. Working with Latin America is sometimes a little bit hard and I’ll say especially as a woman okay. This is not the easiest of jobs but I create an amazing relationship with my point of contact, and this is actually a gift that I sent to my point of contact. It’s a $80, the best $80 I spent, a custom-made jacket for his pug, with the Rappi logo. This is all about getting personal. Now through the communication, when all the KPIs were changing, which I’ll show you in a second, because we had such a great relationship, he’d just jump on the call with me and straightaway say, G listen up, this is about to change.
I’m giving you a heads-up. Okay, the changing KPIs. Even when we’re working on a CPO model, which kind like basically CPA model, they’re still constantly changing, because you can’t just assume you know their marketing strategy. We know our marketing strategy but their marketing strategy changes, especially as they evolve in performance marketing. This is a short roadmap of what the changes in the KPIs were, and this was insane okay. And this was on, I would say every other week, we would have to tackle another thing every other week. Basically working with AppsFlyer, we had to make sure that the primary attribution was true, which means that we were the first ones to bring the attribution. We had to work on increasing payouts, decreasing payouts, and we had to work on the CR, which is their click to install rates. I mean this was a lot of changes. Now the thing is, is that changes aren’t a problem, and if you know how to adjust and how to do it properly and work with your point of contact correctly, then you actually have a competitive advantage.
Because other people are going to fall out the game because they can’t keep up. So just to go back to an example of the changing in KPIs, when they bought in the condition of click to install had to be now between 0.1% to 0.2%, this was a huge problem. 50% of the agencies basically got cut because they weren’t able to do this, and their method which is the incorrect method is, they were trying to optimise really quickly to get to the CR, but they needed results immediately. And in order to get results immediately what we did is we actually shut down a few of the countries. So three geos of Latin America in one day we shut down. That did reduce our revenue in the short term but it kept our partnership in the long term, and because they saw the immediate results of CR improving, they said, okay guys you’re good, we’re gonna cut all the other companies.
And they kept us on board. Everybody calm down. Now, this is the 80/20 problem that I was discussing before. Rappi started becoming a huge advertiser of ours, and we love their partnerships, we have great relationships with them. We send now stupid gifs to each other and whatever, but I don’t want them to get too big, because the reality is, once they get too big, like if they decide all of a sudden to shut down their performance marketing, my cash flow is gone, and cash flow is everything.
So unless you have exclusivity with the advertiser or the app, you need to be careful of this problem, and make sure that you stop at some point, and just keep it stable and there’s no problem. Listen $125k a month, it’s okay, it’s pretty okay. So keep it at that level. But what did we realise? Latin America is an incredible market and people are becoming more and more exposed to this market now. We started then going to other apps in Latin America, which was awesome. And so now we have a huge Latin America portfolio of apps in different ways now. Moving on to Asia. This is kind of what everyone is trying to do at the moment. How do we get into Asia? Everyone wants to know. How can we get to Korea, how can we get to Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia. Now one of the key things here, you have to realise there was a bubble okay. Everyone was working on CPI. The reason why a lot of these companies got shut down was because they were working on CPI making huge money, increasing their overheads, doing amazing, then all the fraud tools came in — Protect360, TrafficGuard, all of them came in.
Kind of f*cked us all a little bit. And what we saw was about 90% of traffic, and in stores, we’re actually not real, it was bot traffic. And then they shut everyone down, and this is the reason why these companies shut down. Learning from the Rappi situation, I realised we have an opportunity here. Now the first thing is to really understand who we’re talking to. When dealing with the Asian market, you have to be careful. It’s a totally different mentality. I’m English okay, so we have a bit of a coloniser mentality going on.
You can’t be like that. You have to be respectful of the culture. So I have a secret weapon and I will tell you about my secret weapon in a bit, but I’ll show you after the CPI bubble bust. We then reduced our activity with the Asian market to 2% because we don’t have time for deductions okay. It doesn’t work. It’s just not worth the manpower. My name in the industry is much more important than working with an advertiser. Now we’re at 30%, 30% of our activity is working with Asian apps. This is an incredible change. Now many reasons for this change is that we understood that we need to talk to them better and understand their KPIs better.
My little secret weapon? It’s my incredible VP of marketing, Hofit Shelly. She lived in Korea for four years. What she taught me was you can’t be so aggressive. I am quite an aggressive personality. A little story, the other month we went to a conference, another conference, not as good as this one, but we did go to another conference, and we were talking to Korean clients that wanted us to promote their apps. And I come in, I’m like, and they’re just like whoa, like you can’t talk to them like this. They don’t like it. And then Hofit comes in, please don’t take this in a racist way, very quietly. That was totally inappropriate, but you understand the point, I can’t speak Korean. And then they started talking and communicating, and what you saw was that they really responded to the gentle mentality, so I had to also adjust and learn that I have to gentle my approach when dealing with the Japanese, Korean, and Chinese market, because we all like to be salesy.
We’re affiliates, this is who we are. But it’s not working when you’re dealing with the Asian market. How we work with the Asian market? Work on CPA. If your traffic is not good enough to work on CPA, you should not be running the offer. You will not reach their KPIs. Renegotiate the deal to a CPA deal. This will give you stability, cash flow, and most importantly, a long term partnership with a direct app. To get direct apps is very hard. This is almost you know takes a lot of hunting, a lot of networking, a lot of conferences, not an easy job.
So work on CPA. If they want to work on CPI and it’s a hard KPI, don’t run it. Unless you’re sure that you can keep their KPIs, just don’t run it. My bet and this has happened to me at least five times now, they will come back to you because they will be getting a lot of rubbish traffic on CPI, who don’t reach their KPIs, and they’ll come back to you and say, okay I want to hear about the CPA model. Because all of them also don’t know it yet, they don’t know that you can actually place the postback on the payable events so that both sides will benefit. Some campaigns won’t work on CPA. This is a fact. If it’s a new app, you are now launching a new app. Sometimes it’s not gonna work because it hasn’t got enough exposure yet, they haven’t done branding, they don’t have the budget, this is okay.
In this situation, there is an opportunity to work on CPI, as long as you make sure that you keep it very clear that you may not see events. This is for exposure, this is for branding. I’m gonna send you a lot of installs so that in the Google Play Store your app’s gonna look like a beast, but I don’t know how it’s going to proceed afterwards. As long as they can clearly understand that, it’s not a problem.
Again communication is key here. There is a lot of information when dealing with let’s say Korean clients, Japanese clients, that a lot gets lost in communication. Keep your sentences short when talking to them. This really helps me. Do it direct and to the point. Don’t be salesy, they don’t want salesy. It’s not interesting for them. Direct to the point, we work on this model, is that okay? Yes, no. Very simple. Keep it simple, not that they’re simple, but the communication, a lot can be lost in translation. And obviously you wouldn’t want that. I just released recently statistics on Japanese apps and Chinese apps. What they saw, which was very interesting, 46% of Japanese users actually make a lot of in-app purchases. This is awesome because for me what I’m thinking is I can work on CPA here because I know the statistics, 46% are making purchases.
My odds are pretty good. China, however, the average user in China is worth $5. This isn’t so good for me. And this is where you have to say it, guys look really sorry, we can work on a CPI system with soft KPIs, however, no basically, I’m not going to do this on CPA. The world is changing. This is where it gets really interesting. What’s happened in the industry, the Asians are now fighting against the Americans okay, because what the Americans are doing is they’re saying, oh Japan they make a lot of money, they do have a lot of payable users, I want to attack these markets. Now, none of us here, no I don’t know maybe one or two I don’t know, if you’re like big shots okay, I can’t compete with these US gaming companies. They’re giants okay, and neither can these Japanese apps or the Korean apps. So what you have to understand is that there’s a great opportunity here. Like I mentioned before, it’s very hard to get direct advertisers.
Now do a test when you leave here if you are in app promotion, go to a Japanese, Korean, or Chinese app, and say to them, listen the market is crazy concentrated, and I think your best bet is to now move to the US market and start trying to target US users. This for them blows their minds. They think, can we do it? Now a lot of the time the reason they can’t do it is because the communication that I told you about.
Because they haven’t got a bridge, they haven’t got someone in the middle to translate what the KPIs are, the traffic sources. Now anyone who’s been doing affiliation for a reasonable amount of time most likely has great traffic for US, Canada, Europe. We’ve kind of already dominated these markets, we already know what’s good there. But they don’t. They don’t know. Let them use you in coming into the US market, coming into the UK market.
This works perfectly and we were able to get twenty direct apps just from this, by changing their strategy, because they were so impressed and said, you know what you’re right it’s too concentrated in this market, we’re not bringing enough users, the US are coming with their gaming apps, and it’s insane basically. So what we did then is we worked with the 20 apps and we’re doing really well. We’re making huge money just by, I don’t wanna say we’re educating because it sounds patronising, but I will say we’re educating them. We are educating them on how to enter the US and the European markets and they love it, and they will create a long-term partnership with you because they’ll trust you and you will be their bridge and the main point of contact. The biggest key, I don’t know about you guys, but for me anyone feel like affiliation has gotten a bit of a bad name.
Like if you mention the word affiliate, it’s like you have leprosy or something. Like people don’t like this word anymore. It’s really honestly you say, if God forbid you say, affiliate network, no now we’re agencies. Now we’re media buyers right? We’re media buyers here right? Everyone. Now we’re media buyers and we’re agencies and we’re whatever, we’re f*cking affiliates for God’s sake. This is what we do. I don’t care about the technologies. I don’t care about the media sources. I care about my publishers, my fellow affiliates. What you have to understand is that they can come with their elitist attitude of I don’t need you, hey you’re only gonna deposit $500, $1,000, like this is how they come to you. But I’m making you all money. We’re the ones who are connecting everyone together, and we need to start standing up and saying, guys really sorry that we’re the ones making you the money. Sorry but this is the reality of the situation. Because you go to an advertiser, you go to a DSP, or you go to a media source, and they act like they’re the ones who own everything, and that they’re doing everything, and you’re not good enough, but you are good enough.
And you’re the one who are connecting the advertisers with the traffic sources. The advertisers, they don’t know how to f*cking do it. And the media sources, the publishers, which essentially are websites or mobile apps, we want to monetise apps, they don’t know how to f*cking monetise apps. So we are actually the ones who are doing the connection and this is really important for everyone to understand. As an overall, what I’m mentioning is, communication, don’t just assume people understand what you’re saying. Don’t talk as fast as I talk.
The English accent obviously does help. If you can fake it, try it. But really build a relationship. I don’t care if they are the cleaner of the company. Make them your best friend. They deserve respect. I am sick of people treating people like sh*t. I am sick of this elitist attitude. We’re in a new generation here. I’m not talking about the old-school generation, who treat their workers bad, who treats affiliates bad, who deduct with no reports, like communication is key.
If your point of contact is a douchebag, don’t work with them. Simple. Don’t work with them. I know it might seem like you missed a big client, but the time that you’ll be wasting dealing with said douchebag, you could be making a lot more contacts with a lot better people. Two, obviously KPIs, change with the KPIs. Don’t fight them. Figure it out. I’m totally open to anyone emailing me at any point to ask advice on how to do this, because really there are very simple ways to keep the KPIs as long as it’s in frame with your goals basically. But don’t just let them also say, okay has anyone had this, okay my KPI is day one 50% retention rate, day two 100% retention rate, day three deposit $5 million into the bank account, anyone had that? I’ve had this okay. This is bullsh*t.
Don’t wipe on shitty KPIs. Negotiate your KPIs. My father is a brilliant man, said something very clever to me. If you don’t ask, you don’t get. Very simple. Ask and if you don’t get it, tell them to f*ck off. Simple as that. Fourth thing that I mentioned, stand out. Have a personality. Have fun. We spend our lives doing this. I bet you’re all working your asses off 60-hour weeks. Like this is insane. Have fun with it. Have a laugh with your clients. Make them your friends. My clients, I consider friends. It’s their birthday, I wish them happy birthday. They had a kid, I’m sending them a gift. Like enjoy this industry. We’re lucky to be in this industry. It’s a gift. We can work from Bangkok. I’m going to Phuket after, and I’m gonna f*cking work on the beach. I’m like a cliche affiliate, but we can’t say affiliate remember that. And just have fun with it all.
Now my last quote, a very wise quote, if you only do what you can do, you’ll never be more than you are. The reason why we come to these conferences is because you have to go with the changes. This industry is changing too fast. Do not get comfortable. You do SEO, learn something else. You do PPC, learn something else. You do media buying, learn something else. You have to keep learning. Keep educating yourself. If you don’t, you’re just gonna lose. That’s it. You’ll have to get a job, which sucks. Well unless you have a good boss obviously, then it doesn’t suck. I haven’t been blessed with great bosses in the past, so maybe that’s my personality, though it could be that as well.
But really, keep educating, keep moving, keep learning, because there’s so much to learn. The TikTok conversation before, I’m definitely going to start learning to buy from TikTok. This is amazing. We have to keep exploring. Don’t be scared to invest a bit of money, and even if you lose the money, you’ll still learn something new on the way. If you want to do good and you want to create stability, you can’t just get comfortable. You have to keep moving. Now, does anyone know who said this quote? It’s a very famous quote. Winston Churchill no. Steve Jobs no. Bill Gates no. Master Shifu Kung Fu Panda 3, don’t underestimate Disney. You can learn a lot from it. And that’s the end of my talk, and I’m happy for any questions. Thanks for this speech. I have a question. Have you ever managed the Russian market you know something about the KPIs in this region? Wow what a market, the Russian market. I mean, well based on the population size, this is a huge market.
Traffic is cheap, which is amazing. Best apps I can see doing at the moment, the Russian market actually, gambling, ***, you know these? These are doing really well but this is seasonal. This is sporting season at the moment, so you have to also realise that. We have Yandex as well, which we represent. They use fraud tool you know that? Pardon sorry? Fraud tool. Which sucks okay, because they make up these deductions and stuff like that. But the key here, if you’re going to work like that is to take a big margin okay. Why? Because assume you’re gonna get deducted, if you’re working on CPI, assume you’re going to get deducted, because the reality is that I would rather take a large margin from my publishers or my sources, and not deduct them, even if I get deducted. Because the real moneymakers are the affiliates and the publishers okay. What my strategy here is that, let’s say I’m getting $1, I’m gonna take 60 cents. It’s a lot, but I know there’s going to be a deduction and I even tell my clients, listen I don’t want to deduct you, I don’t have any intention to deduct you, so I’m going to take a bigger margin so everyone will be okay at the end of the month.
No deductions for everyone, everyone will be fine. So that’s how I deal with it. Any other Russian apps that you want to, I love, I mean Russia’s an awesome. You know La Moda shopping have very very hard KPIs like just terrible. So La Moda actually we renegotiated, we just closed them before. And we renegotiated them to CPA. This is the whole point of, don’t just settle for CPI. People know CPI because it’s the old-school way of doing things. Push them onto CPA say, guys look I want you to succeed. I want you to do great, work on CPA. It works much better, and they’re happy and then the KPIs kind of go out the window a little bit from there. Makes sense? Yeah got you. Thanks a lot, thanks a lot. But if you’re into the Russian market then come to us, we have a lot of Russian offers. You didn’t touch upon any of the traffic sources, maybe a little hand? You wanna know my traffic sources? It’s all the regular DSPs so ***, all of the DSPs.
But my affiliates, my affiliates are my traffic sources as well. Bot traffic? So because we run a lot of the time with direct apps, okay this is also a matter of understanding your data, you need to be watching your data. Before the fraud tools, pick up on fraud. You can pick up on fraud. If you see a CR of 50%, it’s not rocket science. This is fraud. This is obviously fraud. It’s pretty obvious. My first advice would be to really understand your data okay. Second thing is we do have the fraud tools now. Everyday I’m optimising by the fraud tools because this is what the advertisers are looking at. But again going back to my first kind of tip, if you’re working on CPA, the apps don’t care as much, because they care about fraud installs let’s say.
But they won’t care as much if you’re working on CPA. But Protect360 for example, and AppsFlyer, it’s very simple to optimise. Remove, remove, remove and that’s it. When you work with affiliates, they’re very smart okay. I mean they give you bot traffic but they play it smart. But if you work with DSPs directly, it’s a very foolish traffic. I mean advertisers quickly catch it. Just because DSP traffic is not clean okay, also everyone’s into RTB at the moment. It’s like the new thing in the industry. RTB, RTB, RTB, that’s what I’m hearing. I have an RTB okay. It’s not clean. It doesn’t mean anything. This is the point of really understanding your data. You should be watching your data so closely, like we run about a thousand apps and about I’d say about 10,000 campaigns okay, a month.
Like it’s huge but everyday I am looking at my data and you can see. What I always do, is my approach is, I put on my strongest most reliable traffic source first. Once I see they succeed at it, then I can see the pattern of how the data should look like. And then, I’ll start adding sources. Now if I see the other sources are creating anomalies in the pattern, then I know that this isn’t a good traffic, and I shut it down straight away. With advertisers, you can’t f*ck around with advertisers. It’s like you have to be on it like a 100% especially when working with direct advertisers. But like you said, affiliates are really smart, but you’re also an affiliate, you’re also really smart. We have to compete on our intelligence then. Thank you. Thank you. Alright guys, thank you. Please give it up for Georgina Green once again..
