Affiliate Manager Challenges with Zach Measures from Everflow

I am a champion of affiliate managers I do think they're unsung heroes within our industry you know because they're often juggling a lot often Affiliates as a whole might make up 10 or 20% of be doing very well within the program but usually it's something like 10% so often they'll report into VP of growth or forance marketing C and all the rest of it and I think the challenge often those people are quite data lit think sometimes it's just about getting access to that information just

and and automating it just so you can say because often affiliate managers have to have this kind of dual aspect of them would be okay I've got to be the sort of person that can get on a phone call and maybe deal with some issue that the client's having and resolve it in a you know with using all the kind of soft skills and emotional intelligence and everything like that but then I need to maybe WR SQL queries on the back of that to Crunch the

number to run a report to understand what went wrong and why and I think I think yeah you've hit that on the head what a lot of people are looking for is for computers software sold and automate that problem so that they can focus on things that machines can't do very well which is have these conversations I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by St welcome to the affiliate podcast today we're chatting with Zack

measures he's the commercial director EMA uh at everflow that's everflow doio and and he's got around 20 years experience in different parts of affiliate marketing a lot of experience uh Zach welcome to the show well thanks for having me John nice to see you again we've uh spoken online we've never met in person so uh came close in Brighton we did indeed yeah yeah thanks for having me on appreciate that so I'm going to skip my first question because we were just chat and I wanted

to ask your experience of how you got involved in affiliate marketing and when I look at your LinkedIn profile you've got a lot of Rich experience touching on almost everything I like I kind of wish I had your collection of experience to add to my skill set so I just want you to uh share that well the danger of that is that you can be jack of all trades master of none right so uh yeah I mean I I kind the broad sort of theme of

of um what I or I I guess my Dre today really mainly helping us performance-based company expand into Europe um and this is going to date me but I I really kind of cut my teeth for a a a Data Business in London that I worked for where I was a media buyer and it was um a coed business so sort of similar to something like I'm trying to think um Publishers house in the US you know like a a big coed prize draw sign and

it was a very very profitable business we ran from sort of like 17 people in a basement up to sort of 270 people and we floated on the alternative uh Market in London um but that was great because I was a media buyer and I was buying traffic from and again this is going to date me from uh places like Myspace and I was buying it on a CPM basis I was looking for UK traffic we would spend money on a CPM basis buy traffic in

people would go into this data flow data flow data flow and sign up for a prize draw and then they'd enter like a tick box to say yes they should be contacted by these advertis who would pay us fee for that so for every sort of you know $150 that we spent in media buying we know that a consumer would generate us $2 or something like that what I discovered in time was that okay I went to the states um for adtech in San Francisco and

I met a number of companies that said yeah we've got uh UK traffic but it Remnant and so you can buy it for us on a CPA and this kind of led me into a whole journey of then working with lots of us companies that were looking to expand um and at that time kind of email was very big and so it's kind of been a continuation of that really so I've worked for a number of startups and everflow is sort of within that mold as

well we are an attribution uh tracking platform based in San Francisco we have around a thousand clients um and essentially what we do is provide a way for people to create manage and scale their own partner activity we call it or affiliate activity and other people might know it okay I definitely have more questions now uh just from that Co so I want to jump in the first question I've got set up which is you know what's been going on with Google just basically trashing affiliate

site I think we're seeing more Affiliates lose market share to e-commerce so I want to ask what are you seeing on your side of the fence given that you've got a bit of a view of affiliation as well as the affiliate programs and the network well Google is such a big gorilla right that you can only see part of of part of the Beast sort of within any one business right so I think you mentioned that you speak a lot to affiliate to a SEO sort

of affiliate driving traffic on behalf of their advertisers we see uh a small part of the landscape with that and in the sense that to take a step back I suppose the debates that are talking you know or going on with Google obviously the big one that Google's talking about is the deprecation or removal of these third party cookies that originally was slated for 2024 now moving to 2025 um and and obviously like your audience is sophisticated but for those that don't know it's really kind

of about moving you know moving away from third party election and that is kind of you got first party bookies which is basically the company having a direct one-to-one relationship with the Denture consumer consumer consumer or that data being collected indirectly through another party which is third parties and that's kind of forcing people to have a more direct relationship with the end owner of the product which we call an Advertiser within our sort of vacula within within everflow and what we see is a couple of

different things I would say two big trends one is that more and more Affiliates are moving to become media buyers rather than just mere Brokers so the a lot of people are very kind of leery of kind of affiliate traffic you know it can be painted with this oh it's fraudulent traffic I don't know where you know where it's coming from uh concerns about very sophisticated fraud and so on um and so lots of Affiliates now have moved to becoming pure media buyers because Google is

good traffic also you know outside of Google you've got people buying traffic on Facebook and Tik Tok which is obviously huge and and so on and then that's one problem that or one Cort of users that that we deal with you mentioned you were speaking to volume earlier who are another great tracking platform that really helped media bu very well in that space and then the other sort of challenge that we see all that we sold for potential customers in that is people having um a

very fragmented view of all of their Performance Marketing channel the affiliate industry kind of renamed Affiliates as partners of late right and that can be some people will say well that's just window dressing they're still affiliate you know why are we calling them part but I think there's actually more and more weight to it because now Partners can include bilia 1 to 500 influencers 1 to 500 but also Google Facebook Tik Tok and what we're starting to see now is this sort of convergence of someone

let's say like a a of grow or um you know a VP of marketing who has uh Google under his or her kind of remit now we want often they're coming to edlow and saying Hey Google says one number Facebook says another number and you know Tik Tok says another number we can't Stitch all of these things together um you know we're using something like looker or segment or another bi tools how can we centralize and aggregate all of this so that we get one unified

dashboard of all our performance Mark B so by using something like server server post or we've got called JavaScript SDK which is just a line of code that sits on the the thing you want to track you can get this unified view because it's it's confusing right we're in the industry you've been in industry for a long time you know a lot of people are like okay I'm just going to put this live and hope it works and then they start to get different numbers and

then that for the sort of problems we game and that really just compounds unless you solve yeah I agree um talking about partners that was actually one of the questions I had where it's like do you see uh Affiliates becoming more Partners rather than just the standard affiliation model where it's like I get the tracking link and I think you're kind of alluding to something where it is like what more can we do than just send you traffic like how can we do like C- branded

stuff and one of the questions my next question written was like do you think landing pages will become more important where the landing page is an implied partnership where it's not just a tracking link with all this code it is like a co-branded landing page that says hey we work together the the trust levels higher and are you seeing more of this already happening yeah I mean I I think actually going back to these Affiliates the the the very small part that we see right because

um like I said Google's such a big big big beast too big to get into any one company's view but for particularly with the ey gaming space and things like that it's when people are media buying they're using something direct linking sending that traffic directly to um the the advertisement so of landing pages obviously you know everything's more competitive landing pages need to be mobile enabled they need to perform well reload time all the rest of it um the big theme I think around that really

is and what you were saw asking within that I think is transparency right everyone's got so much data at their fingertip now Affiliates or media need to add value to that and one way that we see that beyond the landing page and that kind of idea of transparency breaking down whatever the years of flow is into what we call events within more a flow and so that might be let's say for example you are sofware as a service let's say an accounting tool or something like

that someone's searching for um let's say you are Vio or um quickbox or something like that if someone's searching how do I learn about online accounting and they sign up for a demo the keyword that they've inputed there and then they've signed up for a demo Google will fire that convers you back and say Here's a conversion right we think this is good we're going to optimize this keyword unless you have the ability to place um post back or tracking further down into that user flow

you could be rewarding Google or not very qualified users that are coming to the front door they're knocking but you're saying actually this isn't the kind of user that we want so things like event level tracking link to keywords within Google or very specific landing pages where you're asking qualifying questions um can get all of that data to help qualify how you follow up with that consumer you know because it's all about relevance for a consumer isn't it so you know if your software as a

service you know a lot of people are just SPF finding you know when they're looking around okay we're we're going down the tangent route of questions so let's say we're going to do a landing page but rather than have it hosted on the operator side we're going to host it on our side first before we send uh that click conversion over um and you mention like you know we're we're going down a path of away from third party tracking to first party would you say there's

first party collection of data that's a not just a possibility but something a Philly should consider going hey before we send you to this it's like let's pre-qualify you or maybe you're gonna have like a lead capture for him are you seeing more of this or or would you say that more philage should be thinking of this I definitely think more philage should be thinking the advertiser is not buying leads really they want to buy users so you know you might say well we've sent them

100 leads and that's great and to perhaps a unsophisticated Advertiser Advertiser Advertiser that maybe look good for them because they've got 100 lead but if only three of those lead convert that's a waste of everyone's time in terms of trying to convert that lead back in So pre-qualifying questions pre- targeting that happens even prior to the click if you're buying on Facebook or something similar the end of the day like Philip Cotler said you know a a a person doesn't buy a drill or they buy

the hole you know and that's what people want okay because maybe what you could also do is like I mean S2s tracking would be perfect for that lead form and then you send the click over but if the user has filled out a certain amount of information maybe you could either pre-qualify or maybe you realize they're in a certain type of ICP you could actually give them a not just an S2s tracker but a whole different one that says hey we think you're in this different

type of buyer Market or you're this type of ICP maybe we can actually give you a different link um I'm just thinking out loud this could be I I just believe that most Affiliates don't do these things but I think the ones that are top of the food chain are the companies that think of things like this or definitely definitely I mean we we have like I said about a thousand customers with ow and it's a very disperate range of customers actually so we have you

know Banks we have finex we have lots of gaming companies so people like uh trading companies like trading 212 and and things like this and then um yeah you know commonweal Bank of Australia and so on and then we also have because we completely uh have what we call different instances within workf flow completely separate ways of using it but it's not a shared platform each each customer had their own instance and a standalone W Garden version of ml we also have people that use ml

for in fact dating and things like that where um they are very very sophisticated Market at these agent because it's it's complicated more like I gaming where you might have different different landing pages for different states for example you know if there's different rulings in different states or different countes then a user clicks on that they can then be directed to that landing page relevant for them so whether that's in their local language for example well not just a Spanish page but maybe you have someone

that's shown in b or Catalan you know they're in Barcelona or bbow whatever it is um yeah you can start to use systems very cleverly for that collect data and then again depending on the vertical the usual evolution of people that have multiple buyings lead buyers is that they will then usually sort of upgrade in the evolution of that to something called like a a lead management system got familiar with so lmss where they can they can then have a pin tree that goes out to

multiple buyers so let's say for example you are company that's running activity for insurance company one Whatever someone comes in this is this is a high value user that is interested in getting a new insurance home insurance form or something completed you have one Advertiser and that works well soon you realize well actually there's two or three advertisers that want exactly that type of customer now what you can do with other software is you can say great so there's companies like lead prosper and data ball

and a bunch of other guys um lead by is a very good one in the UK where you can say great now I've got one consumer I'm going to send that consumer to buy a one wait half an hour then same consumer to buy a two buy a three and so on so often that could be a way that an affiliate agency adds more value and you know grows and changes as a business now we're talking about a lot of things that are very deep where

you know you're getting really deep into the buyer journey and I want to take a step back when we started talking about how Google was messing everything up uh would you say that affiliate sites moving forward need to be more focused as a product so we're we're past the days of being just another information portal because anyone can set up an information portal I mean data in that sense is really cheap but building a product like you said like trying to be um sending qualified leads

to Insurance offers it's like well what would the best way of doing that and to me the answer is products like Credit Karma that give you your credit score and then they basically the perfect flow for saying well since you've already made it here and I've done it without SEO I now have the ability to sell you because I mean that's what credit Karm does I mean they make pretty good money from just being a lead magnet by offering an amazing product yeah I mean in

theory it sounds a great idea right but the challenge is getting found that's the difficult thing and there's a lot of big big sites out there that have huge budget to D that aggregate lots of content Within so I think kind of like for Affiliates like the best thing that they can do and it it it sounds sort of um an anatom to what we're talking about really which is all about technology but I still think a big thing that's that's missed is actually creating relationships

with people where you can actually pick up the phone to someone that's not particularly scalable and say hey if you're an operator or an owner of a product I am an affiliate Network what kind of users are you looking and then there's there's a of ways you can get get those audiences you know whether it's through you know people with their own Tik Tok channels or influencers or whatever and then it's kind of saying great I've got one Advertiser that fit that bill these are the

icps that they're looking for now I need to find another adverti um and that's really un I mean people talk about that and it sounds fluffy and maybe outside of what what you know a lot of bi is about but that personal relationship where you're actually saying like what what really are you looking to to acquire from us you know what what is that kind of user and you can put together like a package of actually going out and trying to trying to find them you

know I think a lot of companies they get lost on the concept of scale where they forget like you know people want to buy from people we know this to be true in the B2B space but I think we're already seeing uh some proof of that in the b2c space where it's like why are video and streamers and podcasters capturing more market share or simply put why are they able to create demand I mean affiliat have been just sort of sitting back and capturing it it's

like you know bet 365 as an example they just become a massive company so naturally a lot of people are searching for it but you know to create demand is something else and I think that's where you're right it's to have those relationships I don't think you're going to AI or automate your way through this and if anything I think you know companies like Google with Gmail are saying hey we don't really want this spray and prey like all all the social channels where you can

actually get you know connections happening um you I think these days are kind of done most yeah and and to Echo that actually and kind of bring it back into to Google um and that side like I think that one way of bringing personality to scale I remember speaking to a guy that I met for our podcast who had a number of different um website uh that he drove traffic to so he was a very scaled publisher and he said he's going to put a lot

more emphasis this was a year and a half ago on video because like when you present something of like the benefits of using bet 365 for example as a video that's hard to replicate you know you can quickly get a track GPT and kind of create a site that Google is going to start searching for an in-depth thing and be saying well actually you know this seems to be machine generate but if you John R are talking about the benefits of 365 and R and all

the rest of it and then you start to create that as an asset that's available Google will start to favor that you know for for for SEO stuff so it's harder to do I think but um that's one of the ways that we keep doing it and you know we everyone's been talking about this for a very long time but more you know as an influencer or as an affiliate you really want to be like an inch wide and a mile deep in terms of like

this is all I do but I am an expert driving traffic for becking and gaming d or whatever B to be whatever it is I I wish I had that answer to give to all the people that do Outreach I know you get pitched all day long it's like hey I do all these things and I mean I don't trust them yeah exactly right yeah so let's talk about personalization and I I know everyone wants to do everything at scale I mean that's just how we

are in affiliate marketing but uh what are you seeing in the background of how people are able to use smart ways of personalization I'm assuming that the short answers you need to get more data to be able to personalize anything whether you want to do it on scale like a large scale or small scale yeah yeah so taking it from the lens of let's say attribution and tracking and one method that definitely a lot of people use is something called smart links we don't we more

familiar with this but this is the concept of creating one link and then giving that to your Affiliates and then nested underneath that you might have a series of different offers so that could be different ways to AB test landing pages for example so okay I'm going to give you John a link to promote this and when a user clicks on that link Now using the targeting technology that we and other companies use you can say great if this user fits this criteria send this user

to this Landing P that might be language it might be device type it might be whatever it is um but you can um AB test using smart links but you can also like a lot of people have been quite clever in things like sending out emails so you can send out a generic email let's say it's for a gaming offer or I gaming or something similar you send out an email and embedded in that creative is a smart link and what you can do within that

is you can say okay let's say I have a cap for a certain operator certain number of conversion that they want and then after that cap is required I have another operator that fulfills that so maybe just in the UK for example we have a very big race called be CH gold you know within I and beon and so you might have you know three or four people that have given you an option for the CH gold car you create a generic email you include a

smart link within it you send that out as each of those advertisers hit their cat the link just redirects users to other buyers seamlessly so you know if I open that email on a Tuesday come back on a Thursday and think yeah we'll buy that she I'm checking it my family now I'm going to another provider seems know so you can personalize it in lots of ways like that never thought about that before where you could actually say wait a minute you clicked on this link

Monday and you you came back Wednesday um I I think giving that user something different or saying hey welcome back or you know it's hey it sounds kind of trivial but I mean these are things that in my opinion without having any data in front of me there's no way this doesn't convert more yeah exactly so well I mean as as as as we all know right and I'm assuming that most people are listening kind of date to Geeks to to some way to some extent

like the British sort of made a decision in their Olympic sort of thing to sort of say okay we think we can win a lot of medals within cycling so we're going to put a lot of our eggs in those basket and all we're going to do is to focus on like games you know so they had the same the cycling team had the same pillow every night even though they were going to uh a hotel because they realized that even this half a percent increase

in performance compounded over time really adds there and I think that's the big thing that now a lot of marketeers want there's so much data out there how can you automate this process of optimizing things you know um that big thing but it seems like most Affiliates and we could even probably find some large Affiliates that would be guilty of this are not always using smart links like I don't even know what percentage of the space is but I estimate that there's what three million Affiliates

globally if not more I mean your your mom and your friend could be an affiliate with one click of just joining a referral program and uh yeah it's there there's a whole sea of space debris of tracking links and broken links and yeah I mean one I mean obviously this is we I got brows on this but like one one Trend definitely that we see is for example um we deal with a lot of different types of company but you know let's say you're an e-commerce

right so you're using a tracking platform you've got a good idea of like these are my partners I'm working with these Partners I want to F in Google Facebook and so on what's the next stage of growth and often like our team will say well have you thought about turning your customers into ambassadors or referral sources and so you can do things like turn a tracking link into a QR code because if you're sending out any physical product you own that real estate you might as

well turn that into a QR code so whether that's on the uh item itself in a letter that's included within the item and you know that could be anything you could be refer a friend and get them sent off or whatever this could be for software as well you know I think a lot of people are forgetting that the biggest referral sources usually come from their own customer base turning people from Happy customers into tracked referrals so there lots of different use cases for affiliate and

as you said anyone can become an affiliate now so I I've been I'm always looking at Stats and I think I've read something that the affiliate marketing space today is worth around close to 20 billion and in 2030 it should be around 36 billion um let's assume that people get Smarter with optimizing everything like all the things that we've been talking about before how much bigger do you think affiliate marketing could be um using 36 billion and that's been kind of like a 10 to 15%

uh compounded growth per year do you think it could be bigger yeah for sure and like I think it's very difficult for people to get through numbers on the size of total affiliate EV I actually think it'd be a lot bigger I can share with you like everflow is a company that you know no one walking around the street has heard of you know a few people in our Industries just as a small company with 100 staff we process 4 billion um dollars of affiliate Revenue

payout per year um so like I think that number is like Way north of that s 30 36 billion I think I think it's it's actually maybe 10 times bigger 20 times and I I think it will get bigger bigger bigger because like there's a lot of Focus to previously to learn how to do affiliate marketing like we're getting into the weeds of it here but for for the average person to to to learn how to do affiliate marketing it's actually got simpler in terms of

like okay great you want to work with me I want to work with you I'll just generate you a tracking link you can promote this however you want on your Tik Tok re on your LinkedIn posts whatever it is and the audience that you can reach very quickly is you know is is much more scale scalable so yeah I I think obviously I'm biased but I do think it will grow and I do think that people now are um seeing themselves as influencers you know more

and more professional to seeing themselves as influencers and to track all of this and this you know you touched upon crms maybe you track some of this like you can do it not just through um affiliate links and so on but you can also link to a CRM for when introductions are made or email is made and something that okay then that goes right into the next question of like do you think we don't really have any proper crms for both Affiliates SL Publishers as well

as operators because I mean when we think of CRM we think of HubSpot and pipe drive and Salesforce and those things are great on their own but I feel like we need our own customized version that lives and breathes our space well I hate to sound like an advert here and just shut me off but like essentially yeah everflow is is like a CRM for affiliate and there are other companies out there so really good companies as well so like when you start searching if you're

looking for this the problems that these companies as a whole sort of solve are the administrative elements of running an affiliate so that can be okay I want to organize all my Partners I want to organize all my creative assets I want to make sure these are all tra I want to pay partners with invoicing I want to give them a login they're definitely companies that can do this so like if you are finding that managing your affiliate program is causing you more headaches to scale

than it were which is often the case sometimes the affiliate program will be doing very well and the person that's running that would be I don't want to scale this anymore because I'm managing it on spreadsheets you know all the rest of it and it's just not working for me so there are a bunch of companies out there that can really help with that to really be a CRM to manage all of that and of course it can plug into the more traditional crms because let's

say for example you are running an affiliate program on a B2B for example let's say you are a software as a service that's maybe doing or we mentioned accounting soft accounting software earlier like you want not only to be buying or giving out a tracking link that just goes to someone to book a demo you want to understand what that user's doing and the value of those users as they go through that user flow now and that is super super important so like we link to

HubSpot Salesforce for example and so you know for beta beans it's essential for them to see okay you know postback is firing what and an electronic signal is sending back that the consumer's done something so they booked a demo maybe they've had the follow-up call with the sales bre maybe uh information is being sent out trial upgrade Enterprise upgrade you want to track all of that so that you can reward that referral source and also learn more about okay these type of users go much deeper

into the user flow I don't just sign up to become do a demo where it's not relevant you want to really link that ICP right way through to someone that is upgrading and becoming a paid for next I want to jump into Data literacy uh because I know you have uh the everflow certification program so I want to ask what's in the course and what is your take on where we are as an industry of trying to make people not just understand the basic but level

up I I believe that affiliate managers are one of the the areas where if they understood data better then they could be do more of just being salespeople yeah yeah definitely well probably like your goodself right I am a champion of affiliate managers I they they're unsung heroes within our industry you know because they're often juggling a lot and sometimes within a big organization the affiliate manager can occupy quote unquote relatively lowly position because often Affiliates as a whole might make up 10 or 20% of

be doing very well within the program but usually it's something something like 10% so often they'll report into VP of growth or Performance Marketing C and all the rest of it and I think the challenged often those people are quite data lit up thing sometimes it's just about getting access to that information just and and automating it just so you can say because often affiliate managers have to have this kind of dual aspect of them would being okay I've got to be the sort of person

that can get on a phone call and maybe deal with some issue that the client having and resolve it in a you know with using all the kind of soft skills and emotional intelligence and everything like that but then I need to maybe write SQL queries on the back of that to Crunch the num to run a report to understand what went wrong and why and I think I think yeah you've hit that on the head what a lot of people looking for is for computers

software to solve and automate that problem so that they can focus on things that machines can't do very well which is have these converstion take take that affiliate Source out for lunch you know all the good stuff that you want to do but you need the system to be automating this stuff so you don't have to run reports uh or uh have the system blocking sub IDs like at click level if there's problems happening whether the signature of the traffic looks wrong you need these stipulations

and signatures in place at the tracking platform level so that you're not basically spending your day fighting fires with you know the The Operators or the owners of the office and so on I think i' I've just realized that maybe affiliate managers have the one of the biggest burdens in affiliate marketing because they have to be the salese they have to be the relationship manager they have to quite often build the program they have to make the decisions of how they're going to grow the program

where there's not really a lot of documentation behind and then we're basically asking them on the flip side be really good at data and reports and the finances and all that stuff I mean this is actually I I think no wonder why you know this is actually my personal opinion affiliate managers are one bottleneck in the industry where we're asking them to do everything and they're the ones that actually go to the owner of the the company and say we're going to pick this software for

this reason it's like you're asking them to do all of it yeah exactly exactly and often why the case is that those affiliate managers when they they they either move away from affiliate into something kind of easier like brand or something similar or just focusing on Google or they set up their own agency right you know and there's there does seem to be kind of like within like an affiliate agency um you know maybe up to 10 people is is kind of the level it gets

to and then it sometimes scales up and down and things like that because you've got smart people that come in and realize well I can do this myself you know I'm I'm I'm G to go and dur um what of your articles on your website talks about agencies and I forget what the context was but it was something that agencies are going to suffer where there's a lot of them and I think maybe the margins are going to get tighter so I want to just get

your take on what do you see as agencies today or moving forward what do they have to to be good at to not just survive but you know to to grow yeah and I think agencies need to add value right we we all can think of agencies as and for us like agencies are a central part of our strategy sort of ongoing because they can help um you know everflow we provide a software as a service as a CRM and manage all of this affili in

the to what we present we've got some tools to help people scale like a Marketplace and so on but agencies really will then take that program forward so they can come up with ideas of like well let's turn these QR codes into adverts on bus stops or in print or wherever it is um and I think the challenges that a lot of agencies has from a pricing perspective is you you and I were talking about be being a very big space postco you know that with

all the you know um let's say inflation and moving away from a zero interest rate world where suddenly these software as a service have got to be earning money God forbid you know rather than just raising BC money building a Bru and hoping you know the world comes to them it's kind of like most growth managers now are viewed through like a performance lens of like okay we're buying users we can't just be afford to be buying users that don't go on and do something so

they need to be again deeper into that user flow and that is then pushed forward to the agencies where it's like we don't want brand campaign we need kind of users like and you know we we are happy to pay you but you know we haven't got that kind of money now because that VC money is dried up and you know the dragons further up up the chain are kind of breathing and saying like when is this coming s make Mone going back to QR codes

because you mentioned that a few times and I actually don't think I spent much time talking about that in any with any of the previous guests so what would you say are like how do operators and Affiliates need to look at QR code in terms of we know they're growing we see these QR code companies just they're they're flying they're they're just printing money uh what are we not doing to integrate QR code yeah I I I think kind of um QR code the sort of

like you know the sort of uh The Unwanted stepchild of kind of like you know they get overlooked because it seems like oldfashioned technology to turn a track of into a QR code and that was in the days where it was like a real F to you know uh oh there's a QR code I need to get my app to read it and all the rest of it now people can do that and it Bridges the gap between very cheap offline media like newspapers like leaflet

like letters that you can include when you send a product to a consumer like the um QR code that could sit on a bottle of nutrition you know supplements or whatever it is that's three real estate you can advertise in bridges that gap between very expensive and very and very and very competitive um online media you know and so I think QR codes can be used in lots of different ways whether it's through referral sources for a B2B let's say um one of my clients is

like a credit Checker uh in the UK so people are buying a home um they need to get their credit checked right and so their affiliate program this company uh is basically mortgage advisors and they will use things like QR codes on their business cards to say Hey you know you're in my office we're talking about you buying a house you there you go right and you that can all be tracked back to that individual mortgage advisor um as a partner within the program and you

can use it in kind of strange ways like that that people are not necessarily thinking of you know it's all about bridging that that Gap you know so I I I think they kind of unlove QR codes at some debate we won't get into the conversation yet about broken links in QR codes that's that's definitely going to be a thing in the future if we already have broken tracking links as being a major problem in affiliate marketing then uh this will become a problem problem later

I later I ask yeah it it's there so what do you seeing in the igaming space uh because I know everflow uh has some clients in igaming and uh you're looking to B in there uh what do you see coming from my opinion of the outside affiliate marketing world going in this uh unique space yeah definitely well you and I got connected because um through you know your other interest you help aggregate a lot of that information right from The Operators and things like that um

and one challenge that we saw when we looked at this industry maybe three years ago was that the player data often uh arrives in unusual ways whether that's flat FTP files or something like that that been sent through and there seemed to be for commercial reasons as well as technical reasons a reluctance to place postbag at the point at which a consumer does something and so we kind of looked at it and then we thought well there's other tangential markets that we can serve that that

are better but what seems to have changed in those last three years is and you probably know this better than me John is that there seems to be more of an Acceptance Now from operators to be at least willing to place postback where something happens so that might be a registration or an install or deposit or something similar and what we're seeing and it's really kind of early days in terms of you know the number of run up and running customers scaled customers thing have but

definitely noticeable is that media buyers are using errow flow to link things like Facebook directly to the operators so they're media buying and they're maybe running traffic to pad pal or or or someone similar and they're using everflow specifically for that that excellent yeah it's um I just think with the S2s space uh what I believe to be true is that as Affiliates integrate the stuff on their side and say okay we're going to go from regular tracking to S2s with postbacks I think once they

realize how they're able to learn from their mistakes and like you said very early on about the incremental gains I think operators they might be seeing it in a different way but they see it in the wrong sense is you got to feel it saying we will not send you a single click of traffic unless you give me a post back so affiliate operators are being um kind of like drawn to the water so to speak and I think this is where we're going to change

and of course it goes with saying I think if operators can see any data that support growth from having S2s tracking um either they're going to do it or they're going to fade out or be acquired by a company that's H that's done those incremental incremental incremental gains yeah and and you know this is always the tension that exists between you know advertisers and Publishers right is that transparency of like okay I'm going to send you a thousand clicks what's actually happened to those users you

know and you got this kind of again this this sort of tension that exists where the advertiser might sort of say well actually you know 800 of those clips are rubbish you know but you know 200 of them will go on to do something unless one side talks to another and post back do allow that then you know it's it's it's that mistrust continues and and it's not in the benefit of any of either party I don't think because yes there are fraudulent companies out there

that are going to try and you know run traff but postbacks can you know solve that quite quickly as well where you can see traffic adents coming in and you can block sub IDs that don't meet criteria that you know you want whether too high conversion ratees or if you use something like apps fer there 360 tool you can link that to tracking platform like everflow and just block that up a click level so as these clicks are happening if let's say the fraud level on

M 360 is over 3% or whatever this can automatically start blocking those sub be because it's all about pruning the tree rather than chopping the whole thing down right um because there there is kind of gold in those Hills as it were but uh you don't want to just and shut the door no and and I think that could be another conversation for just talking about uh blocking of clicks and filtering things out on both the affiliate side as well as the operator yeah sure and

then last question which is what do you see of the future of a marketing as it intersects with business with business intelligence yeah well I think as we sort of initially discussed and I I guess the theme of this conversation is help online marketers need tools to help them optimize all of the the Myriad of of data that they get about consumers you know it's becoming more competitive to buy a consumer to do something it becomes more there's more impera of getting things like lifetime value

of that user and increasing the average revenue per user and so on and so I think as we you know as there's more and more data that's just being generated just generally you know on the internet I mean if you think since May chat GPT launch for you know January of when it last year you know can you imagine how quickly the internet grown in terms of just the sheer number of actual physical sites and all the rest of it that and all the data point

so I think within all that noise people need tools to help them distill data to its essence of like okay we understand these consumers are coming in and these users have a higher lifetime value than these users where are they coming from what are the features that make that user value as a user high value users and then how do we get more of that and how do we strip that stuff out but what people don't want is to log into 550 different systems Stitch data

together and try and work it out they want like aggregated views of all of that data and they want the system to start making those suggestion back to them of like hey this is what we're starting to see you know there's a lot of kind of um intelligence and AI that that that that there and lots of stuff that we you know interface with we need that kind of ched um distillation data that comes back to onl Market say hey we've noticed this micro Trend that

Happ you know because sometimes within all the noise it's difficult to see particular if it's residing in lots of different spaces and that's a sum a good Summary of why you know we wanted to have this affiliate bi podcast to talk about these things and going how do we optimize automate standardize things and uh I think it it starts with these conversations so Zach uh you're welcome on as another guest I have way more questions that I could easily do for a second episode uh how

can people get a hold of you sure yeah I mean they can connect with me on LinkedIn so Zach measures is my name think it's made up that I work in attribution with the name measures and measures and but Google me uh and then you can reach me at Zach everflow doio and happy to answer any questions or share like case studies that that that we've seen so like um I think it's kind of important to uh yeah share the knowledge I'm I'm very happy to

do that and thank you for again letting me on the program today once again uh your uh podcast what is the name of it for the guest I the everflow podcast you just SE search for everflow um within um Apple you'll find it uh we've got we've got a podcast there we call it fireside chat I believe but if you search everflow you'll be able to find that great we'll include that in the show note thanks again no worries pleasure thank you for tuning in to

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