Performance Marketing insights that affiliate managers should know with Simon Dunne
Guest: Simon Dunne
About This Episode
Meet Simon Dunne, founder of Your10k. Simon has been in affiliate marketing for a decade and his knowledge in performance marketing is what affiliate managers and operators should be reaching out to him for.
Full Transcript
Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Performance Marketing insights that affiliate managers should know with Simon Dunne
Host: John Wright
Guest: Simon Dunne
Published: Fri, 08 Dec 2023 12:11:00 +0000
Duration: 32:47
Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.
---
John Wright: So some of them will Google, Google Bullet Bingo or the bid on Bullet Bingo coupon code. And what that affiliate is doing is like, they're just converting over someone who's already searching for the brand. It's not necessarily that incremental. The affiliate, not a affiliate manager doesn't necessarily recognize that. They just pay kind of like their premium rates to people who are just like closing off the sale and they look at the program and they go, wow, we're getting somebody else to our affiliate program. But what's actually happened is someone else in the business has paid big bucks to create awareness for that user. And that affiliate is just closing them out.
Simon Dunne: I'm John Wright, and you're listening to Affiliate BI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by Statstrom.
John Wright: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcast. Today we're chatting with Simon Dunn. He's the CEO and founder of Your 10K. I was very happy to see him launch his agency just a few years ago. And I'm not surprised he's having the success he's having today. Simon, welcome to the show.
Simon Dunne: Thanks for having me, Joe.
Simon Dunne: Glad to be here. I want to get started at the very beginning. So what is your career story, especially how you got into iGaming?
John Wright: Yeah. Oh, and iGaming brand owner and then big brother, a bit of a punt on me. And I have, you know, one or two years of marketing experience for Dave Randall, called Broadway Gaming. And it was a star book, UK facing bingo operation. And I came in there at the third employee in 2011. And very successful. And we started off with bingo, but you know, expanded.
John Wright: We had five bingo sites, two casino sites. As the company grew over 10 years that I was there, ended up managing a team of 25 people. That's a couple of products, a couple of regions. And yeah, it was a fun 10 or 11 that I had in gaming.
Simon Dunne: I remember that brand very well, because when I think about bingo, there's not many brands that come to mind. And just kind of like a side topic, tangent question. How much do you think like just basically doing all the proper things like growing the affiliate program leads to brand awareness?
John Wright: And it definitely helps a lot.
Simon Dunne: You know, if you get with them right, if you get with the right affiliates and then bingo, you know, there were some that like some silver affiliates like bingo port, which bingo, these were bingo brands that became known by bingo. Players. So getting, you know, good placements, good relationships with these kind of affiliates really helped people will review people who Google, but they think they're bingo, they find one of these trust the finger of bingo sites. They were hugely important for the brand getting trust.
John Wright: And I want to talk about your company, Your 10K. How did this come about? And I know you do a lot of work in paid media, PPC, etc.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. So, um, I, after I left Broadway gaming, um, I went to the world of med tech for a while. Um, I worked at home testing company called Let's Get Checked. Um, so I did a lot of COVID testing, um, just mental, women's health, hormone testing, but I worked there for a year. Um, but then I left, um, like I got a referral to hell, another brand or two, um, just helping roll. Kind of started the company started off at the other consultancy where I was helping, um, small brands, high growth ambitions, um, just educating them on
Simon Dunne: how West managed Google faithful, but also affiliate. Um, so I was doing that for, for about 18 months and done it, but in the other way, I got to make this bigger and become an agent. Um, so made my first hire and it's September and multi 2022. And now there are 10 full-time employees of the charge. Yeah. Um, 10 people over the last four days. And so, um, so I think quite a role if I serve what the person.
John Wright: I'm embarrassed to say that I've got minimal experience when it comes to PPC and paid media, what would you say people aren't doing? Like, is this a massive missed opportunity for people to not include this in their, their ecosystem in their marketing?
Simon Dunne: It depends. I mean, you've can, you know, you can do it in house or you can kind of have affiliates take care of it for you. You know, in when I worked in my gaming, you know, say we had a budget. Um, then we had a budget of 500 K and a month. It was very, very possible for 80% to be fulfilled by affiliates. Um, and it's very different for each industry because it really depends on what the affiliate landscape is in that industry. So some industries, you know, gambling would be one where a lot of like the
Simon Dunne: paid search, um, rankings are actually occupied by affiliates, you know, gambling, if you Google any gambling term online, Bingo online, because you know, you're going to see all these aggregators top 10, the online sites. Um, so like sometimes you're already better off just leaving, um, the search space to the affiliates because, um, the number of reasons where like affiliates get quality scores from Google's therefore they get lower cost for six, therefore it's cheaper. And of course, with affiliate and then they need to acquire it yourself for older brands, um, or like that further are no affiliates and
Simon Dunne: saying in the paid search space, you've got to have to do it for yourself. Um, I know you can, you can figure it out. If you can look at all the top keywords for your industry, and look at who is participating in the opt-in, you need to do this, you should go to affiliate program or non-tenant affiliate program.
John Wright: For the audits you do, I want to ask, are these for affiliates or are they more for affiliate programs and can you share some of the shocking things you've discovered by, uh, performing these audits?
Simon Dunne: Yeah. So for the, for the most part, they are for affiliate programs and, and the most shocking thing, and it's like, it happens time and time again, is affiliate managers paying wrong rate and to, to a CEO though, quite often for people who are inexperienced with, uh, affiliate management, they will say, okay, my target cost per acquisition is $50, therefore, and then launch a program and going to pay all the affiliates $50.
Simon Dunne: So what they don't actually understand is what a lot of affiliates would do is play in what we call a bottom of full space. So they will go and quite often they'll just like, someone will even do, um, you know, let's go back to the gambling example. So some of them will go Google, but there's been your order bid on bullets, being a coupon code. And what that affiliate is doing is like, they're just converting over someone who's already searching for the brand, not necessarily that incremental, the affiliate, not necessarily a manager doesn't necessarily recognize that it just pay kind of like their premium rates to people
Simon Dunne: who are just like closing off the sale. Um, and they look at the program and they go, wow, we're getting somebody else to our affiliate program. But what's actually happened is someone else in the business has paid big bucks to create awareness for that user. And that affiliate is just closing them out. So we've often seen where, you know, rounds are choosing to pay $50 for sale where they could easily be paying five or 10 and they say, you will be happy to know that delay we've got in it, you know, program burning tens of thousands of dollars every single month, just by getting the rate.
John Wright: That's a, that's a painful insight to see. And I'm sure that kind of shocks people when you hand that report back to them.
Simon Dunne: And yeah, um, it usually gets us at a gig managing their, uh, their affiliate program for them. Yeah.
John Wright: Yeah. So like, I don't like it's some of them that sound like these affiliates are like doing something wrong. They're not people who are Googling brands or serve you or blind brands was too quiet. Like they are looking for it. They should be getting it. So you, they're, they're, yeah. Like on the flip side, some of them don't have it's enough.
Simon Dunne: Yeah.
John Wright: You mentioned something, which she said bottom of funnel content. Now I know what that is because like we're a SaaS company. I need to know my top of funnel, the bottom of funnel, but I think a lot of affiliates and affiliate managers don't understand what that means and why it's important to understand for both PPC and SEO. So could you quickly explain it, uh, for both sides of the fence, for the field managers and affiliates?
Simon Dunne: Yeah, sure. So, um, well, it's different for, for like each industry app, you know, there'll be different sets of terms, but like, usually like top of funnel would be people who, um, you know, are searching for a product perhaps. Um, you know, they're not, they're not searching for a brand. They're searching for a problem, you know, so let's take healthcare, for example, and top of funnel query might be, um,
John Wright: why am I tiring all of a sudden?
Simon Dunne: Okay. A middle of funnel query might be, um, supplements for helping them start this. And then a bottom of funnel will be, um, athletic greens, um, review.
Simon Dunne: So each of those, um, they're different stage of the funnel. Um, the bottom one, the athletic greens review, for example, like the manager should probably pay them, you know, fraction of what they're paying the top of, top of all ones are introducing brand new people. That is your funnel. And to me, those are the, those are the most valuable. Um, and the affiliate can go and create content. No, they could go review content, rather offer reviews, or they create more.
Simon Dunne: Um, so it's just general content about like, uh, how the most and you know, how the wellness content of course, it has a lot more people. Um, you're, you're less than conversions that is all in the trade off in module, virgins, how easy it is to write.
John Wright: And do you have any experience on the influencer side? Because what we're talking about right now and what you just shared is with bottom of funnel, we're basically capturing a demand and it's not easy to create the demand. And I think that's where influencers can really change things where obviously that example you had of, uh, you know, that green supplement for whatever. I mean, obviously a celebrity can just go on TikTok and start talking about it. And you know, that creates, um, that creates the demand. So, um, maybe would you have some insights as to, you know, how do people kind of follow this stuff or do you just have to watch the trends and see that, Hey, we're getting a spike in bottom of funnel. And then your job is to find out where that came from.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. So, um, yeah, like usually that the bottom of all stuff, like it is caused by something else now that could be, um, the ad could be someone massively increasing your budget on book or TikTok or could be caused by an influencer. Um, and like, yes, you can track all this stuff with like takes and impressions for the platform. And where it becomes more challenging, probably the, the influencer activity, because very often with influencer, we might
Simon Dunne: also have an influencer account for your paying down permission. Are you paid with these? Um, but with influencer, like if someone's watching a video on YouTube, so I've met video about products, they don't always go, you know, they're not always going through, so like people might see a direct situation from an influencer to your website.
John Wright: So what happens if they might watch a video and then they might go Google that brand later on.
Simon Dunne: So it's very, very challenging for, for the brand owner to know, well, like who's responsible for this brand? Call it so. Brand coach. Um, what I've seen a lot of brands do now is start adding like, um, zero party attribution, uh, tools to their website. So how did you hear about this? So while in the backend, you will be able to know what the last take, take UTM parameter was, but what I've seen very well is each it's direct set up, they can't direct or they Google it brand for me. I'll send her at us. It was over.
Simon Dunne: So like you're kind of using that data to try and evaluate our goal is influencers, drawing new awareness.
Simon Dunne: Right. Do you think a lot of a bit major companies, whether it's gambling operators or e-com, do you think they're just kind of scared to use these self attribution, uh, things because they just feel like it doesn't really scale cause you're asking for like a text field, like, how did you hear about us and you're right. Uh, people might've actually heard of it, uh, of the product because of YouTube. They end up going to Google and either that comes from a Google search or they actually click on an affiliate link. So the attribution gets lost. And I'm just thinking that it'd be to be more of the salt attribution starting to change. But I think it'd be to see it's, uh, I think they're just don't know where to start.
John Wright: It's crazy. So maybe it was, um, maybe it was like a lack of experience for me, but even though I still talk to lots of people in gambling, so both of the shows,
Simon Dunne: attribution conversation, so much more advanced. Well, at least at least now compared to what I think Emily, there's lots of tools not affiliated with entities, but Nord beam, roper box, like there's lots of tools that really, that really help you on such a challenge.
John Wright: When I, you know, working and everyone was just a whole bond, either first click or last hit one of the others. So you're looking at your tick true store that you stored a UTM with the user registers and update, there was only one time a little bolt. And so like I do think there's, um, probably more work to be done in the commerce, but certainly from my experience with gambling, I didn't for affiliate programs, like there doesn't, there certainly wasn't any like partial conversions in my day. So, okay. A user clicked, um, a PPC, a PPC affiliate.
John Wright: And then they came through and viewed, uh, looked at the review in our world, the review affiliate always done version, but it may have, or whoever you chose first thing or last term, but there was never any partial allocation with it. I'm much better away.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. I think it's a conversation that is just starting to get off the ground. I know in iGaming. And so when I have these conversations, they're typically only with, you know, tracking software providers, not really with the affiliate programs. And they're kind of going, well, I can't scale this or what does this look like? And I think this will start to change, but it might take a couple of years before people copy each other, copy them, not knowing why they're copying because they see the best companies do it. And then that's how we all learn.
John Wright: Yeah. And even on new versus returning, like very often in e-commerce, like affiliates are getting rewarded, start bringing people, like it's on a fair sale basis, not necessarily on, you know, well, you know, it's very possible that I use a registers with a site in 2020 doesn't do anything. Comes back to an affiliate in 2023, but that's, but it doesn't get any credit because they were tagged. You know, they were tagged as a free free money. I'll show it three years ago. Like, and not like how, or even like they may be in that's a pretty rare on there.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. So a lot of work to be doing there. It's funny. You just mentioned this cause I was coming up a question on the fly and I wanted to talk about most affiliate site. They focus on the sale, getting the acquisition. There almost seems to be no tools in place for retention. Do you think a retention and some ad tech is going to start appearing where like the situation you just described is actually going to show where it's like, Hey, they did sign up a couple of years ago, but without that. Retention mechanism, he may be, maybe we're missing out on a lot of revenue here.
John Wright: For sure you are. Yeah. So now you could say that the operators, you know, our models are based on a color position, we pay a hundred dollars for a new question or coming through the door, we don't incur any marketing fees with that. They're like, if they're like, well, actually we do incur another $50 fee. If someone reactivates them and there's ongoing fees, the question right, like kind of changes the model.
Simon Dunne: We always looked at like, this is the customer position cost. And then they have a lifetime buying. There are no extra costs in their app.
John Wright: So affiliates definitely reactivate and don't get rewarded. But I wonder if they were to get rewarded, but what happens to that, to the CPA that operators want to pay does not have to come down.
Simon Dunne: Do you think it would, it would require something like pixel tracking, like what you see for Facebook's pixels, LinkedIn pixels, maybe, do you think operators could have something like this where it could actually go back to the affiliate sites and show a retention ad instead of an acquisition ad?
John Wright: Yes. Um, yeah.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. Onshore, um, like, yeah, I suppose.
John Wright: Sponsor gambling or what you could share and all those kinds of things. And like, technically, if you get away, get away with it, um, or legally,
John Wright: not legally, but just how, how can I look at it?
Simon Dunne: Typically, I'm certain. Don you, or you might want to like, I don't know, it will be nice for affiliates to only show offers to our site that the user who was on their website didn't have an account for.
Simon Dunne: Because it's like this top 10 list. But it was top 10 list accounts that the user wasn't already a member of. Yeah. Very often though, like they already have an account of five or six at the site. So that is.
John Wright: Exactly. And then it goes full circle to the brands that, you know, they just want to reactivate, like the customer has signed up three years ago, but maybe they haven't logged in in two months. It's like, what can you do? Maybe there's a, there's not a signup bonus, but there's a 25% offer to welcome back.
Simon Dunne: And technically I'm sure it's doable. Like in Google ads, for example, like you can exclude lists, you know, you can exclude people that are on your list. So if you have an ad and that provider is running ads to a list, you go down. If the, if the operator was willing to share it, yeah, you might want to exclude these people, no, lots of trust issues there, but technically it's doable.
John Wright: We talked about a couple of data tools. So I want to ask like what data or data visualization tools are you using?
Simon Dunne: Um, so yeah, data studio for like a lot of our e-commerce clients for not necessarily for visualization, but like on the influencer side, like we use a tool, it's called hype auditor. It's just a house for just like finding new, early websites.
Simon Dunne: We speak about, uh, what product you want to find influencers for. And for PPC, I use a tool called optimizer and just a lot of automations, a lot of any inside surface and obviously SEMrush for like for SEO for finding thanks to the affiliates SEMrush. So probably my main, um, probably full of the, uh, text that costs, but I, uh, and SEMrush optimizer, yeah, data studio, um, hype auditor would probably be for core tools in the agent.
John Wright: Yeah. Maybe we should, uh, beep out a couple of those tools. So you're giving it, giving away too good of insights here, but, uh, we know at the end of the day, people may be useful. So the, uh, I'm sure you're confident. We'll come back and say, Hey, look, these tools look really cool, but we don't know what we're doing. Uh, can you help us out? Only thing about tool to bite, like you can help use this tool. Well, you mentioned people sign up to all that they don't quite sure. But yeah, like you have insights or utilize the property.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. This kind of goes full circle to a common question I ask people. It's like, what percent of people do X, Y, and Z like an SEO, like what percent of people, um, you know, use Google analytics or, or search console data in the proper way. And the common answer I get back over and over again is it's like 1% of people will do the things and the rest of the 99% just don't do any of this all at all. So I think what you're saying is pretty much a reflection in your experience.
John Wright: Yeah.
Simon Dunne: And it's like, there's so many tools out there that like you could spend your day until you know, you can easily spend your day and then tools and like, what are they like, are they bringing actionable insight? Like you could easily, you just want to do tools and just look at graphs and go, wow, but I think I'm going to change how you're managing your campaigns or not.
John Wright: Yeah. It's, I get a headache thinking about all the things that I personally want to learn. You know, we're a data company and, um, you know, I started learning Tableau and now I'm looking at Power BI, Looker Studio and don't want to say Python, but depends on what your needs are.
John Wright: You're right. You can spend, uh, weeks and weeks studying and it's just getting started.
Simon Dunne: I would say like in terms of tools, like with like universal analytics and GA4, like I've met very few people that like no GA4, well, and I'm one of them been saying that this is very different. I need to do a course on this for months, like an everybody I talked to is just like, bring, bring that to universal analytics. Yeah.
John Wright: Um, going to some of your recent LinkedIn posts, uh, talking on a personal professional discussion, you mentioned something about, uh, being alcohol free for 15 months and all the top 10 benefits. So I know it's like a side tangent, but you highlighted like, you know, what it's done for you in terms of, you know, productivity. So I just wanted to touch on that.
Simon Dunne: Yeah, sure. Um, I wouldn't be where I am with your 10 K. Um, I don't believe I would be where I am with your 10 K. Um, if I didn't make this decision and the biggest helps of like, I had to personally would always like struggle with anxiety. Um, like I would find like, um, you know, things that the business like really hard to deal with, whether that's like an email from a client gone, like your work is terrible or like no, it's not like working out whatever.
Simon Dunne: And like being out the hall free enabled me to like deal with dress, stressful situations, a lot bigger, a lot better. Um, I'm getting a birdie going for a walk, clearing the head before it started work and like, it's related, you know, so we're not drinking or whatever. Like you're able to do these things. We're able to like just stare at the morning. You eat healthier as well. Like when you know, you eat no, not all comes together and just like the ability to, um, manage, manage stress, I think increased.
Simon Dunne: Um, yeah. Um, yeah, it's a funny one. Um, it's either the season I made and you know, I think I got a do over a couple of months and then we like through Christmas. But the conference in Las Vegas, but the bit of my friends and sister in Thailand, I like, I'm no interest.
John Wright: Happy. Yeah.
Simon Dunne: I can relate because I'm not purely alcohol free, but in the last couple of years, I cut down massively. Like I used to have like a drink a night and then I started monitoring my sleep and then I realized a single drink will affect sleep. So now I get up early. I do some of those things you mentioned and it's for me as well. It's been very transformational. Like I won't go alcohol free at a conference, but I definitely don't, you know, partially like some of these other kids do or adults for that matter. And it's been, yeah, everything you listed. It's like, I can totally relate to.
John Wright: People say to me like, is that it like, will you ever think the end up? I don't know.
John Wright: I feel like it. I'm like, I'm not, I'm the owner. I just found out for the years.
Simon Dunne: Yeah. I would say as well, for me, it just seems that, you know, the highs and lows of stress are kind of like leveled out there. They're not as extreme. And I realized that first running a business of things that can be really stressful, like, I don't know how anyone else would have handled it if they were basically, you know, drinking regularly.
John Wright: Yeah. The guy I got back from a conference, you know, it was a Finland someone he's at, it was a Finland someone he's 2022.
Simon Dunne: You know, I'd miss a couple of days of work, got back and I will open the Monday. I just stared at the ceiling for six hours gone. How do I climb this hill? I wasn't the hired at all. Just got to sit down and do five beers for like, just like having a couple of days of waiting behind me. I was like, everything.
John Wright: Yeah. Well done on you.
Simon Dunne: Thank you. And so almost every episode I do always kind of finds a way to come back to AI. We haven't really talked about AI. So I wanted to ask what's your take of AI relation to affiliate marketing. And if you have an opinion or insight to share.
John Wright: And see you're marketing.
Simon Dunne: I imagine like the immediate thoughts would be how it can assist with content generation. Like we all know that like having quality content on the side, that's a big fact. Um, you know, I think back to my days starting off a bullet bingo and and to get saying there was a door review news asked my senior team. Could we, they write the review because it didn't want to pay the £200 to write that review. Pretty sure if you ask someone for a good prompt and they write a review for bullet bingo, focus on the bonus, focus on the cash-ins, and later it's good.
Simon Dunne: I think they also, I know the right, turned pretty quickly. So I think no really good prompts, good content topics. And just really fast, right? So quickly.
John Wright: Yeah, I agree. I think it's a prompts is something that I need to spend more time on. And every time I talk to people, I'm always picking up one or two little points. And I think we could probably spend all day just looking at AI, like no different than the data tools.
John Wright: Yeah. Yeah. It's one of the things that yeah, I got that, you know, affiliate world and seeing that one chart, which is the tool that like, or one of the tools that like generates images, like an email marketing agency, surely out of AI.
Simon Dunne: And the content was like amazing. The images were amazing. And I'm like, are we outsourced to a designer or paying no under books? We are? Well, this guy is putting in a prompt. And yeah, scary.
John Wright: So last but not least, all questions come down to this one. What do you see in the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?
Simon Dunne: And I think like a lot of the things I've spoken about, like the main problem, like that I call out in the one I do audits is the lack of, you know, you know, the lack of paying the wrong rates to be wrong. Like you didn't realize there were a bottom of one, like getting that right. No, knowing what the right to make to pay.
John Wright: And this might not be just where the phone will based on lifestyle. I leave out the customer and maybe there's so many more decisions should go into like your city marketing strategy and that's it's all BI.
John Wright: Don't expect the affiliate manager to like go digging in and sell the things that they're like, wherever it's running the team to make sure the end of BI is giving good insight to the city manager.
Simon Dunne: You know, if any managers have a top of nose to our ringing, that's affiliates, them links, making sure they're not good.
John Wright: Ask them to look like the app as well. You have to go. So that needs to get a very well.
Simon Dunne: Yeah, no, I fully agree. I think it's a, you know, business intelligence as a generic keyword. It's a, I think you're on point that there's a lack thereof. And you know, it's, you start asking people like, how deep do you know your tracking? And, you know, I've heard of a story about a guy was in a coffin. She's like, how well do you know your data? And then he asked the question, then he went more specific. And then the hands started dropping and he got to a point where out of like hundreds of people, there's only four people with their hands up. And then he's like, how much money do all of your companies make? And they all listed off and it was just like lots of millions. And he's like, see, it's these companies that make the most money, spend as much time on data, on attribution, and they dig.
Simon Dunne: So they, they know their numbers. And I think not everyone knows their numbers in detail.
John Wright: Yeah. I'm like, you can get extremely grand on the number. It's like your point them on tracking like.
John Wright: Philly programs all have a cookie window.
Simon Dunne: When nobody talks about it and like the difference in an app or not, the truth is seven day versus 30 day versus or 90 day, like important. What do you think? You know, expanding that window. I was like, people like give me $5 more. It's like, you give me 30 days more on the code and the attribution window. You'll actually make more doubt money. Like people that talk about it. Yeah.
Simon Dunne: That's so true. If only we could say, okay, it's not just I want to hire a commission. Can you extend the cookie duration? And I'm not really sure if I've ever heard of programs actually enabling that, but maybe it actually is a thing.
John Wright: You get like the setting is there. The setting is there, but like any managers, you know, I'm going to talk about it. Just by the way, by the race.
John Wright: Okay. I'm going to have some questions for a few other people after this call. Simon, how can people get ahold of you?
Simon Dunne: I'm coming at your 10 K. A or just go to your 10 K. A and, um, you know, and I will include those links in the show notes. Simon, thank you so much for doing this. It was a very insightful. I think we could do this all day and I'm, I definitely would like to have you back on again.
John Wright: Been a pleasure. Thanks John.
Simon Dunne: Thank you for tuning in to the affiliate BI podcast. I'd like to take this time to ask for small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast. That helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners.