ROB: [00:00:00] Hey Paul.

PAUL: Hey, Rob.

ROB: So I have a question for you today because we've got a furniture themed episode of the podcast, and I wanted to ask you about your taste in furniture. Do you have like a particular style that you like?

PAUL: That is a good question.

ROB: Is that question you've been asked before? Probably not.

PAUL: It's, it's a question I often answer or have answered vicariously through me by my wife. But I think if you were to press me, I would say more of like a rustic-y farmhouse vibe, I think is probably where I go.

ROB: Yeah.

PAUL: But to be honest, you know, I will, uh, I'll, I'll often defer -

ROB: Yeah.

PAUL: - to someone with far more experience.

ROB: And given that you don't live in a rustic farmhouse?

PAUL: No, I live in a mid-century house.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah.

PAUL: So probably not the right, right vibe.

ROB: Welcome back to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast. I'm Rob, and this week I'm joined by my co-host Paul.

Hey Paul, how you doing?

PAUL: Very well, thanks, Rob. How you doing?

ROB: Yeah, I'm good, cheers. Um, for [00:01:00] listeners that are unfamiliar with your voice, um, who are you and what do you do at Awin?

PAUL: Sure. I'm Paul Stewart. I'm VP of, uh, strategic partnerships at Awin. I oversee partner development, um, strategic partnerships and network quality. So this means I, I work with publishers and partners on topics like how they activate their data, how they shape their solutions around brand needs. Um, how they scale their value across the markets, and how we make sure that the network role in underpinning fairness in that ecosystem is, is maintained.

So a big part of my job is shining a light on new and innovative partners that are unlocking value across the ecosystem.

ROB: Which is actually hyper-relevant for today. How did you actually find the experience of, uh, doing the interview for the podcast?

PAUL: I was apprehensive going in, but, uh, it was really enjoyable once you get into the flow of the conversation.

And Sirio, from WeCanTrack, I've, I've known and worked with for a long time. Um, and it was great to spend a bit more time with Ray, 'cause it's great to hear more firsthand about how the solution is being used by a prominent partner like, like uFurnish. And I think we got into some great talking points.

ROB: Yeah. So as you say for today's episode, Paul spoke with [00:02:00] furniture comparison website uFurnish.com and technology partner, WeCanTrack.

PAUL: We talked about WeCanTrack's data and insights and, and how they've become central really to uFurnish's strategy. And it's not just about tracking performance, it's what it enables them to do.

And I thought, I think some of the really sentient points of the conversation were around the need for publishers to build brand presence, to become destinations, not just pass throughs, um, for, for traffic. 'cause ultimately that's a defensible business and that's an investible business. And in times of disruption, those things are, are really important.

RAY: Going back about eight years ago, my wife and I bought our first home together and so we started to think about how we furnished the property. When my wife turned to me one night and said, "Why isn't there like an aggregator or one website, like a Rightmove, but for furniture, where everything comes into one website and you can compare across the market, you can see products in different retailers, big and small?"

And I thought there was, but there actually wasn't. So actually the genesis of uFurnish.com came [00:03:00] from that experience. And we sort of thought, well, is there a better way that we could help people furnish their home?

PAUL: That's Ray Wright, co-founder of uFurnish.com.

RAY: So we went about setting up uFurnish.com with the view of creating a solution for consumers that gives them that consolidated view.

Helps 'em connect with retailers big and small, find products, find deals, all that kind of stuff.

PAUL: Essentially, you were like your own first customer because of this thing that you were experiencing and then realizing, "There's actually not a solution for this. I'm gonna go out and, and build it, and maybe other people will be interested in this."

RAY: Absolutely. Like we, we, you know, hear it often with businesses, like a lot of the time you're actually solving a problem you have for yourself and then you realize like it's a broader, more universal thing.

PAUL: Yeah.

RAY: And like my, my wife and I run our business together, I should give that context. But actually to this day, you know, my wife is still consumer number one, you know, because we're still furnishing our home, you know, even though we own this platform, we're still doing it ourselves. So we're sort of at the coalface of like, where is the future of like home furnishing going, connecting people with products and actually [00:04:00] we're always buying pieces for ourselves so we can always sense check our direction of travel.

PAUL: So that that origin story about like being your first customer is interesting 'cause Sirio, that's, uh, similar with you, right? You started off in the publishing side and then found a problem, so it'd be great to expand a bit more on that and tell us the origin story of WeCanTrack.

SIRIO: I used to work, uh, for a deal platform where we consolidated deals and coupons and uh, yeah, we had no tracking at all basically. What we were doing is just tracking sessions and click outs, and we didn't really know what was converting. Every month, we had to get our commission data from the affiliate networks. And we were using like 200 different network accounts. So we logged into each account, exported the data, and then, uh, yeah, basically put it all together in a spreadsheet.

So yeah, it was a lot of manual work and, uh, just useless. I mean, you're just wasting time doing this. Um, yeah, that's, uh, how it all started basically, we thought, yeah, we need to find a solution for this.

PAUL: And that's Sirio Küpper, co-founder of WeCanTrack.

SIRIO: The biggest problem was that all the different affiliate networks they had, um, solutions in place, uh, [00:05:00] like APIs and Postex, but there was no standard. All of them are different. So we had to figure out for each of these networks, how can we actually get the data and also how can we track unique identifiers. There are some networks where it's quite standard. You just place the parameter in the URL, but then you have networks where the structure of the URL is completely different. It's done with slashes and whatever, or other special characters and, um, yeah, figuring all of it out and then really also then implementing it also took, of course, quite a while.

PAUL: Well, I suspect as well, it's, it's one thing to figure it out, but you've also gotta maintain it.

SIRIO: Oh yeah.

PAUL: Like, uh, how long are these, do these things change quite frequently, do you find and?

SIRIO: It depends. There are some networks that do change their, uh, their connections. Which is usually a good thing because they're improving them. And then there were quite some changes in the last years, uh, also for the ad networks because of all the privacy initiatives that were taken. Which was also good because they started to roll out conversion APIs and all that, which didn't exist before.

Before we, we basically used Postex, which we figured out ourself. [00:06:00] There was no documentation on, on this at all. So we just kind of found a work around how we could utilize this, um. But, uh, yeah, the industry is changing, uh, there are more functionalities available. It, it is good, but yeah, we, we need to maintain it.

As you said, it's, it's, uh, yeah, a work in progress and it continues that way. Yeah.

PAUL: So Ray I'll come to the, what Sirio has just spoken about, the complexity, the different standards or the lack thereof across the industry. Like was this one of the first problems you encountered and is this also, you know, what led you to working with WeCanTrack?

RAY: So probably the primary thing for us was that we wanted to stand up a data platform that would enable us to build insights that we could use with advertisers to build our relationship. And we were looking at the way that the networks were set up and, and the point that Sirio has raised, or the things that WeCanTrack was addressing, were very much focused on the issues of like disparate information, inconsistencies, that kind of thing. And to be perfectly candid, like we didn't wanna have to go and build that solution for ourselves. So whenever we think about our business, we think [00:07:00] about, well, has someone created something before us? And is there an opportunity to work with them?

Otherwise, you'd just be recreating the wheel all the time and never actually build the core product that you wanna build. So, uh, I took a call with WeCanTrack, I took a call with Sirio, and uh, he took me through the solution, how it consolidates, this is how it sort of integrates in. And we felt like that was the right course of action for us because it was gonna help us move forward with what we wanted to do.

And that's, that's how it came about.

PAUL: You can standardize the data, I can see the, I can see the benefit in doing that. I can also see the benefit of having a specialist focused on that, allowing you to, to do other things. But what are those other things? What is it that this standardized data is then able to be used, and how do you use it?

RAY: There are a number of things around standardized data that I think are, are fundamentally important to businesses, particularly publishers.

So the first thing actually that we were trying to solve was the fact that we were spending money in other digital channels. And what was happening was we were advertising on Google, we were advertising on Meta, but what we didn't have clarity on was people coming through that funnel on uFurnish.com and then clicking out to the advertisers. [00:08:00] And converting to purchase.

So what we wanted to be able to do was build an attribution model that told us what the channels were actually doing. So we, we were able to do that, that's one of the first things we worked on with WeCanTrack was, okay, can we connect this back into our GA data and can we get some better attribution to channel sort of metrics coming out of that, which might help us optimize our own advertising.

And then from there we started to look at more integrated solutions around people coming onto the site, the journeys they were taking. Because once you had acquired someone, you know, let's say you'd acquired 'em through Google. They weren't coming through Google again, they were actually coming direct onto the website.

So what we wanted to understand was what was the behavior of that particular person or these people? What journeys were they going on? What clicks were they making at to advertisers, and then what purchases were they making and within what window? And the WeCanTrack platform gave us that consolidated view on the network side.

So what we were then able to do was integrate that data back into our BigQuery instance so we could start to plumb that back into our [00:09:00] server side website data, and that enabled us to have a data platform that led us into the insights world that we live in now.

So that that's how the journey sort of evolved. But we were solving for multiple problems, and I'm sure loads of publishers are out there doing the same thing because we are advertising ourselves, we're trying to grow our brand, so. Yeah, it, the platform helps us solve those problems.

PAUL: That's an interesting point, and that is, it's also what initially connected me with Sirio and WeCanTrack was that I, I recognize this problem on mass, right?

Every publisher will face some version of this problem as they, as they grow. And having publishers constantly try and find a solution for themselves is a huge market inefficiency.

RAY: Yeah.

PAUL: It's one of the benefits of a, of a free market is that this is when you get specialisms. And so I'd be interested to hear from you, Sirio, like the publishers that you work with, uh, in addition to uFurnish. What Ray was saying sounds relatively sophisticated. Do they all get to that stage? Or do you see that actually there's a fundamental problem that most need and then slowly, more and more are moving more towards what Ray is saying?

SIRIO: The beginning it's often similar. They want to integrate the data in Google Analytics, Google ads, and [00:10:00] so on. And I just get an overview, um, of page level attribution and, uh, traffic sources and websites. But, um, a lot of them stop there. They're happy with getting the data and the platforms that they're using, like AET networks. But for instance, what you did, now, using BigQuery and everything, that's usually the more sophisticated publishers that are doing that.

PAUL: My, my sense on this is - a publisher business 5-10 years ago? Maybe that was enough and you didn't need it. Do you think that that part is gonna have to change?

SIRIO: Oh yeah, definitely. Uh, it has to change. Also even just the standard, um, foundation of our product that we deliver, the attribution publishers need to, to use this in the future.

Without that, they will be blind. They won't be able to compete at all. This is really a very important topic because I see a lot of publishers that are not doing it at all, and they wonder, "Hey, how, uh, why did I lose all my revenue suddenly? Um, just because there was a core change at Google or something."

Yeah, if you don't diversify, you cannot be surprised that things will go bad at one point. You really need [00:11:00] to start diversifying your traffic channels. And in order to do that, you need to be able to identify how are your channels performing. So that is definitely a must have.

And on top of that, yeah, utilizing, uh, data warehouses and all that to go deeper into the data. That will differentiate these types of publishers from the really sophisticated ones at one point.

You wanna become a brand, not just any publisher that promotes, uh, products and make, make a quick buck to make a quick buck. But, uh, you really have to dive deep into the data to also understand what is your platform actually providing to consumers and how can you improve it? How can you work together with your partners? And uh, yeah, in order to do that, you, you need to have the data available.

PAUL: Once you started with WeCanTrack, was there a point early in the journey where you went, "Oh, this has unlock something. This is, we really need this, this, I can now deal with that. This allows me to do something new."

RAY: Yeah, the aha moment for us around uh, partnering with WeCanTrack came from the visibility we got based on people's behaviors on uFurnish.com and the [00:12:00] likelihood for them to click out to a retailer or an advertiser and actually complete a conversion. So what we learned through it is that the people who are most engaged, who were then converting into, you know, purchases, actually were the ones that were coming on organically and directly. So it actually gave us insight based on here's how we're actually building into people using our platform, but actually this is where we're more likely to drive an outcome from if people are are doing that. And WeCanTrack unlocked that for us, like without it, we wouldn't have had that visibility. And it would've been harder for us to scale our business the way that we have.

PAUL: Sirio would you say that's a common first aha moment that, that publishers have when they start working with you, or are there others?

SIRIO: Actually, a lot of publishers think that, um, tracking click outs gives them a good overview of what is actually also driving sales. So they, uh, think: "If I generate a lot of click outs on this page, it means the page is generating a lot of sales." But this is not true. You, you can only figure out how you're, uh, driving sales if you really attribute the data back.

And, um, a lot of publishers have this aha moment [00:13:00] where they suddenly see, oh, this page is generating a lot of, uh, sessions and clicks, but it's not driving any sales. And then, yeah, you need to investigate why is that actually happening.

So yeah, that's a common aha moment that, um, publishers, uh, suddenly can see what is working and what isn't, and that they're surprised that, uh, it's not exactly as what they expected.

PAUL: What are the common responses to realizing that a page isn't converting or a certain link isn't converting as well, or maybe an acquisition strategy isn't working as much?

SIRIO: Um, yeah, it's different. A lot of them, first of all, reach out to us and tell us that something is not working correctly when it comes to tracking.

PAUL: Disbelief, yeah.

SIRIO: Yeah, because they don't wanna believe that it's true, um. But uh, we tell, yeah, we tell them, yeah, it is, it is like that. And, uh, you need to investigate what's going on. Um, some of them work together with the partners, with the brands, uh, to figure out what's going wrong. But it could also be just, yeah, some technical things like, uh, certain device not tracked correctly, like mobile devices might not be tracked correctly on the advertiser's [00:14:00] end. That's, uh, not uncommon. And when you figure that out by diving deeper into the data, you can adjust to that.

PAUL: When you see the publishers that succeed and grow, is there, is that generally the point that they've unlocked something and then that's where the growth comes from, and what specifically are they then more likely to do?

SIRIO: I wouldn't say that it, this is the only, uh, thing why, why the growth is suddenly happening, but, uh, it's definitely one aspect.

By optimizing your pages, um, on conversion rates, you can of course improve, uh, your overall performance very quickly. So, uh, that is one big aspect, which a lot of publishers also kind of fail to do actually. A lot of them still focus mainly on, uh, traffic acquisition and tracking that properly. But there's so much to do on your, uh, on your pages. You can change so many things and, uh, AB test what is working, what isn't. And um, if you do that right, then your overall performance on the entire website will improve.

If you wanna have big impacts, then uh, you should be analyzing what you're doing on your, on your own website.[00:15:00]

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PAUL: It's a really interesting point you mentioned about becoming a brand.

If you were to read the latest APMA stats, the UK affiliate market has grown to roughly 1.7 billion. Sounds great, right? And it's, and it's grown faster than, uh, other digital channels. But I know from my position within Awin, that growth is not evenly distributed.

SIRIO: Mm-hmm.

PAUL: You know, like there are relatively few publishers that are driving that growth and a lot of publishers who are struggling.

For, for those [00:16:00] publishers that aren't in that small percentage that are driving, driving this growth, like why did they need to develop a brand? Can we explore a bit more about why that's important?

SIRIO: It's kind of easy to run ad campaigns to your website and have a comparison of products or whatever, and then drive a few sales here and there. It's more of a challenge to actually provide something really valuable on your website or application that, uh, the consumers want to come back to. If you have that, then uh, you don't need to spend, yeah, a ton of money and, and paid ad channels at one point because you'll have returning visitors. And you're not dependent on SEO alone.

That's why it's important to become a brand. You need to be known by your consumers and provide an experience that they want to come back to. And if you don't do that, yeah, sure, you can make money with affiliate marketing, no problem. But, it will not be sustainable. At one point, yeah, you either will fail, um, if something changes, like suddenly you don't have a partnership anymore or SEO changes, uh, all the time and, uh, also with AI [00:17:00] happening and everything, it's just too risky in my opinion, not to become a brand.

Of course, it's a lot of work and you have to invest heavily into this, but yeah. Are you in there for the long run or the short run?

PAUL: So that's interesting, you're talking about being a, a destination rather than sort of a throughway.

SIRIO: Yeah.

PAUL: And I come back to, to you, Ray on that, like uFurnish is exactly that, right? Like you are, you are developing a brand, you're developing a reputation with your users for giving them honest, fair, good recommendations they can come back to and, and rely on.

That's easily said. How do you go about doing that? And what are some of the metrics you're looking at to judge that? Because I'm assuming like just sales volume is not necessarily the one.

RAY: Building a brand is critical because you have to stand for something, right. And I think that the point that we've been discussing about publishers in particular who have just chased traffic for traffic's sake, and people have been on the SEO bandwagon for a long time of just washing people through their digital platforms. It sort of to an extent is beyond your control. And when it's beyond your control, your business model can get away from you and you, you can't recourse it, right? But building a brand is [00:18:00] also tough as well.

But the way we think about it is - in the comparison space, you think of like super salient brands in the UK, so like Rightmove, for me, they completely own their market. They're incredibly well trusted by people out there in market. So you'd be hard pressed to find someone wanting to buy or rent a property in the UK that wouldn't be familiar with Rightmove and probably just circumvent Google and go straight to that platform because it's known, it's trusted, uh, and that's what people do. And like they get billions and billions of website visits every single year. And then you see it again in, uh, things like, you know, insurance aggregation, broadband aggregation. And you only have to look at the way that companies like Compare The Market, or MoneySuperMarket, or GoCompare run their campaigns. You know, they use these vectors to build out trust and confidence to get people using their their platforms.

So we think of it in the same way where we need to stand for something. We need to lead the home furnishing category. We need people to think of uFurnish.com first. We're not about just chasing [00:19:00] traffic for traffic's sake.

What we want is we want people coming on, using our platforms that understand what this will do for them and how it makes their life easier. And then making meaningful connections with our advertisers. So that when our advertisers look at what they get from uFurnish.com, the connection with the consumer, highly qualified people actually coming out to their website who have been through a journey of doing their diligence on products. They're not just getting a website visit, they're actually getting incremental customers. And that's really, really critical for us. But you can only achieve that if you properly build a brand.

And if you build a brand and you build saliency, it can't be taken away from you by, you know, let's call them "helpful" updates that Google puts out there, uh, or any of those sorts of, um, things that might influence your business because those people know you, trust you come back to your platform so I, I think it's critical.

PAUL: At some level, every decision is a trade off.

RAY: Yeah.

PAUL: And I'd imagine publishers are gonna have to increasingly make these trade offs.

RAY: Absolutely.

PAUL: You then have to judge, well how can I adapt [00:20:00] to this rapid change situation? I can spend a lot of time trying to get my data in the right place and, you know, have to understand all these things like APIs, warehouses, and big queries, or I can outsource that part and focus on the bit that I know is important: building a brand.

What was it when you decided, I'm gonna trade off the technical part because I found a partner and what was it, what is it about the partner that made you able to make that decision to focus in on the brand?

RAY: So the technical trade off and the decision that uFurnish.com made to sort of move forward in partnership on, on some of the technical elements, was literally down to us having a very clear vision of who we were as a business and what we needed to achieve.

And that was very heavily product focused. So when we built out our tech team in the early days of the business, going back five years ago, we looked at it and said: "What are we asking the tech team to do?" Well, what we're asking the tech team to do is understand a very clear problem that we're solving that's coming from our product team and focus on engineering a solution that solves that problem and delivers the consumer experience.

When we made that decision, it was sort of clear about you could spend all this time [00:21:00] on the backend trying to build out these solutions, but actually that would be a waste of time. 'cause why would you build a solution if you didn't have people using your platform or trusting it? And that's where we needed to start looking at what partners did we need to work with.

WeCanTrack was a classic example of how it was gonna consolidate data, but there are other partners along the way as, as well too, like consent management platforms with GDPR compliance and cookie consents and all that kind of stuff. Like there are a whole network of what I would call critical partners that sit within the way that we deliver uFurnish.com.

So that was really the consideration is: what are our options? What do we need to prioritize that would allow us to run our business efficiently? And then where's our, where's our team? Where's our resource sitting? And that's, that's how we came to the conclusions we did.

PAUL: And Sirio, from your perspective, that data portability part, where do you see most connections happening?

Like, say you have the information coming back in from, say, the affiliate networks or wherever the, um, data might be gathered. What are publishers then connecting them to, what are the most common things they're looking to use that data for?

SIRIO: Yeah, the biggest connector we have is Google Ads, probably where most [00:22:00] of the data goes back to, but then also Google Analytics, uh, Meta Ads. I would say then Microsoft Ads and uh, then TikTok and some other platforms.

PAUL: These are acquisition channels for the publishers. They're looking to acquire an audience.

SIRIO: Yeah.

PAUL: And so you have to use these two things together, you have your acquisition channel, but then you have your, how do we get them coming back to us directly part. So how do you balance that? Ray? Like how do you go, I know what I can spend on acquisition and I know that I'm gonna be able to retain a certain amount like what are you looking at and how are you strategizing around that?

RAY: It depends on the business that you're running, but also it depends on how you actually calibrate, you know, the way that your business is set up.

So like in the early days of our business, to speak really candidly, like we did chase lower down the funnel traffic coming from Google in particular and, and meta, where we were focusing on people who were in market searching for specific products. And it didn't work for us as a business because those people were too well qualified.

So effectively you're then in like some kind of arbitrage game, and that's not the game we're playing. Like there are CSS companies [00:23:00] out there that do that incredibly well. And we were like, that's not our mission with the consumer and that's not what we're trying to do for advertisers. So we then took it back and said: "How do we calibrate the way that we do this from an acquisition perspective? Which is actually focused on us building our brand and reaching people further up the funnel to drive incrementality around our platform." So it actually became more of a brand play. But what we started to do was we started to calibrate and use the conversion APIs to send signals into those platforms around the type of people that we wanted to attract to uFurnish.com and the type of behaviors that we wanted those people to exhibit. And those things were very much calibrated on things like time on site, returning sessions to the website, people who were viewing multiple products, and then using those people, those vectors of the audiences that we wanted to acquire.

And then what you're trying to do is calibrate your creative to connect with those people so that you are, you are solving a problem for them, they see that through your creative. They're coming on, they're hitting the metrics that you want them to hit on your [00:24:00] website, and then you've got them.

The really important part for us is how does the digital strategy support the above the line strategy to basically drive frequency and relevance in front of consumers no matter where they are through the journey? And again, it's all about how people remember you, how you keep sticky, how they keep using your platform. So that's how we calibrate the brand bit and that's how I'm seeing brands who are doing really well, actually do it as well.

Like they've moved away from just chasing people at the bottom of the funnel, which is a bit of an endless pit, if I'm being honest.

PAUL: What you're describing, going above the line, measuring that, acquiring these audiences, these are things advertisers are doing, right? Probably not the affiliate teams, but the advertisers are, are doing.

RAY: Yeah.

PAUL: And I suspect that the next part of growth for our channel will be less worrying about this affiliate definition and more talking about, the wider problems that can be solved through the things that are, you know, partners within, within ecosystem are, are working on.

And you mentioned, uh, customer acquisition there. I suspect one of the strengths of uFurnish and one [00:25:00] of the comparable weaknesses of, of publishers that aren't doing this is actually, they don't share enough information about the customer types that they're acquiring or even the expectations of the customers that you are referring.

Uh, so can you speak a bit to, if that's true for you and, and how you go about that? And what the benefits of that are, you see when you start having those types of conversations and relationships?

RAY: What is really interesting is that, you know, data is irrefutable and insight's irrefutable, but they're also hard for people to come by. Like everyone's desperate for information.

So for us, like, that's a really important part is we want to be able to provide insights to the advertisers we work with that go above and beyond our relationship. That gives them information that they can use within their business that may go well beyond us and may fall into other investments that they make, but at the same time, it gives them trust and confidence in us as a partner. That if they work with us, you know, they know what they're getting from our business.

Now, I think the thing that's really interesting in advertising land is that ultimately it comes down to this, right. There are [00:26:00] executives within businesses that have to make decisions, and those decisions are accountable to a board who's trying to drive outcomes on behalf of shareholders, whoever it may be. The execs need high level information: what are we doing? Why are we doing it? And is it easy for us to understand and are we succeeding? I then think of like our role and the role of the affiliate business within the, the overall strategy as how are we articulating our value proposition to those execs, so that they're leaning in and they can quantify that to their board when they're pushed, right?

Because everyone wants to drive the right outcomes and they need certainty or as much certainty as they can get. So when you then play that back into, you know, how are you selling in insights? The insights that you're offering are actually allowing those people to say, you know what? We believe that if we put more money into the affiliate channel over the next 12 to 18 months, it's gonna help us grow our brand awareness by X, incrementally reach more consumers by Y, and put X amount on our bottom line, [00:27:00] so we believe we should lean into this and what we're asking for is the board to run with us on it.

And I think a lot of people lack the courage to actually do that. It's easy to trade away at the bottom of the funnel and go look at that great return. But it's not salient.

I then bring it back to the affiliate industry and say, that's actually what we need to focus on, how we articulate it. Because Google Meta, these platforms are doing a much better job than we are, but ultimately we need to be getting some of their purse, and it only starts through building out that trust.

PAUL: Do you find that there is a, amongst certain publishers, maybe similar publishers to yourself, that actually there is a, a helpfulness in the industry?

Like as, I guess, relationships have always been sort of a core part of the affiliate industry, do you find that similar minded publishers will help out if you have questions or have you used that network, uh, to help you?

RAY: Yeah, no, we, we've definitely found that publishers help other publishers, you know, and particularly if you're not competitive.

But we've really enjoyed that about the industry and particularly through getting involved in different events, uh, with Awin and stuff we get to meet other publishers and we share ideas [00:28:00] and we talk about challenges and we talk about solutions. So there's no doubt about that at all.

PAUL: I mean, even today, I guess Awin managed to bring you together with Sirio for the first time in the flesh.

RAY: That's right. Yeah, very excited for that.

PAUL: I'm biased here, but, uh, one of my proudest moments from 2023 was when Awin did the investment into, into WeCanTrack, and that was predominantly off our understanding of the value of data portability and the mission for what you guys were trying to solve. It'd be good to hear a bit from, from your side, like what was it that attracted you to Awin and how has that unlocked some benefits for publishers?

SIRIO: Yeah, we were looking for an investor that, yeah, is very involved in the affiliate industry. It, it was important to us that it's actually an affiliate network, so that we can work closely together with that network and, uh, improve the industry together.

So yeah, all the publishers have to do is basically just, uh, go to the MasterTag Action in Awin and, uh, enable the WeCanTrack plugin. It will then create a WeCanTrack account. Awin is immediately connected with WeCanTrack then, so the, they don't need to connect the network account via API [00:29:00] credentials anymore. They still need to add their websites if they want to use our attribution features to our platform so, uh, that's, they still need to do that. But even for that, there is a setting within the Awin MasterTag that they can enable, um, the JavaScript injection.

PAUL: So they should definitely go and do that.

Um, we can't do a podcast without talking about what is probably gonna be the defining technology of our lifetimes. There's a growing concern, or I hear it a lot around lLM scraping publisher content and not recognizing the effort, the value that's been put into that by the publisher and essentially then circumventing the, the impact. Like, do you hear this as well? Is this something that you are worried about from a uFurnish perspective as well, Ray?

RAY: LLM scraping publisher sites is probably the most topical thing out there at the moment. And, uh, and I hear it every day. Like, and, and you, you know, you read about it every day in every news publication, but also I'm part of multiple, like, publisher networks where you just hear this conversation coming through.

And I can [00:30:00] understand people's apprehension and fear about that, particularly if you're a specific type of content publisher. You know, um, the fact that LLMs can come along and take your content, um, and use that for their own benefit is a little bit frightening. In our case, it's not really an issue because we, our content is products from advertisers on uFurnish.com.

So actually, if those products and the fact that they're on uFurnish.com, uh, enable the LLMs to see us as a point of authority and then to index us within results that come back from questions that people are asking the LLMs, then that's not a bad thing for us. So what we work on in and around that is how the LLM see us as a trusted source.

So what signals can we send into those, uh, platforms through the way that we push content out there and authority? That's, that's sort of what we focus on. So it's, look, it's an ongoing challenge, I think there's no doubt about that whatsoever. But I think it is quite particular to each type of publisher that's out there as well, and how they actually tackle that.

PAUL: From a WeCanTrack perspective, do [00:31:00] you hear this from publishers? Do you see it in any of the, the results that you're able to, to see?

SIRIO: It has a big impact, uh, on the industry, especially on organic traffic. I mean, all the things happening to organic traffic lately in the last years were very impactful. Uh, we lost a lot of customers because of that too. Some affiliate publishers ran out of business because they were too focused on SEO.

Yeah, you need to adapt. That's the only, the way you can handle it, and you need to diversify your traffic sources. I really hope that the affiliate publishers can be more included in the AI platforms in the future. Maybe by also providing their own outgoing URLs, like redirect URLs or affiliate links or whatever, uh, directly into the AI platforms, for instance, through product feeds or something. I mean, they are implementing new services out there for e-commerce businesses nowadays. Hopefully they will also do something similar for affiliate publishers. We can then even help them track the performance of, of these links, uh, because we have an API available to do so.

Usually what happens is that [00:32:00] affiliate publishers tend to be left out, Uh, in, in all these, uh, services that, uh, are built from these big players. But, um, maybe that will change in the future, especially if the networks really try to work hard for it.

PAUL: From an organic perspective, the modality we're talking about is, um, AI overview, google's AI overviews, is probably the most seismic shift that's happened in that space. How often does this come up with publishers, uh, for you?

SIRIO: This comes up a lot, especially also for big publishers. I mean, the industry's changing and, uh, they noted, notice it very, very much, um, especially for organic traffic.

The thing is AI results are not converting as much as and as well as, uh, organic traffic. Um, also the numbers of sessions do not seem to be as high as back then from organic traffic. So, um, people are doing a lot of research in these AI platforms, but, um, they're not necessarily clicking out through these links and then making a purchase.

I mean, that's also how I use them. I, I, I use them to do [00:33:00] research and then later on I, I might buy something or I might, uh, yeah, do something with the information that I've gathered there. And that's, I think, how a lot of people use these app platforms nowadays. It's not really an acquisition channel yet in my opinion, it could become so though.

PAUL: There's a bit of research recently that was, uh, produced by the University of Munich and the Frankfurt Finance University, and it showed that actually the conversion rate of recommendations that are given from LLMs, predominantly I think this was looking at chatGPT, converts far lower than pretty much every channel other than paid social, which is interesting. In fact, I think it converted like 36% lower than an uh, an affiliate referral.

SIRIO: Mm-hmm.

PAUL: Does that surprise you? Or do you think, actually that makes a lot of sense.

RAY: That research doesn't surprise me, but I think people are thinking about it in the wrong way.

So when you look at most of the papers about LLMs and how we should think about that in terms of them being a point of reference for our businesses as publishers. It's actually a brand building [00:34:00] exercise more than it is, let's say, an SEO opportunity. Um, and the reason being is, you know, people will see your brand reference within citations on LLMs, and actually that's an opportunity for you to build trust and credibility with someone who's consuming that content and asking questions and trying to engage almost in a conversation with the LLMs.

So rather than thinking about it from the perspective of, "I need to get that click through to my side." It's, "The citation needs to show me as the authority in this space," and if that supports the rest of your model around how you bring people towards your brand, your product, your platform, that's actually the objective.

PAUL: Mm-hmm.

RAY: As opposed to I'm just chasing clicks. That's, that's my opinion on where it sits.

PAUL: What's, what's next for your partnership with with WeCanTrack?

RAY: I've made it no secret here that WeCanTrack is an integral part of our business and it links into our overall data and insights platform. So as we evolve, particularly as we evolve our solution further into, you know, how we integrate uFurnish.com with our advertisers, WeCanTrack plays like a really critical bridge in bringing that [00:35:00] insight together.

And the element that we're working on with WeCanTrack right now is how we can create even deeper insights that integrate back into our data warehouse to produce our insights modeling, and, and templates that we sort of share out. So that's the next 12 months for us.

The insights that WeCanTrack provides are so unique in terms of what they do and so integrated that, you know, I, I think it's a, I think it's part of their value proposition to be absolutely candid. And I think anyone that's working with WeCanTrack should think about it that way. You know, how can you leverage that as part of a value prop? And maybe even lean on that as like an industry leader to say to any advertiser, "We actually use WeCanTrack to integrate data. This is how it helps us stand that up and then this is what we can do for you as a result of it." And that brings a lot of credibility to what you're actually selling.

PAUL: And Sirio, what's next, uh, for WeCanTrack? Anything big you're working on that you can share?

SIRIO: Yeah, the last years we've been building a lot new features and also an entire new interface. But also some other functionalities like, uh, link generation, [00:36:00] automatic website monetization, so just by using a script, uh, you can monetize thousands of pages without, uh, needing to create any affiliate links yourself. Um, link testing and um, yeah, different APIs that help you also to generate affiliate links.

And so on top of that, also we're looking into cost data because that's something a lot of publishers are also missing. Especially when they run paid ads. So that's also something that will come in the future, pulling in cost data from these big platforms that they're using and consolidating that, and also putting it together with the revenue data so that we can also do profit analysis.

ROB: Thanks for joining us for this week's episode of Awin-Win Marketing Podcast.

PAUL: If you haven't already, be sure to subscribe via Spotify, Apple, Pocketcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

ROB: And in two weeks time, we'll be back with another great partnership to spotlight. And in the meantime, do look out for the next episode of our B series, The Performance Marketer's Toolkit, where we'll be highlighting how affiliate partners are [00:37:00] helping brands with their app tracking measurement.

PAUL: Until next time thanks for listening to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast where we show you how affiliate marketing always offers a win-win.

ROB: Goodbye.