Top Affiliate Marketing Takeaways from attending T&C Summit and ASW in January

This week we’re sharing everything our business development and sales team brought back with them after attending these first two affiliate events of the year, namely – Traffic & Conversion Summit and Affiliate Summit West, which ran back to back earlier this month!

This year you’ll be seeing vCommission’s sales team attend multiple global affiliate events as we embark on a year long “road trip” to expand our publisher and advertiser database world wide. We caught up with Stuart to catch his thoughts and learnings from these two events, and share the top affiliate marketing takeaways he had from these first two industry events:

Q: Stuart you recently attended both summits, what were some of the key things you learned whilst out and about at these events?

A: Both events held interest both on the official panel agenda and in-person discussions around upcoming changes to third party pixel tracking and the challenges that this will bring to the affiliate marketing industry. From media buying partners to lead generators all publisher types are looking to invest long term into providing better first party tracking and data collection. Maybe because of this there was also a lot of discussion around non-traditional affiliate marketing campaigns such as pay per call and lead generation playing a bigger role in future for program segmentation which was quite interesting.

Q: What are some of the key messages you gleaned from advertisers you met with in terms of where they feel challenged right now?

A: Tracking is a real concern for a lot of brands, as is data transparency. Advertisers really appreciate working with companies and affiliates that are open with them and share as much data as possible to help make considered decisions in terms of where and how to spend budget in performance. It’s one of the things we do well at vCommission so I was happy to share how we supply granular reporting and insights on all the publishers we bring to the table when advertisers join our global network.

Q: What are some of the things vCommission can offer to help these brands overcome them and move forward to partner with publishers that can drive quality traffic?

A: I think the answer is the same for both brands and publishers in this case. It’s a combination of our international reach and internally built and maintained affiliate marketing expertise. It’s our ability to help our partners reach and enter new global markets that they may not have worked in before. Our team has a lot of experience on the ground in a number of locations so there’s always someone on hand with good advice for our partners to benefit from working together. That’s also why our team invests heavily in attending global affiliate events such as these to engage and learn with others in our industry and see the marketplace from all sides.

Q: Part of your remit is to find and recruit new publishers to the network. What are some of the most interesting publishers you’ve met at these events that advertisers can expect to work with as new traffic sources via vCommission?

A: Without giving away any specific names we had a focus to build out our advertiser base in the lead generation and pay per call space especially – that will allow us to offer publishers a wider range of services to promote. We also made some great connections on the publisher side that will help us continue to help our existing advertiser campaigns grow – globally. Coming to events like this is not only about learning what’s new and trending but its about setting up partnerships to build on the success of our clients and publisher partners we’re already servicing too!

Q: What are the top take away points you heard, saw, or listened to in the panel discussions and in the various meetings you had? Give us the lowdown on what the hot topics were for those of us that didn’t get to attend these events.

A: This year there was a lot of talk about tracking and cookie deprecation which are obviously timely with Google implementing their cookie deprecation policy at the start of this year. Asides from this there was a lot of discussion around the need to improve personal branding in our industry and how to leverage this in the content curator space to build better content for advertisers to benefit from.

AI was a hot topic too as publishers are exploring how to utilize these tools to create authenticity behind the content they produce. We’re getting to a point where the industry is realizing that ultimately “people buy from people ”, attention spans are shorter and we need to understand that this is still very much a relationship and people led business. It’s why we believe and invest in putting our team out and about at the front of where our advertisers and publishers are. We value keeping the personal relationships we have growing, and having people you can trust managing the services we deliver too!

Q: What’s the one thing you learned that surprised you about how affiliate marketing and program management tactics may change this year?

A: I’m always pleasantly surprised by the way that our industry attacks new challenges and it looks like that isn’t changing with both publishers and advertisers meeting the tracking challenges with new and innovative solutions. The sharing of data seems to be more open and brands and publishers are realizing the need to work closer together to deliver the right results. The days of running hidden secretive affiliate marketing campaigns and hoping they deliver – are over! It’s pleasing to see the positive results of campaigns that share data and how they can be optimized much better – so I’m glad this transparency has started to happen more and more!

Q: Having attended the first two global affiliate events of the year back-to-back all in one month – what are you looking forward to at the next event you attend?

A: Firstly, I’m looking forward to spending a little time at home with my family, it was a long trip! Now the follow up begins! After this – it’s back to my home town of London so that’s always something I look forward to and another event to attend in a completely different industry – so I’m looking forward to the learnings I’ll be bringing back to the office with me after that one too!

Q: You’ll be heading out to London in February to attend the IGB Affiliate conference. Why should advertisers and brands set up a meeting now to discuss your network offering and get engaged early to have a meeting?

A: For those that don’t know, IGB Affiliate is primarily an iGaming conference and this is a market that is growing extremely rapidly across multiple regions. I’d say that brands that aren’t already looking at it should be and those that are but want to grow further should definitely book a meeting. On the publisher and affiliate side, we have access to many brands and advertisers in the region so we are always happy to introduce new quality publishers to them.

Thanks for sharing all you’ve learned and gathered attending these global affiliate events, we’re looking forward to meeting more of our clients, publishers and partners at further events as we continue our global expansion as a value driven affiliate partner network you can trust!

To book a meeting with our team at IGB London Affiliate Conference, the next global affiliate event we’re attending – CLICK HERE