Since 2015, affiliate marketing revenues have increased by 10% year-over-year; experts expect this trend to continue until at least 2021. In the midst of this growth, it’s becoming increasingly crucial for Performance Marketers and Affiliate Managers to effectively track true incremental lift and value of affiliate relationships.
Enter Everflow, a platform developed to address the complex needs of Performance Marketers and the rapidly evolving multichannel approach of their programs. By developing a platform that makes it easier to track affiliate, influencer, in-app, and paid programs and performance, Everflow enables marketers to quickly make campaign decisions with data available in its ecosystem.
UpSellit had the chance to sit down with Michael Cole, Everflow’s VP of Marketing, to discuss how their platform is shaking up the performance marketing space with its management platform.
For our readers unfamiliar with Everflow, how does your platform create value for Performance Marketers and their existing programs?
We do a lot, so it’s easier to break this answer down to a few use cases:
For brands, we make it easy to manage and analyze performance from every channel: Affiliates, Influencers, In-App Publishers, and Media Buying Channels. By consolidating all of this performance data in one place, brands can easily analyze how each channel is delivering results in comparison to one another.
For agencies and performance marketers, we offer a flexible platform for managing all of their advertiser and publisher relationships. We support their current efforts through: Full API access for connecting other solutions, KPI-based automated optimization, and powerful targeting controls.
What makes your platform, reporting, and analytics unique from those that marketers might already be using?
This is always tough as well! Many marketers are using platforms that haven’t received any significant reporting advancements in the past decade, so they don’t know how much better it could be until they see our platform in action.
One part I’d like to highlight is our analytics tools: We offer the ability to drill down into any datapoint. You can select an affiliate (or channel), see their performance by placement, and break down the individual performance of that placement across cities, devices, etc. We make it really easy to optimize away the bad placements hiding behind good sources.
The ability to ‘track performance without using links’ is very interesting. Can you go into more detail about how this is done and what it means for traditional management of multichannel marketing programs?
We handle this in a couple of different ways, depending on what works best for each channel. The most commonly used tracking method is Direct Linking.
How it works is this: Your Partner 8 sends a click to the brand’s website using a URL like “brand.com?pid=8.” When that user reaches the website, our tag will detect that the user came from Partner 8 from the URL, and attribute them with commissions if that user converts on the website.
This method allows marketers to track every channel and delivers SEO value. Affiliate links (which use redirection) are regularly blocked by Google and Facebook, so allowing the marketers to send traffic straight to the brand website unlocks these channels.
Our fully clickless methods use either coupon codes or automatically generated tracking code URLs, both of which are great for influencers and tracking performance from video content.
One of the benefits of Everflow is the granularity of your reporting capabilities. What are some of the parameters by which users can break down performance, and how does that help affiliate managers make informed decisions?
You can break down performance across any major parameter in our system, including placeholders that can be used for receiving any data point. The two most common use cases are:
- Breaking down Partners by their placements or Sub-Affiliates to evaluate and optimize how each of their traffic sources are performing. This makes a huge difference, as almost every affiliate and Partner has dozens of placements, and deactivating their worst-quality traffic sources can massively improve the overall quality.
2. Breaking down performance on a city-level to see how each Partner and Placement are delivering for specific cities. This is helpful for city-specific offers like Food Delivery and Lawyer Leads.
Tell us a little more about the EverXChange marketplace. How does it enable marketers to establish new partnerships and drive growth in their programs?
Our EverXChange Marketplace makes it easy to connect with our curated set of partners that deliver either: Massive scale (like Ad Networks), Media Buying excellence, or a unique type of inventory. Our goal is to make it as easy as possible to connect with high quality partners. Rather than sifting through 5 million affiliates, we provide a small set of personally vetted, high quality partners, and then automatically handle the setup process with them.
Everflow gives users the ability to build custom tracking and conversion domains. How does that help users adapt to an ever-changing affiliate landscape, and how have you seen users make the most of this capability?
It offers control and flexibility by allowing Everflow customers to fully own their relationships and data, rather than having it hosted in an outside network. We have well-known super affiliates that use Everflow for all of their direct advertiser clients because the platform lets them easily set up and manage those relationships directly.
Can you briefly share an Everflow success story? What were some of the challenges Everflow helped solve?
A great success story comes from one of our EverXChange Partners that is classified as having unique inventory – Gridwise. They provide a utility app and social network for Rideshare Drivers and other gig workers, and then promote audience-relevant advertiser offers to that audience. They’ve grown the revenue from their performance division by 40-60X after switching to Everflow. You can read our Gridwise Case Study on how we aided their success here.
Are there any new or upcoming features for the Everflow ecosystem that you’re particularly excited about?
One of our most game-changing features in beta is actually mentioned in the Gridwise Case Study – our Facebook App integration. This allows our clients to push all of their performance and engagement data from Everflow for Facebook Ads. Everflow can track all performance channels and push that data into Facebook, which assists users in optimizing audiences and campaigns accordingly. By leveraging Facebook’s Lookalike audiences, you can get total feedback on the conversions and events from those audiences, see how it compares against other channels, make smarter decisions, and scale your reach massively.