Affiliate Marketing: GoCPA services for Ecom

Hello, these are services for ecom, and I, Olga Satanovskaya. Today we're talking about our favorites, about traffic, traffic in the CPA channel. We recently talked about how to protect it. And today we'll talk about how to get it. This is what GoCPA does. And today my interlocutor is its commercial director and co-founder Artem Filchugov.

- Hello, Artem.

- Hello, Olga.

- Well, let's start from the basics, what does GoCPA do?

- GoCPA provides a platform for creating its own affiliate program for online stores, banks, and insurance companies. Historically, we have dealt only with large companies, now we have solutions for small and medium-sized businesses.

- What is your own affiliate program?

- Your own affiliate program is a system that allows you to attract both Internet resources and any offline resources, including individuals, to distribute your goods and services, and you pay them a fee for the goods or services actually sold, or you can combine reward options when you understand that you have a long sales cycle, and you pay for a lead, not for the final sale. Either you pay for both the lead and the final sale, there are a lot of options that depend on each specific type of business.

- How does a CPA channel work in most cases: there are webmasters, there are many, thousands, dozens, there are aggregators – these are affiliate networks, there are several different, large ones, and, accordingly, the online store simply connects to this affiliate network and receives all the traffic from these webmasters. How is your product different?

- In a classic affiliate network, there is a mutual situation: on the one hand, there are many affiliate networks that you can connect to, on the other hand, each affiliate network has a huge number of offers from their other clients that are presented there. Therefore, it is difficult for a webmaster to navigate through a large number of offers. He chooses the ones that the affiliate network focuses on. Accordingly, in order for you to get more traffic when working with an affiliate network, you need to work closely with this network so that it promotes it among its webmasters. At the same time, in most cases, you don't know who these webmasters are, where they are, etc., because it is hidden behind the affiliate network. For starting to work with an affiliate channel, the affiliate network is almost perfect, i.e. you came, you brought you traffic, you figured out how it works, compared it with other traffic channels, etc., everything is fine. But then you have the question of whether you want to diversify affiliates, pay them with different payment models, or make different payment levels.

"Why would I want to do that?"

- You want to constantly increase traffic.

-Yes.

- You'll hit the ceiling with your CPA networks. That is, as in any channel, you will hit the ceiling.

- Well, for example, I have a CPA channel, I say in the CPA channel that I pay 30% for new traffic, 10% for old traffic. If this is my ceiling, I say: I pay 35% for new traffic, 15% for old traffic, and then my traffic grows again. Isn't it?

- There is a trick here - all CPA networks take % and % is quite large. That is, each online store has margin limits that need to be given to a certain channel. And moreover, as our experience shows, in addition to the fact that there are restrictions in the check, there are still budget limitations. If the companies are large, they have an annual budget, they just can't go beyond it on the final budget, so they can't increase the commission. And when you hit the ceiling, it turns out that in some cases it is easier for you to choose different strategies, most often they choose a strategy: there are understandable big partners, and you just start paying more to this big partner to the detriment of the CPA network's commission. Yes, it may not be great in relation to CPA networks, but it is business development.

- No, wait, how can I pay an affiliate more against a CPA network if I work through a CPA network.

"That's what you need your own affiliate program for. When you realize that you have reached the ceiling in the CPA network, you understand that there is no point in competing just by increasing the commission, you begin to restructure the commission that you have.

- Ok, but if you are a very large advertiser, it will be more profitable for CPA networks to agree on the distribution of commission than to let you go as an advertiser.

- There are different situations, yes, sometimes it can be profitable for them to go down the commission, sometimes not. Sometimes they just don't. That is, again, you need to understand that you work in a CPA network with a manager, not with the owners. Until the owners and top management of the CPA network understand that there is a problem with a large advertiser, the manager may not talk about it.

- Ok, and when we say the word "large advertiser", what is the volume of traffic, or the amount of budget, when the advertiser can already hit this bar?

"That's more than a million rubles a month, and you can already hit that level. These are commission payments to affiliates.

- Let's take an example: one and a half million budget, it contains 20%, for example, the commission of the CPA network, it turns out that we give one million two hundred thousand to webmasters, two hundred and forty we give to the affiliate network. And it is for these two hundred and forty thousand that the budget can be somehow restructured. But after all, your own affiliate network definitely costs some money. What will the economy look like here?

- We offer various solutions and the cheapest solutions start from fifty thousand rubles.

- And what do you offer for this money?

"This is a cloud platform where you can connect up to a hundred partners. Basically, for a start, when you start restructuring your work with CPA networks, this is more than enough. Because usually you start with big partners, you switch them directly. In order to restructure the commission, and it is unlikely that you have more than a hundred large partners. Therefore, for a start, to switch to your affiliate program, this is enough.

- Where do you get these partners from? Because when we work with an affiliate network, partners are affiliated with an affiliate network, you don't know the partners, you said it yourself. I'm such a beauty, I've got myself an affiliate network, where will all these wonderful people find me from and run to, how will I generate traffic?

- Here we help, tell you whatThere are forums, chats, there are telegram channels of webmasters, including webmasters, where you can enter with a new affiliate program and tell that the affiliate program is developing, leaving the mode of working only with CPA networks, and starting to work directly with webmasters, and what is the advantage.

- That is, it turns out that in this case, the manager of the online store needs not only to launch a CPA network with you, but also to start attracting partners on his own?

-Yes.

- Do you help to attract partners?

- We direct to the channels where the partners are.

- How do you do it?

- We tell the manager, depending on the topic, i.e. either it is an ecom, or it is a bank, or it is an insurance company, we tell where at what events, on which channels this kind of offers are discussed, and how best to enter it.

- In your experience, how long does it take for an online store with a budget of one and a half million to reach the same level of traffic that it had with affiliate networks?

- If they transfer the entire budget to their own affiliate program, it can take up to six months. In other words, it is a long process. Affiliates migrate, they do not migrate immediately, some partners can continue to work through CPA networks directly, comparing some indicators, because on the one hand, partners always do not trust CPA networks, this is a classic. That's how long the market has existed, they don't trust CPA networks. But at the same time, they don't trust new affiliate programs either. Therefore, they compare the indicators in the CPA network, in the affiliate program, and expect that the affiliate program, in addition to rates, will offer something else. Another advantage of its affiliate program is quick feedback from partners. You say: we want to hold a promotion for such and such a product. And our partners say that no one will buy it, let's not promote this product. But we see that you have another one, and it will definitely be well bought now, let's promote it.

— Does this mean that with this direct interaction with a partner, revenue in the channel can grow?

- Yes, the revenue in the channel for all our clients with whom we work is growing.

- And in comparison with affiliate networks, how much does it grow? How effective is it?

- Sometimes it all comes down to budget constraints. But most of our partners are growing exponentially. After a year or two, they grow exponentially in the CPA channel.

- Is it twofold, or three, or five, ten?

- Up to ten times. We have clients whose budgets and turnover in the CPA channel have increased more than tenfold.

-Wow. And this is downright serious. You told me about solutions for fifty thousand rubles. You give the platform, then do it yourself. I'm sure you have other suggestions for some bigger guys.

- Yes, and in general, initially we started with them, with these large proposals, and we have a fairly large range of solutions for enterprise. The cheapest one costs one hundred and eighty-five thousand and so on ad infinitum. And we have clients who develop solutions for themselves.

- Enterprise Solution Than It's a PrinceIs it different from a cloud-based solution?

- When you integrate with a cloud solution, we give an API through which partners are integrated, and we give an API by which you must integrate in order to transmit the initial information about the order, and the final statuses of orders or requests for which you pay partners. In the case of large companies, as a rule, the processes are so complex and time-consuming that they cannot integrate with a ready-made solution and need to adapt to their processes, and then they just need an enterprise solution, in which we analyze the company's process and integrate in the most comfortable way for the company.

- In addition to the fact that you integrate on your own, what else do you do there?

- We provide full technical support to partners, and help in communicating with offer partners.

- Do you invite partners to the site yourself?

- We try not to do this, because then there is a feeling between clients that we can poach partners. That's why we don't do that.

- Your enterprise solution obviously has large customers. What's the biggest budget that goes through you?

- It doesn't go through us, it goes through the payment to partners. And the largest budget is fifty million rubles a month. That is, fifty million is paid to the partners.

- Is there any ceiling in the affiliate program beyond which your technology will need to be redone or updated, or something like that?

"Even if it exists, we haven't gotten to it yet. And we don't see such limitations.

- You talk so well about affiliate programs that it seems that there is nothing difficult. Come, find partners on absolutely understandable social networks and you will be happy. Of course, it sounds cool, but it seems to me that it doesn't happen in real life.

- From the point of view of search, in principle, it happens. And then new difficulties begin, because in any large company it takes a very long time to sign contracts.

"That's true.

- Because this is a long process, a long process of approval, verification of the counterparty, etc. And this is one of the deterrents for the rapid development of your own affiliate program. In our experience, clients resort to certain intermediary companies that aggregate partners for themselves, and they do not aggregate for themselves as agencies, because when they aggregate agencies, there is negativity. After all, the agency competes, it also delivers traffic, even if not from the CPA channel, but traffic. And partners subconsciously don't trust agencies. And if it is a company that deals with settlements, then they are calm about it, and they understand that this is a plus, because they will quickly sign a contract with a company that deals with settlements, than they will sign with a large company, with their lawyers.

- Well, the company that does the calculations and helps the GoCPA company, guess who? Of course, PIM Solutions. Because what we understand is in financial instruments and calculations of everything that is possible. I hope you have a good time working with us?

- Yes, we are very good, and our customers are also very good.

- In addition to technology, you also provide technical support for customers. I suspect it's a fairly frequent job. Do you have any SLAs about this?

- Unlike the technological part, there is no SLA for support, but we try to implement it as soon as possible, if it is a partner who works with our client, we respond on the day of the request, that we have accepted the problem, understood it and try to inform the solution period, if it is really a long solution period, or prompt the partner how he can solve the problem right now. We believe that not only the fast support of our customers, but also the quick response to requests and high-quality support of their partners, who, in fact, supply them with traffic, is an important factor, and we focus on this as an enterprise solution. We try to do it better than our competitors.

- If we are talking about your enterprise solutions, what should be the company's budget for it to go into this enterprise? Who is it interested in? So that I don't have to calculate now.

- We believe that if you spend about 10% of the total budget on solutions, then this is acceptable. And most of our clients started from similar positions. That is, they allocated and considered that 10% of the cost of the platform is acceptable. And, of course, then they grow several times, and this becomes a share for them.

- A favorite story, or maybe not a favorite one, but nevertheless frequent. A story about a CPA channel is a fraud. What are you doing about it here?

- There are a lot of different types of fraud.

- Oh yes, I already know that.

- There is fraud, when partners steal traffic from each other, there is fraud, when partners steal your traffic, which you could get through context, but rewrite it to themselves. Globally, we still recommend contacting companies that specialize in fraud, because in addition to accounting for fraud and settlement, they can also provide video evidence for partners confirming that the partner really committed fraud in such and such a way. We can calculate some of the most common types of fraud analytically and say that here we suspect that the partner is cheating. That is, for example, the user spends abnormally little time on the site and makes orders or something else abnormally fast. This is a suspicion of fraud. We have options in the platform, both in the cloud and in the enterprise, that can be enabled and watched.

- Why don't you provide anti-fraud solutions yourself?

- Because, in addition to analytics, anti-fraud solutions involve a number of other activities, for example, the most common type of fraud that is asked to be closed is context. You need to have regional IP addresses to emulate search queries in the regions, and view it all. It's a standalone platform. In other words, this is really the second parallel big business that needs to be built. There are at least three big players in the Russian market that provide anti-fraud solutions, and there is no point in competing with them.

- But at the same time, are there any solutions that make their own affiliate networks?

-Yes.

- Accordingly, you are not alone in the market. How are you different from similar other services? Do you have a principle?What are the differences?

- Mainly, we differ in the fact that all these companies are somehow part of some advertising holding. Therefore, in addition to the platform, they immediately offer the services of partners. Attracting partners, settlements with partners, etc. This can lead to risks, conflicts of interest, i.e. they are friends with these partners, they are not friends with them, they will not recommend you to work with them. And there may be decent and high-quality traffic. There are risks of fraud that need to be additionally controlled. There are limitations, i.e. when it is an agency that makes payments for you and works with partners, instead of adjusting to your processes, they try to adjust you to their processes as soon as possible. And again, we provide solutions that fit into the company's processes as comfortably as possible.

- How long does it take to integrate your solutions into the company?

- The fastest thing we did was two weeks.

- And the longest?

- And the longest is up to three months. It all depends on the resources within the company, on the complexity of the processes, and on what they will need to adapt.

- Look, in order to start working with you, the manager of an online store needs to rebuild what he does. Because he was just following the partner, the affiliate network, and here he has to look for traffic himself, by and large. This can be very scary. Here's how you motivate companies to switch to their affiliate programs?

- We have an option, in principle, for those who are completely afraid, and do not know how it will all be, we have a trial option, limited to five partners, unlimited in terms of time of use. That is, you connect up to five partners and experiment. And you compare the indicators of direct work with partners, compared to what you had through CPA networks.

- When the online store switched to its affiliate network, did it "marry" you forever? That is, you are the only one who runs this network and he cannot move to some other company?

- He can change the platform, we can't limit him here. And we have cases when clients have expressed a desire to buy the platform into their perimeter.

- Why?

- They decided that they had already grown so much in terms of turnover. We provide the service as standard as a hosting platform. That is, we install a platform, integrate the client with it, but it is located on a separate hosting dedicated for him. If the company's payout turnover becomes very high, and the company's security begins to believe that the system should be inside the IT structure, more closely integrated, and no one should have access to it from the outside, then they decide to buy out.

- How many clients do you have now?

- Since enterprise solutions are focused on large companies with large budgets, we now have more than ten clients. We are actively working, the transaction cycle and the sales cycle are very long – more than six months.

- Yes, that's true. In addition, if I understand correctly, a small number of companies are now thinking about creating their own affiliate program. Everyone is so used to walking to affiliate networks and work in them, that the history of your affiliate program, it seems to me, needs to be formed in the "heads" of online stores for a long time, that this is so.

- Yes, about every fifth person only thinks about it.

- Well, every fifth, this is still a good, excellent result. Did you mention the cloud, what do you have there? There are more stores with a smaller budget.

- We launched the cloud only in the summer. And now we are limited to the clients that we have invited there. And we want to bring the tools of the cloud, since this is self-service, to a higher level, so that, having already launched an advertising campaign, new customers can comfortably connect and do not experience any discomfort when connecting.

- What do your first customers say?

- Of course, they have comments and wishes.

- How many of them have already fallen off?

- No one yet. For now, everyone is with us, and we hope that everyone will go further with us and develop.

- And from this point of view, what is the potential of the cloud, how many customers can there be in the cloud at the same time?

- Technically, there are no restrictions on this. Then it's the market. We expect that we will go beyond the Russian market, and the cloud is more suitable for this than the enterprise.

- Well, let's hope that in a year and a half the story in the CPA channel will change. In addition to the fact that we have a lot of work with affiliate CPA networks, with their own difficulties, we will also have a large number of online stores that will discover the history of their own affiliate program, and will be happy to receive high-quality and effective traffic from the CPA channel. And GoCPA will help you with that, right?

- We believe that it is the mission of our company to develop the CPA market and make it accessible to everyone.

- Friends, if you are already thinking about it, then I am sure that Artem and his team will be happy to tell you more about their programs and will see you among their clients. Artem, thank you very much for coming and telling us about your decisions. We wish you success in having more customers, and so do we.

- And for our market to develop and develop.

- For our market to grow and develop. And I will continue to do interviews with services for ecom.