Gen3 Marketing + Moonpull

ROB: [00:00:00] Hey, Sam.

SAM: Hi Rob.

ROB: I've got a question for you. So do you have a you piece of paper in front of you? Uh,

SAM: yes. Let me get one. Okay. Okay, I'm ready.

ROB: Now I want you to fold that piece of paper 42 times.

SAM: Okay. Are you gonna make sure I can count to 42? Like what's the punchline on this one?

ROB: No, keep going. I mean, realistically, I reckon you'll get to about eight and you won't be able to go any further.

SAM: Yeah.

ROB: So if you were able to fold the piece of paper for two times, how thick? Mm-hmm. Do you think it would be?

SAM: I think it'd be. A very robust piece of paper.

ROB: Like taller than you. Taller than your house.

SAM: I mean, how tall do you think I am? It's 42 times. I don't think it would be that tall. No, it would just be like a bundled up piece of paper.

Okay. I'm dying to know where you're going with this.

ROB: If you were to fold that piece of paper 42 times. You would be able to get to the moon?

SAM: What?

ROB: Yes, it would [00:01:00] be the thickness of over 380,000 kilometers.

SAM: That was not what I was expecting you to tell me. Um, is there a reason why we're talking about the moon right now?

ROB: Uh, well, yeah. I mean, you know, we're speaking to Moonpull, so that was my kind of theme for this intro section. But, um, but that's about the, that's about as 10 as the link as you can get. Hello, I'm Rob. And this is Sam.

SAM: Hi,

ROB: and welcome to a brand new episode of Awin-Win marketing podcast, where we go behind the scenes of some of the most interesting and innovative partnerships in the affiliate industry.

SAM: And where are we headed today? Rob, where's the rocket ship taking us?

ROB: Not quite. Um, today we are going behind the scenes to take a closer look at probably the most important part of affiliate marketing

SAM: coffee.

ROB: Uh, no, Sam, we're not talking about coffee. No, we're talking about tracking.

SAM: Oh, of course. Coffees second, depending on who you ask

ROB: Tea second,

SAM: but mm, mm-hmm.

Okay. We'll see. So tell me though, who have you been speaking to to explain more about the world of affiliate tracking?

ROB: Well, I was lucky enough to be joined by one of our biggest agency partners, gen [00:02:00] three, um, alongside Moonpull, a tracking auditing solution who can pinpoint any issues and help get them fixed.

SAM: That's a well-timed story to share given we've just launched Awin’s Conversion Protection Initiative. And there's a growing need for stronger tracking. I'm sure listeners will be really keen to hear more on the topic.

ROB: Yeah, that's right. We've had hundreds of Awin advertisers upgrade their tracking setups recently to align with the CPI.

So it was really interesting to hear from an agency that's actually navigating a lot of those conversations with advertisers. And their partnership with Moonpull has actually really helped them lift the lid on individual tracking issues and get ahead of them before they actually result in more long-term problems.

So, are you ready to dive in, Sam?

SAM: Lemme go get a coffee first.

STEVE: I set up with others a network in 2000 that we grew and then sold to a OL in 2008. Then became part of Awin in 2011, and then my journey was on to working for various [00:03:00] publishers. I worked for UK Web Media. I've worked with Easy Fundraising. I've helped set up publisher discovery and also involved with Involved Tech, so a very wide ranging experience in the affiliate industry.

ROB: That's Steve Brown, CEO of Moonpull.

STEVE: Through the whole of that journey, you run a network. You know, tracking is challenging. You work at what is a loyalty or cashback publisher, you actually see the untracked sales queries. Mm-hmm. And so the premise of Moonpull was very much about helping networks, publishers, advertisers, and agencies.

All work together better to make affiliate marketing better for everybody.

GREG: So I've been with gen three for coming up to two years, and prior to that I was actually a client of gen three working in e-commerce. And I sort of worked with Gen three for probably about 15 years where I was in charge of affiliates and other sort of digital marketing channels.

ROB: And that's Greg Baines, SVP for Gen three Marketing.

GREG: Prior to sort of working in e-commerce, I worked in publishing for a number of years, so I've got a quite a good understanding of markets from subscriptions to business [00:04:00] to, uh, people buying online.

ROB: Yeah, yeah. And it's also across obviously the different perspectives in the channel as well, which is quite useful.

GREG: Yeah. I think because I was, I've had everything from TV and out of home through the paid search, SEO. Uh, content affiliates, I do have a good understanding of the analytics and how the channels have to play together. Mm-hmm. And then the challenges you have as a client trying to ask for budget. So I think that's why tracking is so important, that the more you can track as the channel owner, the more you can fight for the budget.

Mm-hmm. And the more you understand the different types of tracking, the better it is when you're having those conversations with your boss about why you need that budget as an affiliate manager rather than the paid search manager that the analytics might say. Drives 70% of their sales.

ROB: Mm-hmm. And would you say that that challenge is particularly difficult for affiliate managers?

Or is that just maybe a paranoid misconception that we all have?

GREG: No, I, I think it's probably, historically you could argue affiliates drive 10% of their business' revenue. Mm-hmm. As we move to more sort of probabilistic tracking and AI driven analytics, which is sort of the way [00:05:00] things are going, there's a lot more multi-touch attribution going on and assumptions made on the user journey.

So if the affiliate channel's very last click, it's a vital part of that. But you've also got affiliates that are more upper funnel. The challenge really with the likes of Google Analytics, with GA four is that you need to have a certain number of unique journeys. Mm-hmm. For that journey to be recognized as a path to sale.

Mm-hmm. And I think sometimes it's a lot easier in paid search 'cause it's a lot more, more linear, where the affiliates, you might be going to a review site, you might be going to a content site, you might find an offer, and then you switch devices or you find an offer and then you just type in the brand 'cause you want to, uh, make the purchase.

And click on the paid search link.

ROB: Mm.

STEVE: I think that the challenge of the affiliate industry is it is a CPA model. Mm. And therefore it's a cost that the advertiser pays for a specific product or specific basket being, uh, purchased. Mm-hmm. Then the publisher, many publishers want the transaction to be recorded back to the click.

Mm-hmm. And so the, we're going to pay you everything you are due is [00:06:00] great. A lot of publishers need it back to the click, not just back to who they are. Mm. And it's marrying the two, the requirement of the affiliate model to be CPA and the requirement of many publishers to have the, the transaction back to the click.

GREG: Yeah. And then overlay that with the, the legal requirement that if it's PII. Related in any sense. Mm-hmm. You've only got those customers that opt in.

STEVE: Yeah. So I think your question to Greg was, is it harder for an affiliate manager? And I think yes, because they've got sort of multiple things that they've got to get right?

Mm-hmm. The CPA model and the back to the click. But if you are managing paid search, you can actually look at it more holistically and use Google's sort of estimates, if you like. Mm-hmm. Of what's working, because that's good enough to say, yes, these products are selling well at this ROI and these ones aren't.

Mm-hmm. So we'll. Do more of the first and less of the second.

ROB: Yeah.

STEVE: Yeah. Makes sense.

ROB: What was, um, the impulse behind creating Moonpull? How did you come to launch it?

STEVE: I've been interested in affiliate marketing since [00:07:00] 2000, as we heard earlier. And with that comes knowing about tracking. And one of the lifeblood of running a network is keeping the tracking reliable.

Mm-hmm. Because you've got to pay the publishers what they're due. The advertisers should be paying what they're expecting to pay and. When you run a network, you know that tracking breaks, you know that it breaks for a huge number of unexpected reasons as well. Well, I understood tracking from a network perspective.

Then I understood the untracked sales queries issue in very much detail from working with easy fundraising, which is talking to other publishers. And that led me into realizing that to address, say, half the tracking issues, you can do that by observing how the tracking implementation is working. Mm-hmm.

By just using the standard technologies to follow affiliate links through and see whether the first party cookies are being set. So I decided to set that up as a business and when I found the [00:08:00] right CTO, then we were all systems go.

ROB: Mm-hmm. Were you surprised that something like it didn't already exist or,

STEVE: I mean, all affiliate networks and all publishers and probably all advertisers and all agencies, they have their statistical approach looking to see whether tracking is reliable or not.

Mm-hmm. But that is reporting historically. Mm-hmm. And. I mean, one of the things that perhaps I knew more than others was this sort of what we would call the half life of tracking. Mm-hmm. That the first implementation is put in. Well, and then it just gets nibbled away at, and you just don't see that if you are taking the statistical approach.

Mm-hmm. I

GREG: think as a client as well, you sort of look at the trends and you sort of see what tracking looks like. It's continuing, it's on a sim similar path, but then as we've gone into the data. You realize that the network might say tracking's working. Mm-hmm. We do the Moonpull audit and we discover, yeah, the tracking's working, but this cookie consent banner is actually not working because it's been set up by another team that don't have oversight on the whole user journey.

Mm-hmm. And a [00:09:00] simple thing is. It doesn't automatically apply the cookie when you, when you click, accept means that we're losing another 20% of traffic that you weren't aware of. Mm-hmm. Simple things like that you don't necessarily see in the big picture. But working with Steve and the Moonpull team, we've really been able to dig into the details and solve some of these problems quite early on.

Much of the surprise of the, uh, the advertisers.

ROB: Yeah. And I wanted to ask you both a question on what you think the state of affiliate tracking is in the industry today. So on a scale of one to 10, um, where one. Tracking is completely and profoundly broken, and 10 is as good as it's, it could possibly be within the framework of current technologies.

How would you rate the general state of tracking affiliate today? Would you venture a. A number on that scale.

STEVE: Oh, you, you definitely want a number. Well, rarely is tracking completely broken. Yeah. Because if it becomes completely broken, people spot it, and a decision has to be made quickly.

ROB: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

STEVE: So it is never zero or one. Yeah. Then you get, it's on a spectrum and [00:10:00] sometimes it can be for some advertisers. Nine, I hesitate to say 10, because there's always things like ad blockers out there. The internet is slow. Sometimes it inhibits things. Mm-hmm. But it's up to nine and different advertisers who perhaps haven't implemented first party tracking are overzealous on reversals because they might reverse the whole basket as opposed to just products in a basket.

Mm-hmm. It goes sub five sometimes. Mm-hmm. But I think one of the things that publishers are doing is being more selective of their advertisers, and actually they're drawing advertisers towards the top of the scale. Mm-hmm. Because they know where they're actually losing out a little bit more now.

ROB: Yeah.

Yeah. If I were to push you both to, to identify like one single big challenge that tracking currently faces in industry, what would you put at the top of the pile?

STEVE: I think it's got to be user consent, right? Yeah. Because it impacts all first party tracking. [00:11:00] That requires a first party cookie, and advertiser has to make a decision.

Does this cookie require consent? And then they have to technically act on it. And it's got two potentials to go wrong for tracking an affiliate sale. One sales that don't get given consent don't track, but also the technical implementation of the consent platform can go wrong. So even if there was an intention for it to track, it might not track.

Mm-hmm.

GREG: I think I'd probably go stage further than that and say it's also device based because as certainly in the UK, we're very mobile first. Mm-hmm. And therefore we're very. Safari based in most cases, or if you're Android, you're gonna be Google, but both are are going in the same direction that tracking is.

As Steve said, you're opting in. So by moving our thinking from being PC laptop based to mobile device based, that's probably where the challenge is going to be. Mm-hmm. That. A lot of people will just transact simple, easy transactions you do on your phone. You don't think I'm going to get my laptop out and sit down and do it.

It's an impulse purchase and that's [00:12:00] where we'll start to notice the, the tracking disparities where the browsers are blocking it.

ROB: Yeah. And in the UK where obviously you know that M commerce kind of penetration is so much higher, and I think you can see it kind of like in your own personal experiences, your confidence in making a transaction.

Yeah, on a mobile, I booked a holiday for like two weeks in Italy, like yesterday on my phone. I would never have done that like five years ago. That would've been absolutely a laptop kind of full screen. I need to see all the information I possibly can. Yeah. Before I, you know, put my card details in,

GREG: or even car insurance, or you are on the comparison site, it's easy to do it on your phone.

Mm-hmm. Unless you're really going into deep detail to understand the implications. Yeah. If it's like a renewal or something, you just, it's an easy purchase.

STEVE: Yeah. And many people don't have a desktop anymore. Mm-hmm. So it's like a landline phone. Yes. Yeah. I think going back to the consent question, you've got.

Different consent laws in different territories. Mm-hmm. So you've got the European ones, which are broadly the same as the UK laws, and there's two laws. One about the setting of a cookie and one about personal information. [00:13:00] Mm-hmm. And then many other countries. So the US included really only has the second one, which is about the use of personal information.

Mm-hmm. And they're behind really when those laws came in. So perhaps they're three years old in certain states. And people are just really starting to ask themselves, does affiliate marketing include personal information or not? And that is an incredibly difficult question for a legal counsel to answer.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

ROB: This isn't intended as a question to, to kind of lay the blame at anyone's individual door, as it were, around the state of tracking. And but whose responsibility do you think it is to kind of fix these issues when they, when they arise?

GREG: Honestly, I think it's a collective issue. Mm. Because we all have a vested interest in it, and we, we need to work together.

There's a danger that you might get a publisher contacting an advertiser directly and the advertiser's like, I dunno what's going on. Or you got the network doing it. The client might not know what's going on. So I think the agencies where possible, working with the networks and the publishers to understand what the common themes are.

Steve and I have done a lot of work just [00:14:00] identifying. The top 10, I think became the top 15 reasons why tracking breaks. I think we need to be sharing that and explaining, there's lots of ways tracking can break and as a collective industry, we're on top of them so that we can all educate and learn and fix.

Mm-hmm.

STEVE: I think there's a need for people to understand their contribution towards understanding tracking. So if you're a publisher and you're about to send 10,000 clicks to an offer mm-hmm. You should do the diligence and check that it's going to track. Mm-hmm. Before you send that traffic there. So I think that like other industries, you have an obligation to your professional self to actually understand are the partners you are working with, reliable.

Mm-hmm. And part of bringing people together is actually letting people know what their responsibility is to work together well. So the education part is really important so each of the players can do their part, but absolutely everyone has a key element in it.

ROB: I've come to you on this first, Greg, but tracking is the linchpin, the backbone of the industry.

And [00:15:00] every platform, every network will obviously try to ensure as much as possible that it continues to function, um, as well as possible. Do you think that it should be considered a commercially framed proposition to customers or something that the industry simply agrees this is how we should do it, and it should be standardized as much as possible?

GREG: Personally, I think standardization is the way to go. I know there's a danger at collusion, but we're working alongside other. Marketing Goliath. We've got Google ubiquitous standard. Mm-hmm. There's delights of TikTok, et cetera, are also coming through, but you can only have one sale. You can split that sale across different channels, but we've got to have a standard approach of measuring and, and being consistent.

ROB: Mm-hmm.

GREG: Because it's, it's very hard to move forward as a, as an industry when we've got these inconsistencies and the affiliate channel's got so many different types of opportunities in there from someone reading a magazine article and clicking through on a link to. Shopping through Google to looking for a voucher code and cashback and all the other different types of affiliates I [00:16:00] haven't mentioned.

Mm-hmm. The more consistent we can be with tracking, the more we can work together within the framework of being compliant with um GDPR. The more we can maybe look at anonymized click volumes to get a sense of what the landscape looks like to work out the probabilistic conversion rates. Mm-hmm. I think we do need to be consistent 'cause that's what we're up against when we're looking at.

Google, uh, a GA four. There's a lot of AI probabilistic tracking in there. Every company will do it differently. Mm-hmm. But you are working with the data to the best of your abilities. So the more standard it is, the easier it is to apply the same logic.

ROB: I guess that that sort of fragmentation and lack of standardization is arguably one of the characteristics of the channel.

Right. We're working with lots of different types of partner, maybe on a program. Programs have different terms. They have different approaches to how they commission. Like a lot of it is so nuanced and individuated that. Standardization has always been something I think affiliates struggled to emulate with some of those bigger, kinda more universal channels.

GREG: Yeah. I mean, as a client, one of the things I always tried to do was to be consistent with my [00:17:00] cookie duration. Mm. Because there's no point saying on affiliates it's 45 days, but it's seven days on, on, on search. It's like, well, let's have it the same so we can measure it the same. 'cause the more you can avoid that channel conflict, the more confidence the finance team have in your ability to optimize the programs, and therefore you've got more chance of getting the budget.

STEVE: I think the standardization issue is a really, really difficult one. Mm-hmm. Because there's the basics of it, which is we'll pay on last click, but then very quickly it differentiates. So you, you've just mentioned the cookie duration. Will Safari have their own view on cookie duration? Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Regardless of what the advertiser wants. Yeah. So again. A publisher using an audience that's heavy on Safari has different terms than a publisher who's using an audience on Chrome. Mm-hmm. And the nuances of that are not understood by everybody, but that's more easily understood nuance. Mm-hmm. So I think it's really challenging to say the network should standardize.

Yeah. Um. I think what underpins it is a better understanding of the levers that the different players are [00:18:00] pulling. So you can actually do a better comparison of one program to another. Mm-hmm. And someone has a better understanding of whether the program is working as intended. Mm-hmm.

GREG: Maybe consistency is a better word of standardization, but I, I was thinking, we were at a a Moonpull event recently where we had a publisher talking about.

The fact that they work with a lot of influencers mm-hmm. Who drive traffic through the likes of meta and the browsers are within meta. Mm-hmm. So they don't track. Mm-hmm. And once you close that session down, it's gone. There are ways you can work around that, but again, it's that consistent and understanding the different types of affiliates you're working with to make sure you have some data, some way of validating their place in the conversion path.

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ROB: Kind of reverting back to that previous question about what the single biggest challenge is. I mean, you mentioned consent, obviously being something that's obviously a real priority, but education does feel like it's, it's right up there as well.

GREG: I think tracking can be scary. Yeah. It's code and a lot of marketers like, oh, that's what the dev team do.

Yeah. But the dev team can only implement what the marketing team's instructed them to do. Mm-hmm. And it's understanding what the user journey is. Does a brand have a subdomain? Is that included in the, the user journey? Mm-hmm. Do you have two sites that you [00:20:00] send traffic between? Are you passing the traffic values from one site to the other?

Mm-hmm. Do you have, um, an m website or a, um, a native app? Is it tracked? And as Steve said, yeah, you can get a publishers that might be wanted a deep link.

ROB: Yeah,

GREG: it's great. But if you, if you don't know that's happening, you don't know that, that's not maybe tracking properly. Mm-hmm.

STEVE: One of the things that we found on the Moonpull journey.

Is the, you can actually talk to people and people as well as needing to educate. They need to have confidence. Mm-hmm. That they can understand part of the tracking experience. And so we didn't start Moonpull to talk to people about the memory cookie.

ROB: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: But we very much use the term, the memory cookie as the cookie that has to be there to link the handover.

From the publisher through the redirect path to the advertiser. Mm-hmm. And then at the end of the journey, you've got the checkout page that talks back and you need a memory between the two stages. Mm-hmm. To make affiliate marketing work. Mm-hmm. And so the question that we are getting our publisher clients to ask themselves is.

Is the [00:21:00] memory there? Mm-hmm. And so is the memory cookie, there is the memory, local storage there. And from a publisher's perspective, by and large, if the answer to that is yes, they can move on.

ROB: Mm-hmm.

STEVE: And if the answer is no, then how do they go about unpicking it? And this is where Moonpull helps in giving enough information to that person that is not scary.

Mm-hmm. That can then go down the chain and when it arrives at the affiliate manager at the brand. They don't go, my goodness. Tracking is scary. Yeah. They go, oh, okay. I've got a tracking query. Yeah. And the publisher's telling me the memory cookie's not there. Yeah. And then they go, okay, I've got this PDF don't quite understand it, I'll send it on to my developer.

Yeah. And the developer goes, yeah, okay. I get that. Yeah. And actually. Having enough information that people in the chain feel comfortable. And I think that is one of the things that Moonpull is helping unlock.

GREG: Yeah. Yeah. I think it's, I'd probably second that, that as an agency we might say, Hey, tracking's broken in the past.

Like we just, we don't see it being tracked. But now I can say, here's the Moonpull audit. Here's all the technical [00:22:00] reports to where is breaking what the issues are. And then we can give that to the affiliate manager who passes it onto their dev team. Yeah. And we fix things a lot faster and there's no back and forth.

We don't have endless. Email exchanges.

ROB: Two things actually kind of stood out from those responses actually. And one is that idea of like humanizing quite technical language a lot of the time and something like memory cookie or just the memory of what's going on in terms of that journey feels that's something that would resonate much more with people that aren't in that world of technical implementation.

And the other bit is that I think we think about tracking as being, it's a technical journey that happens online between different websites. There's a chain obviously there that we're trying to kind of connect the dots on, but there's also that chain that you are talking about from a person to person thing within teams.

I. So an advertiser business, it's about connecting maybe the marketing manager with the technical team and making sure that information, that handover that's occurring there is also consistent and coherent and that the fixes can be then effectively made.

GREG: I think it just speeds up the process. 'cause you can say, here's the problem.

You can see it quite clearly [00:23:00] here. So your tech team can pick that up immediately and fix it rather than there's a problem. You need to go and work out where it is.

STEVE: Yeah. And also if you spot a problem earlier, it generally gets fixed quicker. Because if you say we've got a problem, but we think it's been there for three or four months, it's reasonable for someone to take three or four months to fix it.

Yeah. But if you say, we've got a problem. It happened yesterday. It's causing a big issue. There's a slight sense of urgency around it. Yeah. That gets to fix within. Not necessarily a week, but perhaps into the next sprint. Yeah. Yeah. And everyone can move on. Yeah. Yeah.

ROB: Greg, you've been using Moonpull for how long now? At Gen3,

GREG: we've been working with Steve and the team for the last eight months, and during that time we've been auditing the clients, just working out. Which programs are tracking correctly, which programs are tracking after consent and which programs are tracking without consent being needed.

So it depends on, um, sort of like got a traffic light system to help us understand where the issues are. The biggest issue we found really is the cookie consent banner [00:24:00] because it's not something that the marketing team would typically consider when they're checking their tracking. Mm-hmm. And it's, it's managed by the legal and compliance team who don't understand the implications of what they're doing.

They just need to make sure that customers have the option to opt in to be tracked.

STEVE: Mm-hmm. But what we find is. Legal teams are buying consent products, not for online marketing reasons. Mm. They're buying it because they've got to comply with CCPA or they've got to comply with GDPR, and so they've got to put a consent infrastructure into place.

Mm. Of which the CMP, the consent prompt is just the front window. Really? Mm. And so the legal team have given them this product and the marketing team have gone, thanks.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah.

STEVE: Um, now what do I do? How do we adapt it to suit our own purposes?

GREG: Well, I think part of that, and it's sort of slightly off topic here, is that each company will define the pixels differently.

So one company might say, my analytics package is essential. Another might say, but you use it for Google for doing retargeting. So it, it is got to be advertising and there's [00:25:00] no consistency. So it's back to the same conversation as earlier. Yeah. That there's no legal definition of what things should be.

Mm-hmm. And if there's a risk. It gets put into marketing and when you are working with global companies, the UK might be a smaller cog in the bigger wheel, and if there's a risk of a fine and it's, it's for the uk, the chances are it will just get put into marketing. Yeah. So that does have an impact on the tracking that we're able to measure.

And then just trying to understand, does it work? Yeah. Does the consent banner work as intended? Because no one ever. Historically, it's probably checked that user journey through to make sure that things are tracked. Yeah, the assumption is it must work because it's an off the shelf, uh, CMP.

ROB: Yeah.

STEVE: But it has to interact with Google Tag Manager to fire tags.

So it is actually quite a complicated piece of technology. And when you've got Google Tag Manager involved, you've then got other decisions involved of should this sale being attributed to the affiliate channel or is actually this going to be one where. There was a prior click paid search. So those decisions are being [00:26:00] made associated with Google Tag Manager.

Mm-hmm. And therefore associated with the consent prompt. And it all makes to a sort of tricky set of decisions to be made.

GREG: Mm-hmm. So, yeah, that's probably the, the biggest challenge we face. And then it's more where maybe a new product line have been launched.

ROB: Yeah.

GREG: Or it's a new country and the testing just hasn't worked or things just break over time.

Yeah. So that's why you have to keep doing these audits because you can't say I'll fix it.

ROB: Mm.

GREG: Because tomorrow it might be unfixed again. Yeah.

STEVE: Yeah. I mean, it was incredible actually working with an agency who could have better conversations perhaps with advertisers. Mm. To hear the spectrum of issues of how tracking was breaking.

So we could probably have done a list of 10 ourselves prior to working closely with Gen3. We doubled that quite quickly to about 20 different ways, which. Might be the Shopify tag is outta date. Mm. Um, and it's things like that, that we hadn't perhaps considered would be an issue for why tracking might not work.

Mm-hmm. But it's why the work with [00:27:00] an agency, you get to the bottom of those issues and they're being triggered by possibly Moonpull data being overlaid with other bi. Mm-hmm. But it helps get to the bottom of why is the publisher. Not necessarily seeing a conversion on every sale that they feel they should be being tracked for.

ROB: Yeah. And Greg, the conversations that you're having with your clients, they've obviously been receptive to the introduction of Moonpull as an auditing solution for their

GREG: No, they really value it. They thank us for highlighting where there's issues more. I. Promptly. Mm-hmm. And giving them the data to fix them more easily.

Mm-hmm. Because a small client might have to outsource the request to a dev consultancy. A bigger business might have to just book in the time. Yeah. And dev teams never have enough time. Yeah. So tracking being broken, it can be a higher priority, so you get. The faster turnaround, but it's still quite a complicated journey and it does depend on the, the size of the program.

Yeah. But yeah, we do find that very responsive and we get things fixed relatively quickly.

ROB: Yeah.

STEVE: I mean, one of my hopes is over time it just becomes a hygiene thing at a [00:28:00] brand that tracking is fixed. Yeah. And it's not a question of. Should we do it now? Should we do it in three months time? It's hacking's broken, we need to fix it.

And it just becomes that sort of cadence of response.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah. Could you either of you give any, um, tangible instances of where the solution's been used to identify an issue and it's been fixed and has been an advertiser benefit of the back of that?

STEVE: The most obvious one that many people will cite is tagged for setting the first party cookie who's been accidentally taken outta the site.

Mm-hmm. And that absolutely does happen. One publisher said it was a six figure sum that they'd lost for the tag not being there. And when they started using Moonpull, it was clear that that was the reason the advertiser actually acted very quickly. Mm-hmm. And the action of this one publisher benefited all publishers.

Mm-hmm. I mean, it leads onto the very obvious question of, are advertisers happy? To perceive that they're paying more for the sales that result when tracking is fixed. [00:29:00] Mm-hmm. And by and large the answer is yes, because they know that that's part of the journey of running an affiliate program. That at some point in time they're gonna have competitive pressure where their peers do have programs that track well.

Mm-hmm. And they need to be playing the same game with their tracking working well, so that. If a campaign is run, it shows the hundred sales that resulted from it, not a depressed number of 50. Mm-hmm. Because that way, if you see the right result of a campaign, then you can actually grow the program and you can talk to your colleagues about it.

ROB: Yeah. And you can ask for more budget because you have a reliable set of data to, to make that decision in the future.

GREG: I think it's also means the publishers know that they're guaranteed, not guaranteed, but they're going to get a good return from this. Advertiser because they're the ones that have tracking verified and um, fully compliant.

ROB: Yeah.

STEVE: Yeah. So publishers understanding that advertisers take tracking seriously is really important for the future. Yeah. And you know, that is what Gen three is working [00:30:00] with its advertisers on, it's Awin is working with its advertisers on it. You and the overlap obviously is there. And it's crucial to the integrity of the channel that things track well.

Mm-hmm. You know, the affiliate industry occasionally sort of says, oh, we can't track back to the click. You know, what are we going to do? It's important for the affiliate industry to realize that other channels have even bigger issues with actually tracking and attribution. Yeah. And having a first party model is actually a pretty good place to be.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's been, you know. Relatively well insulated, I think, from some of the changes that have been occurring or, yeah, not occurring in Google's case. Mm-hmm. Yeah. So Greg, how are you thinking about the relationship and partnership with Moonpull in the future and how that's gonna evolve?

GREG: I think I, I said before, it's that continuous journey, so I. We work with our clients to make sure they're all tracking correctly and everything's compliant. And then doing those regular audits, I think looking towards having, um, advertisers certified mm-hmm. To say, well, look, this is someone who really takes tracking seriously.

I think that's a, a good way to go forward. Uh, it is [00:31:00] just an ongoing process because we can work with a client and do an audit and then three weeks later I'm like. Can you just check that one again? It looks like there's something crops up and indeed there's an issue that has come up, so it's never finished.

And as Steve said, it's that keep working with the advertisers, helping them understand the issue so that they can learn so that it doesn't happen in the future. It's part of the education and the ongoing process.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah. And what does that look like from your roadmap in terms of the things that you're building and developing in the future.

STEVE: The certification product is something that we have already, but sometimes you develop something that's a bit early. Mm. I think certification will have its place in 2025, which is broadly if someone on behalf of an advertiser is auditing 50 links a month that says, these people take tracking seriously.

There's an environment. Why they're doing this. Mm-hmm. So the certification badge that Moonpull then gives, is one that publishers should take reassurance from, that actually, if they promote this advertiser, it's going to track. Mm-hmm. You know, the partnership [00:32:00] of tracking is key. And so this is a very visual way of saying we're playing our part in the partnership.

ROB: Yeah. Yeah. What's one thing about tracking that you wish more people in the affiliate industry understood?

STEVE: First party tracking is both JavaScript and server to server tracking.

GREG: Greg, it's not something that somebody else is responsible for. It's, it's everyone's collective responsibility and everyone has their part to play in understanding when it's working and when it's not, and getting it fixed.

SAM: Thanks again to Steve and Greg for taking the time to give us the inside track on their partnership.

ROB: Pun intended?.

SAM: Always pun intended, Rob.

ROB: Looking forward to our next episode sam, who are you actually chatting to?

SAM: Next time round I'll be speaking to State and Liberty, a US men's wear brand and the New York Post, one of the mass media publishers they work with.

ROB: Hey, I'm walking here.

SAM: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. So in the meantime, you've enjoyed listening to today's episode or any of the

ROB: That's my. [00:33:00] In the meantime, if you've enjoyed listening to today's episode or any of the others we've shared so far, do please give us a rating and review on Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

And of course, you can also head over to a win.com/podcast to find out more.

SAM: As always, thanks so much for listening to Awin-Win Marketing Podcast where we show you how affiliate partnerships always offer a win-win. Bye.