Dustin Howes: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I'm your host, Dustin Howes. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me every Tuesday and Thursday here on LinkedIn Live and anywhere you get your podcasts, so please consider subscribing. My nerd guests of the day is Mike Curry, affiliate Manager over at Quintz. Thanks for joining me, mike, and welcome to the Nerditorium.

Mike Currey: 0:53

Thanks for having me Looking forward to it. Obviously, you have a better camera than I do.

Dustin Howes: 0:59

Oh well, the first rule about podcasting live is you can't look better than the host that's podcasting, or 101. I mean, this face is made for radio, but I have to do my best here.

Dustin Howes: 1:16

Yeah, and the microphone too I got this little one day I'll get there I can hear you and that's all that matters. Thanks for being here, buddy, appreciate you. Today we're going to go do some live Q&A about affiliate. Anybody that has questions about affiliate jump on into the chat. Hang out with me and Mike. We would love to spit any kind of information about affiliate, but without further ado, mike, who are you?

Mike Currey: 1:47

Well, right now I'm the affiliate lead at Quintz not Quintzay Quintz, you know overseeing the affiliate channel and performance PR or performance influencer. I guess a little bit of my background is. I came from kind of randomly, came into affiliates. I initially started in the music industry doing marketing, PR, print, sales, programmatic display for Microsoft and then, you know, rolled over into a three month contract at T-Mobile where I was doing display retargeting and affiliates and eventually came on full time to do affiliate over there and got into the world of this 10 years about.

Dustin Howes: 2:30

Well, not your traditional story of like falling into affiliate, yeah, but not uncommon as well. Like, affiliate is kind of a lot of everybody's stepping stone into marketing in general. But you went the other way, so that's an interesting move, but you must have figured out pretty early that you enjoyed the partnership aspect of all of this, right.

Mike Currey: 3:00

Yeah, and when I was doing like print sales, I did print digital and sponsorship, so there's a lot of like collaboration and kind of building partnerships. And then when I moved into like agency, it's very rigid. It's like whatever the client is, whatever Google and trade trade desk tell you what to do, is like there's only so much you can sway left or right On the affiliate side. It's like you can make the partnership how you want it and that's it really. Kind of spoke to how I was doing it and like in print sales and in music industry too, it's just how you two come together and build a partnership. It's and that's that's kind of. What really is enticing me is like there's so many different partnerships and how you connect all the technology now and whether it be a paper call or a platform or do we do direct mail, how do you track that? Like there's so many different things that kind of keep you on your toes. So it's what keeps me going.

Dustin Howes: 3:56

This is an ever changing industry. That is. That's what makes it fun. This, this role, is never boring. It's always a challenge and it's always evolving, and that's a great point to bring up early. So if you want to know more about Mike and how to get a hold of them, there is a link in the chat now to his LinkedIn profile where you can DM him directly. So, mike, let's talk about quits First off. This is pretty, pretty standard. Explain the name. I don't understand what a quince is, so give me a rundown of how we got there.

Mike Currey: 4:38

So it's a fruit in Southeast Asia. The owners are from India, so they travel around. Guess they kind of took it from that. The original name was last brand. I'm not really sure what that was like. Maybe it's your last brand you ever buy and stick with it. But somehow it evolved to quince a couple years ago and that's kind of where we went forward with. So the brand is about four years old. This is our fourth year.

Mike Currey: 5:05

We're US only. We are a men's. Women, kids, baby, maternity, travel home. I think we're going into Macy's world a little bit. But yeah, it's a lot of SKUs. We launch about a two to 400 SKUs a month, whether it be sizes or different, different products. Yeah, we're doing doing really well. What makes us different is we're like an affordable luxury brand where when you order we actually ship from the manufacturer. So we're a manufacturer to consumer model. We don't have warehouses, technically Okay, so that keeps the costs down and allows us to keep the prices down. So, like our kind of flagship product is our $50 cashmere sweater for women and men's like 59. Or you have organic bamboo bedding starting at $80. So it's it's a very comparable product to some of our competitors, but just kind of at a fraction of the cost.

Dustin Howes: 6:03

Oh, that's smart. Okay, and so the clientele? The customers are all around and the affiliate program must be doing well with this. Uh, but you mentioned the skews in there. Um, how are you keeping up with the data feed? That's? That's got to be kind of annoying when you're bringing this money skews to the plate, uh, on a monthly basis.

Mike Currey: 6:26

Yeah, so we use feed economics, okay, their master feed, and then it kind of goes in there and gets distributed out to whoever partners. Uh, yeah, so, like right now I'm using phenomics going into pepper jam, uh, but pepper jam only has you cannot customize fees in pepper jam, so I'm having to kind of hack a lot of the feeds for you know the style light or shop styles or some of the others with pepper jam tracking in it. Um, so, yeah, that's how we're tracking it. Uh, each feed is adjustable based off of the publisher's needs, so that seems to be the easiest way to do it. Uh, you know, that team over there is very good. You can submit a ticket and then a couple of days you get a fee. Usually I just clone it and make it a couple additions. But, okay, yeah, it's working well.

Dustin Howes: 7:13

Okay, uh. What was that product again? Feed economics, Feed economics. I've never heard of that. Thanks for bringing that to the table. Okay, uh, and how do you distribute that to the, the publishers Like, is this a weekly cadence where you're putting out all the new skews, uh, to your top affiliates? This is a newsletter once a month. How do you, how do you pass that on?

Mike Currey: 7:40

Uh, so our, our feed is a daily update. So whether it be, you know, for inventory or new products as well, uh, we do. It kind of depends on what we're launching. Uh, we have either our PR newsletter that we launched with our PR schedule, uh, using our uh in-house as well as our PR firm. Um, we just have our schedule. We build out based off what products we want to pitch during that season and Syndicate it out with a company newsletter. If there's a supplemental newsletter we send out, we'll, we'll send it out as well, depending on what type of publisher it is, you know, discount or content sites and what they need. So we're obviously not launching and then syndicating 200 SKUs that there is a system behind it of you know whether we even want this part to be out there, because maybe it's still in testing or something. Yeah.

Dustin Howes: 8:30

So, or, you know, seasonality is coming up, obviously falls coming up, so maybe cashmere's are pitch again, okay, so, and you mentioned that your guys are a semi luxury brand, does that mean like coupon sites are out of the question, kind of thing?

Mike Currey: 8:48

Yeah, we don't have any sales so we're just kind of everyday a little pricing. So okay, I don't work with any coupon sites. Uh, a couple loyalty, but they're more gated, you know, your, your employer type of your airline stuff, things we have to sign up and be a member, not just Traditional loyalty.

Mike Currey: 9:06

I I try to just limit any kind of discounting just because we just want the customer to to realize that it's an everyday low price. But uh, we work with some other a couple, all of them to just kind of help maintain some of the existing customers. So they feel like they're coming back and get a little of discounts and uh, they're from a reward standpoint.

Dustin Howes: 9:24

That's great. Um, it's good that you have that open policy, like marquesi and big-time evans came on and we were talking about luxury brands a couple of weeks ago and talking about how they will not discount or they will not Work with coupon sites. But if you have an open mind, it really opens up your, your brand, into a lot more potential of partners out there. And Uh, I've traditionally not worked with coupon and loyalty sites myself, but I will take that At least the doors open for interpretation and and uh, new potential deals.

Mike Currey: 10:04

Well, sometimes you have to offer a discount to even just get into the platform, like employee perk sites. They're not going to let you in a discount, so even want to even access you know, amazon employee or something. You got to give something a little bit. Or american airlines, um, but we have very low margins. So, okay, any discount, we could be actually be losing money and everything a sale. So it just depends on the product.

Dustin Howes: 10:27

So, yeah, we try to limit as much as possible and are you going uh as granular as getting into like skew-based Uh commissioning well with the products you guys have, or is it a flat? Like percentage throughout the.

Mike Currey: 10:43

Right now it's just new versus existing. Uh, we have done some skew-based. We're going to be transitioning to another platform soon, so We'll probably kind of redo all of our commissioning structure tomorrow. Probably category-based, because I walked into one of these affiliate programs and it was already kind of set up and, knowing that I was going to migrate, I just didn't want to change it right now. Yeah, but we keep adding more categories and so now it's actually starting making more sense where Two years ago, when the platform really was set up, it didn't make sense because we didn't have that many Categories so it was better for new and used. But you know, things evolved so you kind of have to switch because margins are very different from apparel versus home. Yeah, rug versus bedding, like this is not a flat same anymore. So we just can't do the same commission across all of the yeah, that that makes sense.

Dustin Howes: 11:35

It's got to be tough, um, and it sounds like you've got a lot of work ahead of yourself here on flip and platforms. Godspeed to you.

Mike Currey: 11:46

Yes, I did it at t-mobile and that was a very big learning experience. So, uh, my, I got some Behind and I've already kind of planned it out. Uh, but yeah, it's gonna take some a little bit awesome.

Dustin Howes: 12:01

How is that experience over at t-mobile? I can't imagine, like I'm not gonna be an affiliate program that big that's. Uh, that must be monstrous.

Mike Currey: 12:10

Yeah, I walked into a program that was dormant for about two years. It's just kind of running background, anybody idea what it was going on. So, yeah, I cleaned it up a bit and then one day Leadership said, hey, we're gonna be turning off e-commerce and we're gonna send everybody into a call center. So that was either kind of like, do we make this a cpc program? Do we turn this thing off? Uh, what do we do? And that's when we kind of figured out we should probably start tracking these calls, and not on a duration standpoint, uh, on a skew level standpoint. So I hired streamline marketing at the time to help me with this, doing rfps and we rfp to uh March x and invoka and put them through the ringer and building code for us to test them. Cool, eventually uh brought on invoka because they already had some background with cj and stuff, but they were always called duration, they were never skew level. So we built uh working with impact. I hired impact and then their engineering team. We built it all together between us, impact and invoka. Luckily they actually are A few blocks away from each other, so that helps Uh, but altogether we built uh skew level tracking Uh with loyalty in mind.

Mike Currey: 13:28

So I was actually swapping phone numbers on next jump on slip deals, not just static phone numbers. I was session based dynamics phone tracking, um, so all of us had different phone numbers. I can track to this credit level, to the skew level, and pay out Just like as if they were on e-commerce, uh, so that that platform was actually what impact sales today, um, but yeah, it opened up a lot, of, a lot of doors for us. I was starting to do uh direct mail. Uh built out display banners with uh. We had a questionnaire on our site for like a five questionnaire and it had a, a phone number on it. So I actually Made that funnel into display banners and I put it in impact and people Slick deals will download it and we could actually do the questionnaire on the site and and dynamic the server phone numbers on third party sites. So I was able to do like direct mail, paper call, uh it prints phone book. Phone book was huge driver.

Mike Currey: 14:27

Uh, yeah. So yeah, it opened up just having the ability to put a phone number anywhere Open up a lot of opportunities. So, yeah, we, the team, did a really good job. Unfortunately, t-mobile had eight call centers Just for telecells. They had like five for care, couple, for business, so it was like 13 call centers.

Mike Currey: 14:46

So it made it a little difficult to track. But I just picked one and I had to own call center for affiliate program. Oh, but as soon as you Uh transfer the phone call, that was the problem because you You're not getting any of the data back. So but we were able to build some AI at the time and kind of model it using the algorithm of training it to track for conversions. Uh, then we trained it even further with adobe To where if somebody said military iphone did not convert, it went, then went, went back into adobe, uh experience manager. So the next time they came to the website they were shown an iphone military hero image. So it gets. Yeah, like I said, it's opened up a tremendous amount of personalization and other opportunities. It was was essentially a full media program out of the affiliate across many different Media channels.

Dustin Howes: 15:44

That was all on a cpa basis that's a crazy story of, and learning experience, like putting that strategy in place and then executing, and then like it sounds like hurdle after hurdle too, and and I think that's uh, almost a common theme with with paper call, I would say, or have you done it since then? Like replicating this with quince.

Mike Currey: 16:08

Uh, not there yet. I tried to do it at blue now. We were in the process of it, um, but in the meantime I had levers impact and I added I did t-mobile. I had 20 tags on that website for impact. At Blue Now I did the same thing. I tagged all of our emails, sign up, all our chat virtual assistants, everything.

Mike Currey: 16:29

So I couldn't track any of the conversions we hadn't got to get. But I knew where our users were going into, because as soon as they go into chat, you'll never get that conversion data. So then you have all your partners wondering why am I not getting paid? Well, it's because all your customers are going into all these other funnels that the leadership didn't realize that. It happens to across all the channels too, search whatever, you're not getting conversion data. So at least by tagging I can say, hey, I have a problem with chat, and then I can actually start adjusting my commission rates based off of that to help make, at the time, the content partners some of our content partners are driving $30 million a year just from one partner. So as soon as that started adding more of the chat box everywhere, all our customers went in there, they stopped promoting us and so you kind of had to make good on there because it's not their fault. But yeah, I never got to fully finish that integration, but it was in the process, brutal.

Dustin Howes: 17:37

This industry is always a challenge, but you keep running into some very interesting and intriguing challenges here. That can be fun, yeah.

Mike Currey: 17:48

I'm getting ahead of it for Quince too. Working with the care team, I'm like are you going to throttle this up pretty quick, because there is a process to it? I was T-Mobile, had three different websites and I always had to work with all the engineering to make sure they put phone numbers everywhere, and so you always had to make sure the snippet of code was on every single phone number so that in-book it can track it. Otherwise it did not dynamically swap. Yeah, so there's, you're always on your toes with it. Yeah, interesting also that how are you supposed to call T-Mobile?

Dustin Howes: 18:18

to buy a phone if you don't have a phone yet?

Mike Currey: 18:23

Like are people using landlines and Payphone Payphone You'd be surprised how many calls we got from a phone book. I mean, they actually were a very good driver. I did a million phone books. I was in a book. I did a million phone books. I was in a million phone books with just a play banner. It was on a CPA. So yeah, it was people call it all the time. It was like one of the highest converting, one of the best, most efficient channels I had. And a friend of mine who was in the paper call business who worked for like three day blinds I would go to call paper call conferences and three day blinds was just killing it with phone book and so it makes sense, might as well try it.

Dustin Howes: 19:05

Give it a shot. Yeah, awesome, we've got some comments in here. It looks like Kristen Bigtime Evan's coming on in and talking about she feels for you. I'm like, oh no, did I just join in time for my great program? You sure did. Thanks for joining, kristen. As always, it looks like a building a team as a startup is very hard. Indeed, building up your team in a startup fashion can be difficult. I like to outsource the virtual assistants. Mike, I don't know, are you at a place yet where you're going to have people coming underneath you to hire so?

Mike Currey: 19:50

there's two people on the team Great. Luckily it's scaling there. We need the help especially. Yeah, so I think we've all kind of been in challenges, and sometimes the affiliates channel is not always the top of the list media channels. And so you're always kind of fighting for some budget. I really don't have a ton of budget right now, but I got to prove yourself.

Dustin Howes: 21:02

Yeah, sure, and that budget that you are getting. You're probably going towards influencers and you mentioned offline, like performance influencer and PR, and merging these all together. Tell us about that journey that you've got going on here.

Mike Currey: 21:21

Yeah, so same thing. I started doing that at T-Mobile probably 2016. Just having the phone and thinking outside the box, bringing on influencers. Luckily, t-mobile had a name where influencers were willing to work on a CPA model because I didn't pay anybody. So we built out the whole platform and actually at that time I leveraged impact. I hired Aspire IQ for recruiting influencers and then I worked in impact. I had everybody sign up as an affiliate in impact and then I gave them impact tracking in Aspire. So it's essentially kind of what I guess. I was a beta for impact in their creator platform. Okay, they were leveraging someone before, but it's kind of all the same thing. It's a, but now it's so much better than it was before. But that's kind of how we started with. It was just running influencers on a CPA model and just having them do it. Maybe a hundred bucks here and there if we really needed to pay somebody.

Mike Currey: 22:26

But, yeah, everything was on CPA model back then and then that's the last time I fully did influencer there. We're starting to do a little bit more in Quince too. We do have influencer team as well. But, yeah, I'll be leveraging some of the tools for like YouTube and TikTok. Okay, I'd love that for more. Luckily, today, with some of the other brands getting in, influencers are a little more open to CPA. Yes, back in 15, 16, like nope, not doing anything at all, but T-Mobile helped people At the time. People wanted to work with T-Mobile.

Dustin Howes: 23:01

Oh, for sure, I mean, if your brand's big enough. Yes, they'll be in for it, and you can pay them in different ways. Maybe it's like a free phone line for a year, or something too. I mean, you can get creative with it.

Mike Currey: 23:17

Yeah, so we had to do, because a lot of times because of the call sometimes I wasn't always tracking. I wanted to make sure that they were getting paid. So we had them on a CPC too, like 25 cents, and then they hit a cart, they got a bonus and if they converted they got the balance. So I was always trying to model it Like you're always going to make some money, whether you're just driving traffic, the traffic is still valuable and if you get a conversion that's a bonus for you. So as an influencer, make sure you're driving better traffic because you have to get paid. So because it was so new you know they're so adamant on upfront payment I had to find ways to like be creative and open to it. So CPC did help a little bit. Just get some kind of wet the palate of getting money coming in. That they're not. It's not a pure CPA type of thing, but yeah, that opened the doors a little bit.

Dustin Howes: 24:08

Well, that's awesome. How about for your current company with Quincy? What are you? Are you sending folks a product to do reviews? Is that a good currency for you? Like, unboxing was pretty hot a couple of years ago. I don't know was it still hot. If this is still working for you when they get a gift from you guys.

Mike Currey: 24:32

Yeah, I mean we work with our PR agency. Technically, our affiliate and PR are the exact same team. We don't have a separate program. So I've learned that working from T-Mobile and Blue Nile. T-mobile was doing performance PR but it was their two different teams. Blue Nile had a separate PR team and a fluence and it was almost like we're competing each other. We're always working together. But I kind of learned here it's best to keep it the same and everybody's on a CPA model, all the content partners on a CPA, so it just kind of works together.

Mike Currey: 25:09

And we we do give out product because we are seeding tier one publications or the mommy bloggers. Everybody gets it. We do vet them on just like a traditional partner and then give them, gift them and hopefully they review. Occasionally we do some paid placements with them if we really need to get in there. But we get about 50 to 70 placements a week for our partners. I'm talking like Forbes and larger and I think it's just because we have so many skews. There's always something Wow, so we're always pitching. So it's. If you had a limited skew, I don't think you would get that, because we didn't even get that a little now and I think we got maybe 1520 a week if that, but we didn't have that many. There's only so much to talk about from a jewelry company. Yeah, but when you got, you know, men, women, home travel, you got so many products to talk about, so many different angles that it's just constantly there's some mentioned, whether it's be a dedicated article or just a listicle or something.

Dustin Howes: 26:11

So it's right Well that makes you dedicated articles, but they're just a mention, that makes you look good. That's. That's unique. My team is not there they're.

Mike Currey: 26:23

Two are doing really well on the PR team, so it's definitely not on me.

Dustin Howes: 26:26

So gotcha Go team go. So, with the unboxing, what's a good strategy you would suggest for you know retail product like yourself? I think there's two ways to go about it. Right, you could take the influence and say hey, we want to send you this gift. Here's 100% off coupon for whatever you want to get. Or you just send like give me your address and we'll send you something like what's your strategy going about getting the influencer that you want?

Mike Currey: 27:02

Well, I think it's. If you're just working with traditional, you know the main, we have our schedule and we send that out and we work with our PR team to figure out who gets what. But if you're working for just the smaller, you obviously want to ask them first, make sure it's relevant, and then I think the biggest part is asking them what would they like to review, instead of just sending them something because they have maybe no interest. It's just like sending. I've learned when I worked for a parallel. Other parallel is celebrities. You don't just send them product because most likely that product is just going there assisting, because they don't care. You want them to ask for that product because they will most likely wear it.

Mike Currey: 27:40

So it's the same thing it's like a blog, like what of all the? What do we have like, say, travel of the travel products, what would you like to review? Okay, are you going on a trip? Would you need a suitcase and you got a sleep mask?

Mike Currey: 27:58

or whatever it is like let them have interest in it and then they can do a good review rather than just seating them. There are times when you can see them, but because you're just kind of doing a little bit of a mass one, but I think it's best to be a little more personal. So some interest in the product For sure, great calls, great calls there.

Dustin Howes: 28:19

Let's switch gears a little bit and go into a Defender post. Now I didn't find a ton of stuff on you, mike. Usually I sneak up on somebody and tell them. But I didn't have to look far today because right before this podcast you said run a 10 minutes late dumpster fire at work. Now let's talk about this. What's?

Mike Currey: 28:41

going on.

Dustin Howes: 28:42

What's a dumpster fire? Look like to you.

Mike Currey: 28:46

Tracking, probably, or just an ask from leadership or something it kind of hired. Okay, got a habit. Now I just analytics and you do stuff now. So kind of depends on the day, I guess.

Dustin Howes: 29:02

Okay, gotcha. And one of these good learning lessons is like how you deal with that right? Like, do you say, are you the yes ma'am? And you say I'll get that to you right away and we'll get this taken care of. Or you say, hey, I've got other obligations, I've got a plan today, I will get to see you at end of day, kind of thing. What's your strategy about going about?

Mike Currey: 29:28

I think it also kind of depends on who is asking sometimes and also the importance I try to. I don't want to be a blocker for somebody, so I'm quick. I tend to kind of drop what I'm doing to get it to them just because I want to be that team player of like they are quick, because sometimes I want that ask back as well. Sure, but I just don't want to be like, yeah, I'll get it to you tomorrow. That person might actually really need that right now. So it's like if I'm not in in the midst of something that is dire need right now, yes, I can. It might maybe take me 10 minutes.

Mike Currey: 30:06

Let me just do it and let them for sure their work, and then I'll get back to what I was doing. Yeah, I think that's. I just try to be that type of worker with everybody, okay.

Dustin Howes: 30:18

Gotcha, I think I love asking, I love doing favors for people at work especially. I want to be that team player as well. I think it's super important for affiliate managers out there to know, like let's ask some follow up questions before we like go and say yes to something like that, like if they absolutely need it, like immediately, like find out what their timeframe hey, when do you need this? By something quick on Slack. It's going to suffice and that'll help your workflow, because you're busy as well as the affiliate manager, and helping people is great, but you've got a task to get done, so thanks. Thanks for being on time today, by the way. Good work, thanks. All right, switching gears again. Divisional commissioning. You brought this up offline and I didn't know what this is. I took a wild stab at it in the dark and I got it wrong. But tell us what it is and why you would use it.

Mike Currey: 31:29

So I get blue. Now we had, we use our MTA every. All the channels had to use MTA and so we were. You know, if two people, if two channels were involved, two channels were involved, for a hundred dollar order, we each got $50 credit and to base off a number of hits, if that person, that media, had three clicks versus one, they would get 375% of that 100. So what we found was that Blue and Isle it was a $110 million program in impact, but it was an $80 million program in MTA, so we were paying 30 million extra commissions for last click and CPC.

Mike Currey: 32:15

So, my peer, we all thought like, hey, well, mta is starting to come in and all the other channels are getting divisional percentage of credit revenue.

Mike Currey: 32:27

Okay, why is the affiliate program not channel out doing that?

Mike Currey: 32:31

Because there are multiple touch points and you can do this too, whether it be preferred vendor or CPC or there's ways to kind of do it.

Mike Currey: 32:44

But at the time I think it was like impacted altitude they bought clear selling and they built that and it was kind of going that direction and then just kind of stopped working on it. And I think Sherry Cell has it too, that built in and some of the A1, but I just feel like one of the biggest challenges I found with leadership is a lot of leaderships don't think it's a very incremental channel and because it's always last click and they just have this perception it's like, well, if we can kind of police ourselves and bring in some of this MTA modeling and partial credit and we're starting to show that we are more an incremental channel, that we are treated just like a search or display and you might fold up in the full company MTA platform, but then in a day we're still paying out on the last click and it can really add up after a while and leadership sees that last click payout not what it does affect your CAX and everything.

Dustin Howes: 33:43

So with divisional commissioning you're just suggesting like we split the attribution between affiliates or partially between other channels that are bucketed in that had a touch point in the funnel of that sale.

Mike Currey: 34:01

Yeah, because when you know, at Timo I kind of throttled impact and I mapped all of our channels, from organic and paid, across all the media, and so I could see where Google versus Bing came in right before Slick Deals and everything. And so from that alone, if you started looking at that, well, slick Deals came in with a search. So Techment, do they really deserve a 100% of this commission when they another channel kind of came in and helped also? So it's just that same kind of mentality of I think we should really be policing ourselves and then showing the leadership. Hey, we are a significant channel and we do try to be as incremental as possible as we can with other media and the platform Sure.

Dustin Howes: 34:54

Well, I mean that has to be baked into your percentage of what you give away to the affiliates, right? And the affiliates that are driving that non-last click commission stealing sale. Maybe we're paying them more if they're higher up on the funnel, or that's more important to us.

Dustin Howes: 35:15

So it's definitely got to be in that VIP commission zone, if you will, and keeping an eye on your numbers of where, what percentage of sales are coming from this affiliate that are really valuable to us, right? So how do you keep track of that? Like, how do you do reporting to keep your best affiliates on the top of mind?

Mike Currey: 35:45

Quinn's. It's a little bit of a challenge. Just to come on platform I'm using right now, but at previous roles a great analytics team helped build out some looker and Tableau dashboards. I think that was the biggest player coming when we had really great data to understand where everything was going and we can base off of the conditions. Off of that whether it be the first click, last click or should we do CPC versus a cart you never think that.

Mike Currey: 36:14

So it was very granular in the past and to the point where when T-Mobile turned off their website, they lost all order data for every single marketing channel. Nobody realized that was gonna happen. Adobe analytics did not have any order data, so what we leverage was impact was the entire MTA for the company at that point. So I had everything mapped and so just having the proper tools to be able to do that. Right now I'm using one platform that does not go outside of the affiliate channel, so I'm kind of blind when it comes to is there some TN plus activity prior? I do have brand variety and tools for that, but it's harder sometimes to get a quick answer unless they're truly bidding on at the time.

Dustin Howes: 37:04

So having that platform that does have the full scope of all the other media channels mapped just really helps understand to what's happening Whether or not you should be commissioning for that or not, gotcha, and speaking of tools that you use and any best practices as we wrap this up tools that you're using, tools that you're finding really helpful, that other affiliate managers out there might be interested in.

Mike Currey: 37:33

I mean, like I said, brand variety has saved me in so many cases. Sure, I found a major problem when I first started using brand variety. I quickly fixed that. Media Rails was always a big fan of that, just from the all the kind of drip campaigns they can create from boarding and as well as for recruiting. Smartsheet was another one that was really good actually for onboarding, for questionnaires, and you can do it in Google as well.

Mike Currey: 38:09

But I found Google you cannot multi-select options. You can only select one option. Okay, so it kind of so. Like when you're asking that customer, what areas do you cover? Having multiple questions like yes, I do travel, I do apparel, like this it's a Smartsheet, whereas Google is like you can only pick one so you don't forget the whole depth. When you're trying on board a partner and like have an answer questions, you can only get one answer and not multi. And then I've been starting to use Lyft, which part of the LT partners kind of helping beta some of that, still learning a bit, but it's helping out here and there, great Well.

Dustin Howes: 38:48

Kristen, big time Evans jumped in, said Mike, what's your favorite campaign you've recently you've executed recently. Thanks to the question, kristen, mike, I was caught.

Mike Currey: 38:59

Yeah, so let's see At Blue Nile. This one was a little more complex. So we had to. We were doing direct mail, e-commerce, inserts, newsletters and stuff and how to track all that stuff. So we had built. We had built like tracking using affiliate links in direct mail and e-commerce using bandit links, mapping behind with, at the time, impact tracking, and so we were actually able to track all that. That was a fun one, just because it added that level of complexity. I kind of walked into it and had to take it on and just kind of figure out like well, if you want me to pay out on a direct mail, I'm gonna have to figure this out. So, yeah, so we had all that going. It wasn't a huge driver at the time but it was definitely a fun project to kind of figure out multiple layers and mediums to pay on a CPA. Very interesting, all right.

Dustin Howes: 39:55

Well, mike really appreciate you being here and dropping some knowledge for those folks. You can go into the chat below or check out this LinkedIn live for more information and how to get ahold of Mike. You know one thing that the shout out for we go any. We used to call them bat finger affiliates I can't think of the appropriate name for it where they would misspell URLs. I would think Quints would get that, where they misspelling URL and it redirects through their affiliate link. Yeah, that has to be a little bit sketch for your guys' brand, yeah.

Mike Currey: 40:40

I mean we had a. I'm sure we do, because we even have people like Quincy or just how they say it. So I think it's still relatively new fruit for people that don't really know. I didn't realize what it was after this either. But yeah, I mean, even like today's show, they're like can't say or like no, it's Quints. Every time we do this we really have to make sure it's Quints Rents Quint like it's.

Mike Currey: 41:06

You have to tell them because in case they don't say that on air or something, it's Quints. Hey, that's how I like it.

Dustin Howes: 41:14

That's how I, that's how I, that's how I read it. And Paul Kaka, just kidding Paul, it's Kaka, old friend of mine, CPA on direct mail. He's got a question mark. He's on itcom. He's got a huge brand that he's running that program.

Mike Currey: 41:33

Hey, thanks for joining Paul.

Dustin Howes: 41:34

I didn't know you were a listener. It go, man. Thanks. Awesome. Any more words on that CPA for the direct mail. Did it work?

Mike Currey: 41:43

It did, did it a few places. So the best thing to do is try to create a vanity or a rail where there'd be, like you know, quints, axe Lash, david's Bridal or whatever, for example. But when you build that vanity or rail, you kind of build a custom link in your platform and you just have to redirect to that. So every time somebody types in that vanity it automatically fires the affiliate link. Or you can do, or use your phone number too. That's another option.

Dustin Howes: 42:11

Smart. All right, all right, hark you right back there, paul. Thanks for joining in. All right, wrapping things up here. If you would like to be a guest on just like Mike is today, go to this QR code up here at the top. I'm looking at you, paul. Go ahead and do that up with your phone. Or go to dustinhousecom slash nerd. Sign up and we'll take a look at you. And if you would like to join me for a free 15 minute call, go to dustinhousecom slash pod. If you need help with anything affiliate, I am here to help and if I'm not the right person for the job, I will point you in that right direction. Mike, appreciate your time today. Thanks for being with us, any parting words, no, just thanks for having me.

Mike Currey: 43:05

I look forward to it every week, so it's my Tuesday, Thursday next. You know That'll be part of it.

Dustin Howes: 43:10

Fantastic. Hey, thanks for watching. Man Appreciate that. All right, folks, take care, keep on recruiting and we'll see you out there. Thanks for watching.