Dustin: 0:25

Hey folks. Welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am a Nerdarator Dustin Howes. Spread that good word about affiliate marketing. You're gonna find me here every Thursday at noon Pacific time, so put it on the calendar. Join me and my guest today, Steven Brown, CEO over at Moonpull. Welcome to the Nerd Auditorium, Steve.

Steve: 0:44

It is great to be here, seen quite a few of the episodes, and I'm thrilled to, to be your guest today.

Dustin: 0:49

I appreciate the support. Thanks for joining in and tuning in, and I'm very excited to have you on board. You're one of those big thought leaders that is way smarter than me, and a lot of your stuff goes over my head. So I wanna pick your brain and talk about the things that you're super knowledgeable in affiliate tracking today. So glad to have you on, man.

Steve: 1:10

Okay. Yeah, let's get going. Yeah, let's talk affiliate tracking, user consent, challenges of the day.

Dustin: 1:16

The sexiest part of affiliate marketing, obviously. Yes. It is I've known the guys at your company, Dan and Chris, have been a couple of my favorite guys in the industry over the years. And you pulled them into to Moonpull. To help sell the product and be evangelists. And I just love their attitudes. And we got to meet just a couple of years ago and it's been nice knowing you and seeing you at conferences and talk about this stuff.

Steve: 1:45

Yeah, it is been great getting to know you. Obviously you're right. I've known Dan for 10 years, I think. Chris is the, it's the third business I've worked in with Chris, so clearly we like each other, we tolerate each other. But yeah, we started a network by app that many people will know back in I started there 2000 and Chris joined me in about 2003.

Dustin: 2:07

Okay. Yeah. Great. Great. And the company that you are, CEO of, it's called Moonpull. You guys can go hit that QR code and learn more about 'em and go to their site. But before we get into that, let's talk about you and who you are. Tell us what you do and who you serve out there.

Steve: 2:24

I'm Steve Brown, founded Moonpull. You've already heard that I founded a network. I've worked for various publishers and all that teaches you about affiliate marketing is. Tracking is complicated. It can break, and the accountant in me looks at it and says, when people complain that sort of five or 10% of their links don't track actually, if you've got a five to 10% profit margin. You can potentially double your profit by diligently looking at what doesn't track and making it track. And that was the premise behind moon pull is there's easy to fix problems and there's hard to fix problems. And if we can identify all of the easy to fix problems, then. That helps the publisher with their revenue. It helps network with running their business, helps the agencies and obviously the advertisers have better relationships with publishers too. Yeah, I mean that, that's the quite simple premise. Let's work out where tracking's breaking. Awesome.

Dustin: 3:23

And how did you guys come up? Like you saw a hole in the industry and a need for this technology. How did you go about building something that confined where those gaps are?

Steve: 3:36

Yeah, that's an interesting one. In Moonpull started as my lockdown project.

Dustin: 3:41

Okay. So

Steve: 3:43

in the years running up to Moonpull, I always had an idea of, actually, I know that if you follow an affiliate link, you can work out whether it's going to track or not. And what I didn't know was could you develop a business that does this at scale? What. What complications might there be that we weren't aware of? And I was lucky enough to find a CTO who had worked at one of the UK's largest publishers who really got affiliate marketing. And then because of lockdown, there were people who were made redundant. So I actually got a developer. Who I could say got a three month project, no idea whether there'll be a job at the end of the three months or not. Yeah. And now Ollie's with us for five years. We developed a prototype and it just snowballed from there that actually, yes, we can do what we wanted to set out to do. We can, and specifically what we do is take an affiliate link, open it up essentially in a version of Chrome in a data center, and we follow it through the redirect path through. If it's a CJ link, it goes through a couple of redirects. If it's a win, it goes through one redirect gets to. The advertisers site might go through some more redirects. All the time. We're following this, looking at what cookies are being set, what the URLs look like, and then at the end of it, the user sees a page on their screen or we see, we get served an image in our data center and we can interact with consent platform there. And at the end of the day, what we're doing is saying is the environment for. The sale to track if someone goes on to buy is the environment set up at the point the user sees the homepage or sees the deep link page.

Dustin: 5:37

Yeah. Awesome. And this is something I'm using every day in terms of verifying that my affiliate partners are using the right links. And I use a cool tool called Redirect Path. It's simple. It's a Chrome extension. It's free. I don't know why it's free, but it's super helpful every single day. But I ensure that they are. Making sure that those the tracking links are going to the right places and whatever touch points, I do it for a lot of investigating who that affiliate is on my platform as well. What that is like the simplest form of redirect tracking. What are you guys doing that's different beyond that?

Steve: 6:18

Yeah. So they're just following what's in the essentially in. In the top of the browser window. So you know the URL? Yeah. They're following just URL to URL. Yeah. And they're looking at a few other things as well, but it's not optimized for affiliate marketing. And it's not going to the depth that we do. So in Moonpull, we know how. A win links. Track how CJ links track, how impacts, Rakuten's, all the main networks and therefore we specifically know what to look out for. So we will look at the URLs, we'll record all of the information in the dom, which is essentially the code that makes Cs. We will record. All the cookies that are being set, and we'll look at all the scripts and record all the scripts that are being run. So that might include the Network Master tanks. So at the end of the day, if you are a publisher using Moonpull, you really are asking yourself one question. Is the memory of my journey being recorded or the memory of my user's journey being recorded such that when that user gets the checkout, there's some sort of parameter for the checkout to send back to the affiliate network for all the tracking to work. So we call that the memory. And the memory joins the start of the journey. So the handover, if you like, from the user. Through the redirects to the publisher's website. And then you've got the checkout at the other end. And what we're doing is looking to see is the memory for this path being set? And you can think about that memory on the basis that if the user closes their laptop down, comes back two days later. And they go on to buy, how on earth does that checkout know that person was really referred by publisher a. They've got a memory on their machine, and that memory is in either a cookie or local storage. So from a publisher's perspective, they ask and use Moonpull to answer the question is the right parameter in this cookie of the local storage? And if it is great, they're likely to get paid and they can move on. Great. For our network clients or our agency clients who have more responsibility for understanding tracking, they might look at it and say actually the memory's not being set. I. Can we see from the Moonpull reports what's being lost? And it might be the CJ event parameter that people most know in affiliate marketing. It might be that's being lost from a URL string and we'll say that's being lost when. The double click redirect hasn't been quite coded properly. So the moon will user, the network can go to the advertiser and say, Hey, we can see that your double click isn't quite configured properly. So we're highlighting where the breakage is happening for it to be fixed far easier.

Dustin: 9:24

Okay. Excellent. Getting into our topic of the day there's a. A, a trend within affiliate marketing, and it has to do with affiliate cookies and the death of the cookie as some people in the industry call it. But the true reality of that is cookies aren't going away in the affiliate industry. And I'd love to talk more about, what our status of, in the affiliate marketing realm, like where are cookies in a place. For our industry today.

Steve: 10:00

Okay, so there's two sorts of cookies, or primarily two sorts of cookies, okay? There's what are called third party cookies and first party cookies, and what defines that is if you are on a website, so you are on cnn.com, is the cookie one that is on the CNN domain. And if it is, that's a first party cookie.

Dustin: 10:23

Okay?

Steve: 10:24

If it's a Facebook cookie. It's not on the CNN domain, so it's viewed, it's called the third party cookie. Okay. And one of the terms that we use is a third party cookie is a bit like an eavesdropper, that it's not really a the good thing to do, but occasionally eavesdropping is useful, so the example I use often is you're about to leave a pub and you. You say to your mate, I'm gonna get the such and such train home, and the person on the neighboring table says, you know what that train's canceled tonight. And these dropper is good news for you. Yeah. Mostly the person listening to you on the other table, you're thinking, you know what you're being a bit of a nosy parker. And so generally the eavesdropping cookies, the third party ones are those that are being phased out. And the first party ones, which form the memory for affiliate marketing. So they're the good ones.'cause we all like a good memory. They're not going anywhere. But when you hear the ad industry talk about the death of cookies, they're generally talking about the eavesdropping ones. Okay. And I think this is one thing that actually gives affiliate marketing. A positive edge going forward is when everyone gets a bit doom and gloom about affiliate tracking and affiliate marketing. Affiliate marketing has great first party solutions and therefore is slightly future-proofed versus other channels. We've just sort got to get all of the industry using these good first party solutions and then monitoring them so they're reliable. Okay.

Dustin: 12:51

Gotcha. With those cookies. Just a silly, stupid question. What, where are second party cookies? Do they exist? Is that a thing? And like, why did we just skip over them and now it's third party?

Steve: 13:05

I. They do exist. So if, I'm sure if you go and ask your favorite search engine, it will tell you what a second party cookie is. Okay. But I can't remember what one is

Dustin: 13:15

so odd that is, that term isn't utilized at all, but funny. And so affiliate marketing, they are third party cookies on. On websites for the most part, or their first party.

Steve: 13:28

So most networks today use both. What is the legacy Third party tracking. Okay, so that is a cookie being set on the redirect. So the easy example is Rakuten redirect through the link synergy domain. So you may have seen that as a. A as the redirect path of for Rakuten. And so they're setting a cookie on link synergy.com, and by the time you get to CNN, that becomes a third party cookie and they're being phased out, but they're still in use today. And they're super reliable. So we refer to third party tracking as fallback tracking. Okay. Whereas the newer first party methods have more moving parts, they're more susceptible to things like, anecdotally you hear, oh, the tag was removed from the page. So first party tracking. Needs to be implemented more diligently and monitored. But at the moment, third party is a good fallback until Chrome and Google do what they're going to do. So third party tracking is to fall back on Chrome, although Safari with its ITP rules. Stopped recognizing third party tracking in about 2018. Yeah, so Safari doesn't have the fallback method, but the 70% of users who are on Chrome still can still be tracked by third party tracking and that's why. Broken first party tracking very rarely leads to a catastrophic failure of affiliate tracking, there being nothing. But if it is broken, what you are losing is. The 30, 30% of sales that are on Safari, which is 30 70th of what you get on Chrome. So if you fix third party tracking, so it tracks again on safari, you get about a 40% uplift. Oh. So that is the uplift from fixing first party tracking at the moment. And, our users do see that when advertisers fit, fix, completely broken tracking.

Dustin: 15:48

Okay. Excellent. So that's something you guys can help fix. You're essentially finding more attribution that is coming through the affiliate channel. Yeah, very much

Steve: 15:58

and so the advertiser is getting those sales. They're obviously just not paying for them. But we've got use cases where the tracking gets fixed. Yes. The advertiser pays more for what they were getting previously, but the publishers get a higher EPC now. The traffic they were sending, so they send more traffic to the advertiser. So the advertiser actually gets more sales from the channel for having fixed their tracking. And I think this is comes into the area of why should advertisers care, right?

Dustin: 16:34

And my biggest uplift there is now your EPCs going up and you look more attractive to the affiliates you're working with. And you can also use that as a selling point when you're recruiting. Hey, we are using this special tracking to make sure that you get paid even more, and our competitors aren't using that, so we're going to be attributing more sales to you.

Steve: 16:56

Yeah, and that's where, broadly, Moonpull started three years ago. We got network clients two years ago, publisher clients last year we got our first cohort of agency clients. I. And so we're growing more agencies now, and that's where our agency clients are recognizing that if they fix their advertisers tracking, they've definitely got something to talk to publishers about. And indeed, we have a product for the agencies called Moonpull Certification. Okay. Which proves that the, it's a certification the agency takes tracking seriously. Badge. Promote the programs to, to publishers. So Valentine's Day comes, publishers got loads of offers being sent their way. Which one do they choose? They choose the one from the advertiser that they know. The tracking's being monitored and diligently looked after. Okay. Excellent.

Dustin: 17:55

In terms of tracking solutions, like not all of them are built the same. Does your tool work with all of the. Major platforms out there. And is there any I, I don't want to call 'em favorites, but are there some tracking solutions that are out there that, that might not be up to speed for this cookie tracking and cookie list tricking in the future? Wow. About half a

Steve: 18:21

dozen really big questions in one game. Sorry, man. I think all the main networks work in quite a similar way. Okay. Then they do have their own sort of underlying methods of doing things. So impact have a term that the other networks don't get really used, which is API tracking. And so Moonpull can look at that and. The, sometimes we see a little bit less with some tracking methods and other tracking methods. But fundamentally it all comes back to, this memory between the arriving at the site and the checkout. You've gotta have a memory for something to be available at the checkout. To talk back to the affiliate network. So at its heart Moon Pull is looking for the memory look. Doing it at scale and then giving some insights as to why the memory may not be set. So yeah. There's perhaps half percent or less of each of the networks clients, the largest of the large, who just turn around to the network and say, great, really pleased to be working with you, but this is how the tracking's gonna work. And it might be a site that has a lot of logged in users, and therefore, if you've got all of your users essentially coming back and they're already logged in. You can do the tracking by knowing that this is Dustin, who's a returning user, and you store the information on what you are looking at, where you came from with the record they already have for you server side. So for those biggest of the big moon pull, can't really look at what they're doing. But for the 99% of other advertisers we, we can definitely look into what's going on. Okay.

Dustin: 20:20

Excellent. And on the publisher side of the equation, do you have clients that are publishers or is this almost strictly on the agency side, mostly

Steve: 20:30

users. So our users definitely are networks, agencies and publishers. And actually our biggest group of clients is publishers at the moment. So their, the signature one is top cashback, who we've been working with for probably the longest. Yeah. With James? Yeah. So everyone knows James is big and vocal on tracking. Underpinning a lot of what he does is Moonpull data. And Moonpull data has really helped him and his business think about where their losses are. So one of the things he's done is they've slightly moved on from. We are looking at every advertiser one by one, and we need to maximize the revenue per advertiser. Much more mature way is saying, we need to optimize the revenue for our whole business. And then let's start making a few decisions. And if they make 20 decisions with a view to optimizing their revenue. If 18 are good and two are bad, that's better than not making any decisions. That's one of the things we're definitely helping publisher clients with. So other ones are Blue light card in the uk, Aeroplan, who's obviously Canadian ad shoppers who are us then we've got, multinational ones. So Skim links is a client. Voucher codes here in the uk, which is part of retail, me, not future publishing. So our clients are gen, our publisher clients are the largest publishers who get that they've got to take responsibility for their own supply chain. And then, we've got small publishers as well, but the, it's that common theme that they want to take responsibility for their supply chain. They don't want to be reliant on other parties for understanding the reliability of their revenue stream. I. Great.

Dustin: 22:31

Great. I'm always a big fan of tools that are gonna help me look good as an agency and as I'm publisher myself, I'm always looking to optimize where my missing links are. Great that you're servicing all sides of the equation here. I love that. You guys are go to a lot of conferences. I see at least two to three times a year over here in the States. You guys are going to PI live here shortly, correct?

Steve: 22:55

Very much so Dan is representing us. Dan Marque is representing us at PI Live. Say he's gonna be there wanting to meet anybody and everybody basically.

Dustin: 23:05

Yeah. But you guys are road warriors. In my mind, like you guys, I always see you guys at events. You guys don't miss the events that I go to. What are your goals when you're going to conferences like these?

Steve: 23:18

So our goals are long term, I think. Selling has evolved so much over 5, 10, 15 years that no one picks up the phone and makes a cold call anymore in selling. So how do you make contact with people? How do you move conversations forward and. The US events are great, so they pull together 1000, 2000, 5,000, 8,000 people and. If and you work the conference as well, you meet the people you want to meet and you'll have some conversations which are just with friends that lead to something. Other conversations, takes a sale forward 5%. Other conversations, you might meet someone who says, I've been wanting to meet you for months, and then that leads to a sale. We're also very aware that we are really a thought leader in the area of affiliate tracking, and so we're conscious, we're wanting to talk to people about tracking and actually get the honest conversation about sort tracking user consent and. It's very easy for there to be a bit of doom and gloom about it. But actually we really believe that yes, there are challenges, but the affiliate industry's challenges. I think the display industry or the programmatic industry will probably kill for. So let's just work together to have a very successful affiliate industry and. We, we want to be part of that in 26, 27, where people are saying we check our own links. It'd be perverse not to check our links. And we use Moonpull to do it and networks to say, yeah, we, when we need third party data, we buy it into, to give people a better service. So we're. We're in it for the long term and that therefore means that conferences can be fun as opposed to thinking, what am I gonna get outta it? Oh, for sure. And the results flow on the back of it.

Dustin: 25:27

And there's a huge aspect of just getting to know people and. Even meeting somebody at the conference that's working at your company is an instant initiator of another conversation I'm gonna have a little bit later about like how to fix that problem that somebody else is talking about. I, I can't tell you how many times I've had a meeting early in the day and then later in the day. Yeah, I talk about that exact product that I just met about that guy. So the network marketing aspect, it makes a lot of sense for you guys to be at these conferences.

Steve: 26:00

Yeah, very much and yeah, there's you get to know who you want to talk to, and then you also get the serendipitous meetings with people you've never known before who, who are fascinating.

Dustin: 26:11

Yes, absolutely. Awesome. And you're not gonna be there any other conferences that you're gonna be attending this year?

Steve: 26:19

Yeah, so we're going to be at Awin Think Tank in, in Portugal. So they're, they've brought together their international conferences for their 25th anniversary. So I dunno whether you're gonna be there, but Portugal in May sounds like a nice place to be. We will almost certainly be at IPX here in the uk. Okay. We'll certainly go to CJ Europe later on in the year. And we're just dumbing an ing with a SE as well in New York. There'll be one of us at a SE. It's a question of who

Dustin: 26:55

You have a unique strategy about traveling across the pond.

Steve: 27:00

Yeah, so I have a theory that to do it more than three times a year is madness. I think James Little might do it 10 times a year, but, don't try and keep up with James on any base. All right. But a conference, if you do it well, is a week of the conference, a week planning for it, and you've got two weeks of follow ups after it. What, doing a conference well, I think is almost a month's work and there's only so many months that you can slot it, slot into. Sure. To your diary, so

Dustin: 27:31

Yeah. Absolutely. All right, Steve, really appreciate your knowledge and giving us a better understanding of what you guys do and the industry as a whole in the cookie ecosystem that we're living in. I appreciate your time here today. How can we find you?

Steve: 27:46

You can find us at conferences. You can find us@moonpullpartners.com, just Google Moonpull. We put a lot of thought into our name for SEO at the start. So Moonpull is our name. Yeah, find us at events, find us online, find us in LinkedIn, wherever. Just come and find us.

Dustin: 28:04

Good to go. Thanks, Steve. Appreciate you. All right folks, keep on recruiting and we'll see you next time. Take care. Thanks Justin. You got later.