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“Clients Don’t Want Installs or Registrations. They Want Loyal Customers with High LTV,” – BcnMonetize

“Clients Don’t Want Installs or Registrations. They Want Loyal Customers with High LTV,” – BcnMonetize

BcnMonetize is a mobile performance agency, working with leading advertisers and direct publishers in e-commerce, finance and betting.

Each day new players are starting to conquer the affiliate marketing industry. They all aspire to achieve great success and hope that someday their names will appear along with the affiliate marketing leaders. Now we could hardly imagine that days and years ago all of these giants were newcomers as well. What were they dreaming of? Which problems did they have? What were the key factors to their success? How did they become globally known? What was the affiliate marketing industry like back then?

We continue sharing the answers to these and many more questions in our series of articles, Affiliate Network Insider*, that touch upon the working life of the biggest and most prominent affiliate networks and agencies in the industry. In this edition, we caught up with Emre Atalay and Ozgur Taskaya from BcnMonetize to find out their tips to increase ROI and succeed in affiliate marketing.

- Can you tell us about your journey into affiliate marketing?

I have been working in this industry since 2015. My first experience was at CSDI Media that was a big player for desktop advertising at the time with 14-15 Million Euros of revenue per year. This experience helped me a lot to decide to launch BcnMonetize when I saw the shift to mobile advertising.

My first experience was when I became an Amazon affiliate. I have earned a few bucks and while doing that I learnt a lot about affiliate marketing. Then I joined Adcash, one of the leading DSPs, which serve hundreds of advertisers, some of whose campaigns I managed. Before joining BcnMonetize in Barcelona, I was at Skyscanner in the UK, helping affiliate marketing teams set up their programs for their countries as well as advising them on affiliation, in addition to leading growth marketing teams in EMEA.

– What is the most challenging when you open your own network?

Ozgur: The classic chicken and egg problem is always the most challenging. However I think we have solved this problem for BcnMonetize. I think Emre is better suited to answer this question as he was there at BcnMonetize from the beginning.

Emre: Yes, that’s true. We need publishers but good publishers need to know that you have direct offers. On the other hand, it is hard to get direct offers without having direct access to quality publishers. Once this is solved, it gets a bit easier.

– Your experience in the industry is already six years. How has the industry changed since then?

Emre: When I look back, I see an increasing shift to mobile so any network that used to focus on desktop cannot now ignore mobile. Another trend is performance marketing. We all passed through a time when we bought and sold on CPM. That has changed quite a lot. Currently advertisers want to pay for the actual performance they see from networks and agencies. Not only for the installs but often for in-app events. Direct publishers, websites and apps, have had a hard time adjusting to the reality but we see this trend changing there as well.

– What is the future of affiliate marketing? What do you think will evolve in the industry this year?

Ozgur: There is still a lot of fraud, which is sometimes quite sophisticated and difficult to spot. However we hope to see it changing. MMPs are getting better at fraud detection and advertisers are getting smarter about what kind of affiliates they work with. We expect and will be happy to see networks involved in rebrokering and click spamming to vanish into thin air.

I also expect influencer marketing to join forces with affiliate marketing and we already see some activity proving that. That’s why we are currently developing a performance-driven social media influencer marketplace which we named Fenomio.com. This upcoming trend will significantly reinvigorate affiliate marketing. Influencer marketing is where I spend most of my time lately, building a world class product, with our talented CTO Ozgur Kaya and our product team who are based in Izmir, Turkey.

Quarantine Meeting in BcnMonetize

– Can you give us a glance of the applications you use on your phone?

Emre: Actually I use many applications from different verticals. As entertainment apps, I would say Instagram, Twitter. Especially during the lockdown days, I use Glovo for food delivery. Soccer games have just started soI started to use Bet365 (Although my favourite betting app is Unibet, they don’t operate in ES yet). Ciceksepeti is always on my home screen to send gifts to my mom and aunts, who are based in Turkey, for special days such as Women’s Day, Mother’s Day etc.

Ozgur: Mine is a mixed bag. I have Duolingo which I use to learn Spanish and Headspace which I use to relax when I fail to learn 🙂 I use Spotify regularly but mostly for podcasts, I try to listen to a couple of them at least every day. I have Instagram and Twitter, the latter of which I started to use at least half an hour every day to follow what other marketers, VCs and entrepreneurs are posting. VC Twitter is fun, definitely recommended. I also use Notion to capture my thoughts and ideas.

– Your top tips for affiliate networks to increase their ROI?

Emre: Activities involving malpractices such as click fraud (clickspamming, injection, flooding) should be ended. You can make some money with them but you will eventually lose your clients. Find clean, ideally direct sources for your clients.

– What do you think is the main secret of your success?

Ozgur: I’d say there are two secrets of our ongoing growth:

1
Look at the acquisition from the client point of view. Clients don’t want installs or registrations. They want loyal customers with high LTV. They need to set up a well performing acquisition loop rather than throwing tons of leads into the funnel. This is why we plan the acquisition strategy by understanding the product and target audience in depth before launching the campaigns. Not all channels are a good fit and not all apps are ready for acquisition yet. We often recommend the advertisers to take some time to improve the UX of their products before considering online advertising because they would just burn the money otherwise.
2
Hands on anti-fraud battle. As much as we like the MMPs and their increasingly useful anti-fraud tools, they occasionally miss fraudulent activities. Therefore, we have developed our own algorithms as an additional filter and we perform daily spot checks into CTITs and user activities to detect any unfiltered fraud.

Emre: I agree with Ozgur and I’d add that one of our unique strengths lies in our team’s ability to communicate easily with people of different backgrounds. For example, our team speaks 11 languages combined; namely, English, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, Catalan, Russian, Ukrainian, Arabic, Turkish, German and French.

* AFFILIATE NETWORK INSIDER is a project, covering success stories and inside life of the biggest and most prominent affiliate networks and agencies in the industry.

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Written by

Anastasia Zaichko

Head of PR and Marketing Communications

Anastasia Zaichko is a creative B2B marketer, passionate about helping companies achieve their sales, growth and visibility objectives. Weekdays she's all about identifying new opportunities for marketers to grow and get more value from affiliate channel. Weekends include traveling, partying and instagramming about all of the above. She strongly believes in the power of content, networking and the Universe.

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