“Top Affiliate is Who Generates Over $10,000 Revenue Daily,” – DigitalFuture CEO

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 in the industry. This time we greet our new guest, the CEO & founder of DigitalFuture agency, Elisha Elbaz.

– 2020 is your agency’s 5th year in the business. Can you please share with us how DigitalFuture started?

I was asked by one of my closest friends to participate in a project in media buying. I was immediately hooked. I knew it was a great opportunity, therefore I spent days and nights learning and performing to the best of my ability. In a few months, our partnership was performing many times better than all the other competitors in that niche.

As I became more experienced and knowledgeable about the industry, I started to see increasing opportunities to improve the overall experience, from media buying to advertisers and publishers. We chose to be a highly tech-oriented company, thus we developed our optimization technology to provide premium service to our partners.

– The launching of an affiliate network is a rather challenging task. How did you get through the obstacles at the very beginning?

We are striving to have as many campaign feeds as possible on the one hand, while maintaining top quality on the other. However, it’s quite a challenge when each advertiser could approve thousands of campaigns, each with its own restrictions and requirements. To solve that, we introduced a quality check workflow that performs many actions: accepting only the best offer out of many similar ones, redirect labeling, payout comparison, automatic A/B testing, internal supply control, capping traffic sources, and more. It helps us manage a huge amount of data pretty easily.

“Our mission is to provide values to our partners,” – Elisha Elbaz, DigitalFuture CEO

– Given the high competition in mobile apps, branding, and social growth verticals, what do you think set you apart from other affiliate networks?

I believe that it will be quite challenging for competitors to reach a high level performance without state of the art technology. We achieved that and other features because we devote significant resources, to not only eliminating symptoms, but to actually to solve problems. In addition to that, we are mindful with whom we work with, and make sure each partner gets the best possible experience; careful campaign management, lightning fast customer support, and timely payment to our providers.

– Do you remember any funny/interesting story that happened to you during your work in affiliate marketing?

The night before my first affiliate marketing conference, I went out with the boys for a “harmless” dinner. Let’s just say, it was a long night..

On the day of the conference, I was having the hardest time to keep a good conversation with big advertisers, and I was concerned that I might blew it all up.

After the second meeting, I noticed that all my advertisers seemed to have had their own very long night.

DigtialFuture team in Israel

– DigitalFuture is one of the few agencies out there that uses its algorithm to manage campaigns. Can you name any other technical advantages of working with your network?

Recently we started to work with Affise API (the general API, not CPAPI), which provides us complete control in micro and macro-management of the campaigns. And we use our servers to interact with the campaigns at Affise. Therefore we have many features that are not available to other entities such as the ability to cap offers per publisher or sub-source , approve campaigns based on many different conditions such as redirect amount, tier levels, publisher level, click cap, cleanest feed you’ll ever see with complete data, automatic alerts based on various conditions, automatic payout rules based on multiple factors, scheduling ad-operations and so many more cool and insightful features.

All is done and managed automatically.

– In your opinion, which GEOs work best in the industry at the moment?

Right now, Asia is a hot continent with top-performing countries such as Indonesia, India, and South Korea.

– Who do you think the Top Affiliate is?

In my opinion, a Top Affiliate is who generates over $10,000 per day in revenue, and pays its traffic sources on time.

– Please, share with us your tips for working with advertisers.

The most important thing is relationships. Always be kind and polite. Be the first to identify issues and be transparent about them. If you cannot deliver well on a campaign, pause before getting paused.

– Tell us your forecast regarding 2020. How do you think the industry will change this year?

I believe that more agencies will find their way to deliver quality results. This might cause a smaller number of accepted affiliates, yet with more budgets for the accepted ones. Transparency might become more impactful. The US market will continue to decline and remain a key market for the top affiliates only who know how to keep their advertisers satisfied.

DigitalFuture agency is built on key values: kindness, transparency, and professionalism.

– So, you told us about your tips for working with advertisers. But what advice can you give for affiliate networks who want to increase their ROI?

Play the long-term game. Many networks cut too many angles in the pursuit of getting as much and as fast as possible. This pushes the publishers to come up with solutions of their own, which in the end makes more and more networks obsolete.

Most importantly, bring value to your publishers. If a network only enjoys the rewards but fails to negotiate and fails to take responsibility during significant challenges, the network will lose its biggest asset.

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

We at DigitalFuture make the fastest payment in the industry to our traffic sources. We are always ready to solve any problems in a way that all parties feel content. And lastly, we are coming up with top performance while maintaining a friendly and kind approach to any person.

* AFFILIATE NETWORK INSIDER is a project, covering success stories and inside life of the biggest and most prominent affiliate networks in the industry. Make YOUR story heard by emailing to az@affise.com.

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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