Data Science in Marketing for the Busy Affiliate Life with John Wright

Would you believe if I said that the key to being a successful affiliate marketer is hidden in your data? You're about to learn the art of deciphering this data and using it to your advantage in this riveting episode of Affiliate Nerd Out. We're joined by the acclaimed John Wright, the CEO of StatsDrone and a professional gambler turned tech entrepreneur, who shares valuable insights from his fascinating journey across diverse industries.

This episode goes deep into the necessity of understanding data for maximum affiliate marketing success. We discuss the golden rule of focusing on sales vs traffic, the role of APIs and scraping in data collection, and the benefits of using a standardized platform. John and I even touch upon the much-overlooked metric of Earnings Per Click (EPC) that can guide your affiliate marketing strategies. We conclude this conversation with a dynamic live Q&A, making this episode a treasure trove of actionable insights for all you affiliate marketers! 

As we navigate further, you'll learn about the changing landscape of affiliate marketing, the increasing importance of data visualization, and how companies are leveraging technology to stay ahead. We explore the potential future of this industry, discussing the challenges faced by smaller affiliates, the role of AI, and the concept of topical authority. There's even a peek into a data visualization project that analyzes affiliate account data, proving the immense power of data visualization in affiliate marketing. A compelling listen for any affiliate marketer looking to make a mark!

Dustinhowes.com/affistash

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For more tips on how to scale your affiliate program, check out https://performancemarketingmanager.com

Transcript

Dustin Howes: 0:27

Hey folks, welcome to Affiliate Nerd Out. I am your Nerdirator, Dustin Howes. Sprint that good word about affiliate marketing. You're going to find me every Tuesday and Thursday right here on LinkedIn Live at 12.15. So please put it on the calendar, smash that subscribe button and come on back later. My nerd guest to the day is John Wright, CEO over at StatsDrone. John, welcome to the Nerditorium.

John Wright: 0:55

Thank you. I like to think I'm a fellow nerd in multiple ways of being a data person, so this is a. I think I'm a suitable guest.

Dustin Howes: 1:04

I've been excited to have you ever since we talked a couple of months ago and got introduced by some mutual friends in the industry, and I can't wait to talk about what you're doing today. We're going to have some live Q&A going on in the chat room, so please drop a question for John and myself. If you have anything about affiliate marketing, we want to hear about it. Our question of the day what tools are you using for data collection? I want to hear about them. I'm going to drop that in the comment section so that you have it, but would love to hear feedback from folks that are out there. But without further ado here, john, who are you?

John Wright: 1:45

Hello everyone. My name is John Wright. I'm the co-founder and CEO of StatsDrone. I've been in affiliate marketing and online gambling for over 20 years. I've done everything from run affiliate programs to being an affiliate, and I'm in a weird space now where we're building software for affiliates.

Dustin Howes: 2:05

Fantastic, and your time in the space. Where did you get your start again, John?

John Wright: 2:15

Okay, I'll start from the very beginning. So I went to school for engineering. I did robotics, ai, all that stuff before. Ai was even cool back then. And I had a friend in high school that we both went to university for engineering and he started to drop out of his engineering program into psychology and then dropped out completely doing professional gambling. So he tried to recruit me for a couple of years to do card counting and then he switched to online gambling. He was doing what's called bonus something, so I called it a low level form of professional gambling. So he had this message for two years that like, hey, this is working. And I just didn't listen to him. And then he's like, okay, I just bought a BMW M3 Roadster. And I'm like, okay, we're like early 20s. So I'm like, okay, this story is getting beyond ridiculous, but I think it's true. So I went to see him and, sure enough, that was true plus the rest of the story.

John Wright: 3:12

So I decided to take up bonus hunting, learning, basic strategy, blackjack. I went to a website, wizardofaudscom, which was the authority of gambling still is today and I gave it a try. So you got to imagine that I'm in early 20s, I've got something like $40,000 in university debt and I'm like I'm putting this extra $500 in my credit card to go. Let's give this a try. This doesn't work. $500 isn't going to really bust everything, because I'm already $40,000 all in, so I'll just get a real job after it. But I started playing blackjack. It was kind of crazy. People thought you know, my friends and family actually looked down upon me at the time. They're like you have an engineering degree and you're doing this. And I'm like whatever. Like look, if it doesn't work out, I'll get a job. So, yeah, it worked out, and then I was able to make more money from it.

John Wright: 4:06

I met a lot of people that also did that, or professional poker, sports betting and there's a lot of people around the world that have done stuff like this and that gave me exposure into realizing that if I can make money from these operations, how are they supporting it? And every time you go to one of these sites, at the very bottom, you see affiliate marketing. So, lo and behold, I was using affiliate sites to get all my information from and I realized that, as these sites were growing, I could see the entire ecosystem on the operator side as well as the affiliate marketing side. And then, basically, I got a chance to run a couple online casinos with the affiliate programs and I saw firsthand inside what affiliates were doing, how they got started. You get to network with them, like when you're an affiliate manager. You get to talk to them, like you actually see their data, like you're an affiliate manager, you have to. So you basically go.

John Wright: 4:58

Well, how did you get started? And every affiliate story was just different. There was no, I went to school for business. I went to school for entrepreneurship. No, it's. I went to school for law and dropped out and then I started a gambling affiliate site. I mean, that's the nature of all these stories, and I'm sure you know many affiliates that have total random backgrounds, but we all end up in the same place.

Dustin Howes: 5:20

Absolutely, and I didn't realize you had the gambling background as well.

John Wright: 5:27

I remember you have a through college.

Dustin Howes: 5:29

Yes, yeah, by by dealing and playing poker all through college. And the day I graduated I moved to Vegas to play for a living and the day I went broke I got a job in affiliate marketing at CJ. So that was my start of this entire journey and amazing that that you got a taste of that as well. I remember the days of full tilt of there were so many scams that I'd rather not talk about necessarily, but you're probably familiar with with this bonus hunting things. We would probably keep off of air of things that we know people did, but anyway, those those skills and learning lessons make us what we are today. So amazing journey. Your profile is in the chat. If you would like to be in John's seat, go to Dustin howes. com, slash nerd, drop an application and nerd out with me some other time in the future. John, let's talk about stats drone. What's the name origin story here?

John Wright: 6:43

Okay, really good question. So I used to use other apps, like I use one called stats remote. They were online for 10, 15 years. I was planning to build a competitor to them Before they went out of business so I didn't know. I had no idea that they would actually disappear.

John Wright: 7:00

So I knew what I wanted to build and then I had to come up with a name. So I wanted something unique but was kind of gave you an insight of as to what it did. But I also wanted some brand personality. I've read a lot of branding books. I think brand is pretty important. Like I didn't want to be affiliate stats calm, assuming I could actually even get that domain in the first place. Yeah, so I wanted to make sure that I also didn't have a brand that had a trademark.

John Wright: 7:26

So I started doing lots of searches, not just on domains, but I searched the keywords. I searched for stats, drone as a single word. Stats. From separate I did. I picked random things like Chameleon drone, chameleon stats and just random stuff.

John Wright: 7:40

And when I thought about this one like drones were just the company we started with me. My business partner was back in 2017, so you have to imagine drones were pretty popular and I had a drone. So I start thinking, like what would a drone be if it was stats related? Well, drones can be lots of things. You can control them, but they can also be automated, and we wanted to have it so you could control your stats, but there's other parts of it that could be automated. So it's kind of like you know your data is raining down on you and you could see the birds I've. You have everything.

John Wright: 8:09

So once I realized that the names were not taken, they were never written about, like all social channels were untouched. Um, that, to me, was very important, that I didn't have something where someone already had the Instagram page of it. Like no one used stats drone at all. So it was kind of a good chance where, yeah, it's just there's not a lot of people that create apps that we do. Um, I wish more of the industry knew that me and our competitors existed. But uh, yeah, that was just trying to do that. And then, just to add to the story, um, I also Thought about what colors did we want to pick?

John Wright: 8:42

I picked purple, because purple is not really used in affiliate marketing as common, so we wear purple t-shirts at affiliate summit and I say, hey, I'm in the purple t-shirt. You can always find me our secondary. Now Our secondary color is orange and you know about bob bright orange button which is like the it's acknowledged as one of the highest converting Buttons, or cts, and affiliate marketing like amazon. What color are the buttons? They're all orange. So purple and orange stats drone, trying to be original all the way, and that's the story.

Dustin Howes: 9:15

Hmm, Hmm, Uh, I made uh all of my call to action buttons, Uh, giants orange actually. So I'm on brand and and so is um my branding colors. Uh, love the story. Um incredible Uh journey for you to like. Really put that much thought into your brand, and especially the first reiteration building it for the future. That is great. So tell me more about what stats drone is doing and who you're servicing out there.

John Wright: 9:45

Yeah. So Initially, when it came to going back to the stats apps I were using, um, no one was searching for affiliate stats aggregator. That's what we do. So it goes without saying my job is to do marketing and trying to make people understand what we do in a nutshell. So I've got a couple uh summaries where I say we're kind of like the quick books for affiliates. We help you get all your data so you know your clicks, your sales, how much revenue you made, and we pull all the data you can get that exists inside of your affiliate account. So if it's scraping, we scrape it. If it's api, we do that. And how we're different from a couple other stats apps. There's actually a whole collection of them.

John Wright: 10:27

We try to get as much of the data as possible, right down to the campaign.

John Wright: 10:30

So if you had, let's say, 20 different campaigns within one brand, we would get all those 20 campaigns so you could actually see, well, if you're using 20 campaigns in a different way, then you would actually reverse engineer all that data.

John Wright: 10:42

So I'll give you an example If you wanted to know the conversion rate of a, of a product you're selling, and you're, you have the power in that software To create campaigns. I recommend people create one campaign for the home, one campaign for the re review page, one campaign for the product comparison page, if you have one, another one for your blog post, another one for your newsletter, another one for social media. So that might be a lot of campaigns, but what you really want to know is is most of your sales and the most valued part of your sales coming from the home or social media, and a lot of people don't know this. Unless you're able to Break down your campaigns, this is exactly how you're going to get your data, and so what we do and what a couple of other competitors do is something similar when, when you have that data, you're able to Start with a framework and go what can I learn from what's working and what's not working?

Dustin Howes: 11:33

Gotcha, and your product? Is it for publishers, agencies, merchants, all of the above who can use your tool, affiliates and publishers.

John Wright: 11:43

So right now, as of today, it's mostly for the gambling industry, but we are just starting to cover other verticals and niches like uh affiliate networks, saas affiliate programs, seo affiliate programs Um, there's a whole bunch. Uh, we want to focus as well on personal finance. There's a lot of people that are in the finance related space, which is it's a generic category, but it opens up into like 10 different sub niches.

Dustin Howes: 12:10

Fantastic, all right, so you're into data science. You're a data nerd, uh, can you tell the audience here what data science really is in your opinion and why it's important? Why should people care?

John Wright: 12:23

Yeah, I. I personally believe that in the next couple of years that a lot of affiliates the ones that are really going to grow are going to be ones that actually have a strong sense of data. They're going to be able to look at what's working, what's not working. And I kind of like referencing the SEO community. It's if you look at SEO, it's a very data driven industry. You have google analytics, google search console and all these amazing SEO tools like semrush and hrefs, and it's it's data, it's data viz. There's so many things you can do with it and I find that just by studying affiliates that have a lot of success, they all seem to go back to data and go. They really focus on what's working, what's not working.

John Wright: 13:02

I mean, we could easily just look at you know, some of your websites and blogs, and here's a basic example let's take the last 20 posts you've done and let's see which one has both generated the most traffic. But putting traffic aside because people chase the wrong things, what's this? What has led to the most sales? So you might have a page that has five clicks per month, but if that's generating one like high-valued sale per month, you're not going to care about having that page that has 10,000 visitors per month. It's this basic concept of looking at data that I think people just don't do enough of.

John Wright: 13:36

And when I ask other experts in affiliate marketing or in SEO and say what percentage of people do the best practices, and the common number that keeps being floated around is like we're talking 1%. It's like 1% of SEO do this, 1% of affiliates do this. It's a basic stat, but it's really true. They're just not looking at enough data to go. What should I be doing next? What's not working? Can I make a test and make a change and see if that actually worked? At the end of the day, you're going to just be looking for feedback.

Dustin Howes: 14:44

Awesome, and what kind of level do you have to be as an affiliate to start really needing this kind of data to be looking at? It has to be a certain level, I would assume, at like you're pulling in a couple of grand in affiliate commissions. Is there a certain level of affiliates need to use your product?

John Wright: 15:08

Whether it's us or whether you want to just use something as basic as going okay, let's get really get our hands dirty with Google Search Console, google Analytics and all these things. I think you could even start before you have that, I'd say. As you're building your traffic and watching what works and what doesn't work, it's use that data to learn from it. Like here's another example let's just put websites aside and let's say we've got a YouTube channel. Well, you want to see what's working on YouTube, right, it's? You create YouTube videos and you can actually see the engagement stats. Just by looking at the basic data, you start seeing very quickly what works and what doesn't work. And that's even well before you could actually be making those thousands of dollars.

John Wright: 15:48

So, yeah, you can make a video and you can say, okay, this leads to more traffic, which is kind of fun. Like, we all want to have more subscribers and more, you know, more engagement. But then this is where you start experimenting and say, okay, I'm going to do different types of videos and then you're going to see where your first sale comes from. Like, I think your first sale is really the buzz that everyone gets in affiliate marketing. Like I remember my first commission, like we're talking a long time ago where, you know, I had a business partner. He sent me a message on my phone and I got the text. That's like check it out, like go log into the back end we have our very first player that signed up and our first commission. You know it's pretty exciting and, yeah, you want that thousands of dollars before you can say, okay, let's look at data. But I think you can do it even before.

Dustin Howes: 16:37

Okay, that's fair enough, and your product has to be connected with the networks to determine which programs you're making money on and where that traffic is is coming from to get that sale happening.

John Wright: 16:52

Sort of. So when it comes to scraping and API, most of these programs they actually have it like scraping you, we basically just get an account, we see all the data, we build a scraper, we're in like we have almost all of our integrations done without any participation from the affiliate program or any knowledge. To be honest, even when they have the API available, they create the API so you can actually do this yourself. You can basically build your own API bot, which takes a bit of time. So what we do, and some of our competitors do, is we standardize this. We tell you how to easily get the API data. So, rather than you spending 30 minutes to hours building like a setup of getting the API data coming in, we just do it and make it easier.

John Wright: 17:35

So I'm kind of getting giving myself a little bit of promo in our competitors, where the things that we do as an advantage is we standardize the data. When you get your API data from 10 different networks, they're using everything unique clicks, raw clicks Okay, that's two different metrics, but sometimes they switch them around like they re, they mislabel them or they they think one thing is one data point when it's really something else. Our job is to standardize it. So if you, if you, don't mind doing the work that we do, you can go ahead and build your own app. It's not always fun, but yeah, we don't really. Yeah, most programs are surprised that they're integrated. They're like, well, how much does it cost? And it's like nothing. They're like, well, what do we need to do? I'm like nothing, it's already done. We just have our affiliates ask us can you please set this up? And because they you know they're paying customers, we do this for them.

Dustin Howes: 18:27

Oh, fantastic, All right. So talking about affiliates, what stats really matter to affiliates? What are? What should you be evaluating as an affiliate regarding your traffic?

John Wright: 18:41

I always say earnings per click as one of the core KPIs metrics. Whatever you want to call it is everything. It's the one of the most important metrics or KPIs for both the affiliate program slash operator as well as the affiliate. I find that there's a lot of affiliates out there that don't really look at this data and go you know where. Where should I rearrange my traffic?

John Wright: 19:04

Quite often people focus on the money first. They see the program and they kind of rank them and going okay, here's my number one earning program. But just because that's your number one earning doesn't mean that's the program you should send the most traffic to. Obviously, if you got your fifth best earning program, maybe it's off by $5,000. Like, this program's made 5k. Your top programs made 10k. But if the if the 5k program only took 10 times less traffic to make that same 5k, it goes with it saying you know that you should be sending more traffic to that.

John Wright: 19:37

You want to re rank your ads or your traffic If it's important to you. The only time it might not be important is you know these things happen all the time. Maybe that your top earning program happens to be ranking super strong for that keyword. You can't do anything about it other than celebrate and say I hope I never lose my rankings. Let's get the other rankings up. But once you're able to start comparing things let's say you've got blog posts, lists, comparison tables that's when you want to look at going okay, where is the earnings per click Like? What are these values? Who should I send more traffic to? Who should I send less traffic to? And if you start studying this data which doesn't take a lot of work, but most people just don't do it like once again, 1% you will actually not only see where you should send traffic to, but you will see the trends in time.

John Wright: 20:26

Just because your earnings per click is high on program A doesn't mean it's going to be like that forever. Something could always change. They could make improvements. But they could also make improvements and make a mistake and forget to put the tracker back in the core CTA. Your conversions will crash. If you're not paying attention to this, you're going to be blasting traffic at something that's not going to make you money. That's one of the most painful things any fillet can do.

Dustin Howes: 20:50

Gotcha and a couple of great points there. The affiliates that are driving traffic with paid traffic to their site to try to make more money in commissions that they are and driving that traffic there, they should know which programs are performing the best with that APC. But the content affiliates if they have something that's ranking, they better be creating more content linking to that page to keep it high on Google first of all, and then they can make additional content that will also rank in the future as well. So it turns out to be like a content strategy as well when you look at it in last terms, right.

John Wright: 21:31

Yeah, I think you actually brought up a solid point, because I think a lot of people, once they get that success with that one page, they're like, okay, great, that's awesome, let's keep it, but they don't do what you just suggested, which is like let's double down on it.

John Wright: 21:45

I actually think that's a great point because I didn't even really think about that.

John Wright: 21:50

I like watching what other people do and have success with, and I'm going to make something up here where we know Matt Diggity does a lot of B2B content and what he does. I'm going to call this the Matt Diggity strategy, where he does an amazing piece of content but he follows it up with the video version of that and he basically says he's like, hey, the video actually does better conversion because you know how the world works, people want to buy from people. So you see Matt Diggity on video and those videos they might be the same amount of traffic, but he's saying the video converts better, but he doubles down on. He actually says not, am I going to create the content piece, but I'm also going to create the video piece and I'm also going to create the shorts piece and I'm going to create the different little pieces that are going to go on social media and, yeah, a lot of people aren't doing this, and it's rare that I actually watch affiliates do something like this, so that's a solid tip.

Dustin Howes: 22:43

Yeah, and that goes for any affiliate managers out there that want to get suggestions that give them a little bit of bump in the hearts of the affiliates that they're working with giving those kinds of suggestions. Hey, this blog post here doing outstanding, but it's missing a video. Can you do a piece of video content and add it to that blog post? You're going to get better rankings and link back to both of them. You're going to improve your SEO value. Giving them a tip like that can be really crucial to improving your relationship and raising up that EPC altogether.

John Wright: 23:18

I think that's a great learning point for affiliate managers. If you're looking through your data and you see that campaign is actually converting really well, it's well what's behind the conversion? You're going to see the topic and I think affiliate managers could actually take a page out by just doing some basic reports, finding out where the conversions are coming from, and then maybe that affiliate program could create content for that or they could actually encourage more of their affiliates to say, hey, this is working really well. Let's ask your database to say let's do a campaign, let's create some content here.

Dustin Howes: 23:51

Yeah, and going back to what you said earlier about EPC being the most important metric that affiliates are going to look at, especially the good affiliates, epc is something that I am always suggesting to affiliate managers to highlight. If it is a good number, you should be putting this all over your signup page, your email messages to the welcome sequence, things of that nature. You want to highlight that number so that good affiliates can see that they can make money with this campaign. Looks like we got something in the chat. Oh, kristen, bigtime Evan's coming in with a Love the Double Down Additional content pieces will be sharing this with some of my partners. You got it, no problem, kristen. Thank you for listening and supporting this. Appreciate you All right. What about good affiliates? You mentioned? Epc is one of those stats. How do good affiliates interpret this kind of data?

John Wright: 25:00

Yeah, that's a tough question. It's tough because there's so many tangents that can go off on. But, all right, what I'm starting to see with some of the mid to larger size affiliates when I mentioned when we're chatting offline about what's changing in affiliate marketing, I think as these companies get bigger, I see a lot of people hiring people in data science. You start looking on LinkedIn, you go what is this affiliate company doing? What is this affiliate network doing? And I'm starting to see more patterns of the types of jobs that are appearing. And it's less focused on sales and it's more on data science, data analytics, business intelligence. That's a big buzzword and that's a job title that's becoming more important. And if you start looking at what's actually behind these roles like what are these people doing at these affiliate companies? And it's a whole bunch of things. They are using tools like what we do. Some of them that can afford to actually build this whole division. They would build the equivalent of what we have for themselves and they're like look, we don't wanna use another company like ours or our competitors. And what they're doing inside is they're basically building a lot of data visualizations on what they have. They're basically going. I wanna see not just all the data, but I wanna see it visualize. And when you start visualizing this data, I think this is where you start seeing weird aha moments, like I think we mentioned like you know, I shared with a slide here that it's all about a data-vis project. I did. I took two years worth of data on one of my affiliate accounts over yeah, one single account and I said I don't know what I'm doing, but I'm gonna run this in Tableau. So Tableau is a data-vis software. I mean, that's owned by Salesforce. Like all these data-vis companies, they got acquired for insane amounts of money Google acquired Looker Studio, salesforce acquired Tableau and Microsoft has Power BI. These tools are like billions and billions of dollars.

John Wright: 26:52

So people are basically building their own custom dashboards and they're able to spend more time on it. So I'll give you another example. You have Google Analytics. You, as a user, can do whatever you want. So if you're good with Google Analytics, you will actually go inside and see all the reports.

John Wright: 27:08

But what you can do is you can actually build your own custom templates using Looker Studio, which is owned by Google, and because it's a Google product, it's all free and you can build custom dashboards so you can actually see a single dashboard that will do anything you want. You drag and drop, you mix it. You can actually say what is my best converting page, what is my most traffic page, what is all these questions you can imagine. That's based on your data. You will build that into a dashboard and it's all customized just for you, and there's so many people building these templates. So, yeah, that's what's changing right now and I think more of these jobs that are coming up in the data space they're gonna be coming in affiliate marketing and there's no shortage of opportunities and the values there. These people are getting paid really well and it's changing on all fronts. On the affiliate program side affiliate networks, affiliates this is the new change.

Dustin Howes: 28:06

Awesome For those affiliates out there that are in need of something. What is one of those first steps that they should be looking at when determining whether or not they need this kind of technology? Yet?

John Wright: 28:25

That's a good question I try to look at going. How are we gonna make it easy for someone to just jump right in, especially if they don't know, like, how to get really comfortable with data? And I think there's a couple of easy ways of getting to just get into the space. One is finding Looker Studio templates. It's one of the easiest things you could do and if you have a budget of, let's say, let's say, a couple hundred dollars, you can go into freelance websites like freelancercom, upworkcom, and say, look, I just wanna hire someone to do like a basic data viz project. And then let's pretend I'm that person and you're coming to me and I look at your ecosystem and go what do you have? You have a website, so you're gonna have Google Analytics, google Search Console, I think you have a YouTube channel, so you're also gonna have subscribers and other metrics. All this stuff can be pulled into Looker Studio and I'd say you know what? It's same thing as what I was like last year. I'm like I have all this data. I don't even know how to use the tools yet, but I'm gonna go ahead and do it.

John Wright: 29:26

And I think if you give this to a freelancer, you can say look for $250,. I just want you to build me a custom dashboard. There's no shortage of people that will do it and I think you'll be surprised at what you will see. And then, once you know that these dashboards exist, you can actually find other examples Like there's. You go to YouTube, just type in, like Looker Studio dashboard, affiliate marketing, all these things that we work with day in and day out.

John Wright: 29:50

Like people are building custom dashboards based on ClickBank, cj, like they're all this is all normal. Now, I'm not saying everyone does this, but you can actually literally find all these tutorials and templates and yeah, it's a big rabbit hole, but I'd say, start small. Just basically take a small amount of money. If you've got 250 to spend, you can spend as much as you want. You could literally blast your bank account, but literally for $250, you'll find someone that will be like you know what. It's gonna take me one hour, but I'm gonna give you a really nice dashboard and it's gonna be very insightful, I believe, for most people.

Dustin Howes: 30:24

Excellent, excellent. All right time for our sponsor of the day Taking a quick break here and we're gonna announce our sponsor of the day is we're not doing performance marketing manager, when is my? Oh, yeah, we are. But more importantly, we're talking about November here. Go to dustinhowescom, slash moe and ask me about my monkey tail here.

John Wright: 30:53

That is amazing.

Dustin Howes: 30:55

Thank you very much and I support November every single year. I am a moe bro for life Every November my wife hates that I do something goofy on my face, but it is all about talking about men's help and raising some money for a great cause. November every dollar that is donated goes into cancer research, testicular cancer research, men's health, suicide prevention and just a great cause. Go to dustinhowes. com, slash moe and check out more. All right, switching gears here. How about any affiliate marketing trends that you're seeing out there? You're pretty familiarized with this Industry and you've got a lot of clients that are publishers what's working right there that are that is trending.

John Wright: 31:48

That's. That's a tough question because I can go in like we just talked about a lot of data science, so I'm gonna just do a small version of that to say, yeah, data science and this is a big part of trends that are happening. So I I've been talking to a lot of different people like SEO and like I've got a podcast and I get a chance to do what you do, which is ask questions to people at you know, your knowledge just gains multiple levels from having the luxury of doing this. And I've been thinking about a theory that I wonder are we in a game over an end game Mindset of affiliate marketing where it's too late? The big companies are just gonna get more dominant. They're gonna buy the smaller companies. The big affiliates are also gonna do the same. Ai is gonna change things as well. Where you're gonna have, let's say, the big company, where they've got the big bankroll, they can afford to spend two hundred thousand dollars or four hundred thousand dollars a year on a single-person salary. Just imagine if you're an affiliate startup. How do you compete with this? So I like asking these questions and challenging people going is this, is this the end game? Like is affiliate marketing doomed? And it's only gonna be a couple players, or is there an opportunity? And when I, when I talk to people like Matt diggity and Kyle roof, they believe that there's infinite opportunity for sure. What, what they're advocating and I actually believe this to be true is that it's a common buzzword topical authority. And you're like, what is topical authority? It's? You know, it's the whole idea that you're gonna be the best at what you can be, you're gonna be the expert and you can challenge like the most challenging things. But I actually believe that people do have this opportunity to jump in when they don't have the 400k to To pay for, like you know, the perfect AI person on your team, whether you need it or not.

John Wright: 33:33

I think what's actually changing in affiliate marketing today is that we have a mixture of these AI tools that automate everything. So content automation is happening at a really weird way rate, but on the flip side, I think also that it's not gonna be easy for everyone just to jump into video. So I think video Personalization and building your personal brand is actually one of the keys of success, and I actually find it weird that no one's really talking about brand building on the B to C side. In my opinion, like we are, we are B2B, so we know that we're building our brand by doing these things. But when you think about the B2C side, I think a lot of people think they need to build a corporate affiliate site, like it's got to be without the person's name and it's got to be the best-looking logo, and they're worried about building a blog that looks like a blog. But I actually think people need to double down on that and I think when you build this personalized Version of what you do, when it goes hand-in-hand with social media, this feeds your ecosystem.

John Wright: 34:33

So I like to kind of look at both sides of the fence and go is it, is it too late, or do we have an opportunity? And I think, as long as it's really difficult for people to create video, to do social Media, well, I think what's behind all of this is topical authority. You become topical authority and you're gonna just, basically, you're gonna create all these videos, you're gonna do the social media stuff because you're gonna be the expert, and then it's just gonna become something that you feed and you could do this without actually needing, like you know, the the two million dollars in the bank saying, hey, we need to raise some capital. It's like no, you don't. You can still do affiliate marketing today with the the smallest of budgets, or no budget at all, if you want to just go straight to YouTube.

Dustin Howes: 35:14

Yeah, and I love that sentiment and agree with you a hundred percent. There's an infinite amount of opportunity still to be had. Yes, ai is making it easier for bigger conglomerates to buy and like, create content on a quicker basis, but there's always going to be a place for an individual to give a firsthand Support for a product that they're using right now, and that is such a more powerful message than any kind of Automated AI blog posts that could ever be created, especially from a bigger content publication, and it's just pounding out tons of content for the fact of throwing a wider net. If you concentrate on one product and something you really believe in and put a ton of content, and there's always going to be a place for you in affiliate marketing. Hey, I would love to see the demo part of what you do here, john. Can we put that screen share on? And there we go? Put some visuals on here.

John Wright: 36:18

Yeah, that's so. I'll talk my way through this. So this is a part of a course I took last summer. It was on data visualization. Like I've got a data company, so of course I need to do this and I realized I was actually pretty weak in this area. So I took a course. It was beyond phenomenal and I had no idea what I was doing. So what I did was I took two years worth of data on one of our affiliate accounts. I downloaded it. Of course, I used our app just because it made my life easier, and then I I imported this CSV file into Tableau. Like again, did not have any idea what I was doing. I was literally learning Tableau on the fly. I'm like, okay, I'm grabbing these data points, I'm putting them to different charts and I just started Experimenting. So this became the foundation of building what we're seeing today. So this was the very first visualization I created and it shocked me.

John Wright: 37:06

So I'm going to tell you what we're looking at right now. At the very top, we have three campaigns that have generated close to $40,000 revenue over the two years. Now, this is a plot of clicks versus revenue, but plotted by campaign. So what we should see is we should see a lot of different types of data. So what we should see is we should see a straight line of, you know, like everything should just go up in a linear fashion Whenever something's on the left or right of this is either very good or very bad. And I'm going to tell you right now that very far right campaign Took five times as much traffic to generate the same $38,000 revenue as the one on the left of it. That was a kick in the stomach for me when I saw this. I'm like if I had seen this after a couple months and if this data started converging to the true reality, then I would have changed this. And I'm going to tell you something even more shocking Behind these two data points, both of these campaigns are the exact same sign of bonus, but they're different looks of the campaign.

John Wright: 38:08

They present the same thing in a different way. So I've actually done some it's kind of like, you know, experiments on LinkedIn. I give three landing pages and you're actually seeing the three campaigns at the very top and I said which one converts the best and everyone picks each landing page randomly. So 33 pick this one. And then I asked why did you pick it? And Sometimes the insights make sense, but sometimes they don't.

John Wright: 38:32

And when I show, show them this data, they're kind of like, wow, this is a way off. And most people still to this day. When I show them, they actually guess the wrong one. They the wrong one is actually the one on the far left. No wait, it's actually the far left is the correct one and the one on the far right. The far right has a landing page which has actually extra bonus. It's like a $31 note of positive bonus for a casino plus 200%. You're like 200% like this is this is amazing value. That actually distracts people for some reason.

John Wright: 39:01

I don't know the science behind it. I just know that I looked at this data and I believe that if I start studying this more and more, I'm going to find more of this stuff. And this was just one program. I we literally had a thousand affiliate accounts, so I imagine how many times could I find these discoveries if I started plotting the stuff over and over again. Awesome, and if we go to the next page, I'll go through the next one quickly.

John Wright: 39:25

This one is the same thing but just a little different. It's clicks versus signups, so you can still see the conversion rate is. It should be in a straight line but it's it's off. So that's another validation that revenue isn't always everything, but usually these numbers correlate. Going to the next one, this is signups versus rev share. So again the rev share and which is a commission model in Gambling it's very similar to total commissions earn. So I just wanted to see if these numbers lined up or if they were off by bit. So it validates that these numbers are indeed true. What we're looking at is probably not the best graph visualization, but this was a reflection of COVID, so you can actually see when COVID happened, there's a massive spike in traffic. Everyone went online. Of course, we kind of expected this, but again, doing these things tell a story and it's nice to actually see the stories behind your data. Going to the next page, this is the same thing, but this is sales count and obviously you can see the COVID spike there.

Dustin Howes: 40:24

It was pretty obvious, I know my gambling uh habits spiked during COVID as well.

John Wright: 40:33

Yeah, it's very true. Our commission spiked as well and we didn't have to do anything. It just everything happened. Naturally, this one was an interesting one. This was, I think, it's clicks by days of the month, so naturally the 31st day of the month doesn't happen all the time. This is two years, so probably 50 percent of the time we're not going to have a 31, and a small percentage of the time we're not going to have a 30. It's very rare, but you can see that the most traffic we had was actually on the early days of the month. But the story behind this was I knew that when we started our month I wanted to start it strong, so I was newsletter heavy. I did a lot of newsletter letters on the first few days of the week to start the month and that's why this reflects on it as well as the last. So you can actually see 28, 23rd, 24th, 25th, like these days are getting a lot. It's just a reality of our situation, but someone's situation might actually be totally different.

John Wright: 41:30

And then here these next two ones are also. They confused me because they weren't what I expected it. So you can see on the right in the legend, we've got clicks, deposits, revenue, signups and total commissions, and it's by days of the week. So you would assume that, okay, maybe weekends are going to be more traffic. But what ended up happening was the I'm going to go to the next slide they ended up being more revenue but less traffic and I was kind of confused by that and I couldn't really figure out why. But I was kind of surprised, like we expected the weekends to make more money, but I expected that the traffic should be kind of proportional.

John Wright: 42:10

And then the last one because in gambling you can have negative commissions, I decided to just like plot it left to right over two years. And this is kind of interesting because when there was a negative, this means a player has one. But what also is visualized here is that the losses were incurred in a short period of time. Now, if the player had one and then the cashed out and then they didn't do anything else, then that spike that goes below zero would be prolonged. It would actually cover a large space. So you can see here that this is generating more revenue than it does on the negative. But I believe if we were to do this across all the Philip programs we worked with, we'd actually have some that they spend a little too much time in the negatives, and I wouldn't trust it. It's not to say that the programs are being distrustful. It could be actually real data, but I still need to care that we're spending more time on the positive side of the business, which this is going to be a reflection of earnings per click.

Dustin Howes: 43:09

Excellent, all right. Well, thanks for dropping that presentation in there, and we can see how valuable that kind of click data. You made nine quick slides of this in a matter of five minutes. Imagine if you spend a whole day analyzing and figuring this out using your tool. There's pretty powerful stuff there. All right, john. As we wind down, I want to talk about the future of Affiliate. What's out there for you next?

John Wright: 43:43

Yeah, that's a good question. I mean I don't want to be a broken record. I mean this is obviously about data science and I am spending more time Like I've got a data and engineering background, but I'm spending even more time going. What else can I learn? What can I be good at, and how is that going to help both what we do as a company and how is this going to be insightful that I can share with affiliates? And the things that I'm excited to be working on soon are obviously anything to do with AI. It's a rabbit hole. You can literally take the data that our app collects and you can put it into third-party programs and ask for these same insights. These things are going to start to become more automated and I think we're going to have these tools that are going to make it easier to not have to spend hours building these things, but they'll be kind of built for you a lot faster and then you'll be able to spend more time actually just looking at the reports and going. I got my insight. I know exactly what to do. Let's go back to the drawing board. So I think it's going to be a mix of a lot of data science just building like looker studio templates. I'm excited to help people, help affiliates, with this. So I want to get really good building these and helping people say hey, look, we have collections of templates that you can just basically download and try for yourself. After that. It's going in the opposite direction of like okay, here's data, everything, and the opposite.

John Wright: 45:00

And what we touched upon earlier is I actually think personal branding is something that it will show up in the stats Like you're going to see higher commissions earn. But I think personal branding is going to be even more important when we have AI everything. I personally believe that people want to connect more with people and less with AI. Like could you imagine spending two hours on LinkedIn and then being told after that it's like you chatted all day long with bots. Like that would kind of be big. I don't want to be on LinkedIn. Like you would actually want to leave.

John Wright: 45:32

And I believe this is why podcasts are getting even stronger. It's why video is becoming stronger and even going full circle to what Matt Diggity said, where he's like I'm getting some of my best sales from doing videos. People want to buy from people and when you take that branding personality into your content, it's your basic of saying I'm either the expert or I'm just really into this topic and I might not be the expert, but I'm going to go full on topical authority and I think it's actually the more exciting part, because it does the opposite of that challenging that discussion, of going is it too late to get an affiliate marketing. And a lot of people say this, especially when it comes to SEO. It's like you know, it's SEO and branding. They do go hand in hand and I think a lot of people they think about data first in the opposite, and I agree with Kristen.

Dustin Howes: 46:21

Yes, always be branding Excellent. All right, we didn't get to a couple of different segments defending your posts and we're at time. How do people connect with here, John?

John Wright: 46:34

Yeah, good question. I am John at statsronecom. If you search for my name on LinkedIn, you're going to find lots of me. So if you see that you and I are connections in common, you know that's the right John right. So find me there. And my handles on a lot of social media profiles are always look right as it looks RIC, always look right. Yeah, yeah, smart.

Dustin Howes: 46:56

Love it All right. Thanks for joining me today. For Thursday's affiliate nerd out, I will not be there. Happy Thanksgiving to everyone. We'll catch you next Tuesday out there. If you would like to download my affiliate program checklist, go hit this QR code up in the top corner here with your phone and go check that out. And, john, thank you so much for being here. Appreciate your time, and thanks for nerding out with me today.

John Wright: 47:31

Thank you. It was a pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Dustin Howes: 47:34

Awesome. All right, folks, keep on recruiting and we'll see you out there. Take care.