3 Hot Takes #2

Hola Amigos

Writing from beautiful Austin, Texas. The weather is starting to turn in our favor (cooler).

Fall is upon us, Football is back, pumpkin spice is everywhere, and e-commerce holiday planning is in full swing.

Nice to see some positive responses from our last newsletter.

Updates from each stage of the RBL Flywheel and each practice at RBL.

Affiliate Marketing - PARTNER

Last week we reiterated my recent tweet that.. Affiliate Marketing is the most misunderstood performance marketing channel.

Why is that? (consider this part 1 of a multi-part answer to this question)

Affiliates, influencers, and partners ARE the ecosystem of Affiliate Marketing.

They are entrepreneurs and innovators that find ways to drive results for advertisers (often on a cost per purchase or cost per lead basis).

Feel free to join in on the discussion on the Tweeter if your so inclined:

https://twitter.com/TyeDeGrange/status/1565474612586110981?s=20&t=yqJjcfHM5JVZFc2gG4NRTA

Periodically we will highlight some of the high quality partners that are delivering the core value of the ecosystem. The advertisers pay the bills but the partners are doing the heavy lifting.

This week we are showcasing Meredith DoorDash.

They are a premium network of sites giving advertisers access to publications like:Very Well, Health, Parents, Investopedia, The Balance, All Recipes, Serious Eats, Simple Recipes, The Spruce Eats, Eating Well, Food & Wine, Liquor.com, Better Homes & Gardens, Martha Stewart Living, Magnolia, The Spruce, Real Simple, Midwest Living, Drew+Jonathan Reveal, MyDomaine, American Patchwork & Quilting, Southern Living, Successful Farming, Wood, Byrdie, Brides, InStyle, Shape, Travel + Leisure, Trip Savvy, Lifewire, Treehugger, People, Entertainment Weekly, Sweet July, Cooking Light, Coastal Living, Traditional Home, do it yourself, Country Home.

Think of them as your way to access every premium magazine on the rack from one place. As costs have risen across Paid Search, Social and most other platforms using affiliate and specifically quality affiliate content to diversify is very important for e-commerce brands.

[[— Tye DeGrange, CEO, Round Barn Labs] author]

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Why does this matter? Back in the old days (2010), the eBay Internet Marketing team was industry leading for a number of things. We ran a lot of experiments. One of them was the incrementality of each affiliate business model. Reply to me if you have questions about the often misunderstood concept of incrementality. Guess which affiliate marketing partner type was most incremental? Content. As a result, you might want to consider a healthy percentage of partners like Meredith DotDash in your affiliate marketing portfolio.

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Paid Marketing - ACQUIRE

We definitely recommend testing value based optimization on Facebook Ads and Facebook shopping ads. This new-ish feature allows e-commerce advertisers to go after potentially higher cost customers but higher lifetime value customers. FB often optimizes for the best cost per acquisition. While it does not always win over other tactics, definitely get some data on it to see how it performs for you.


[[— Mike McElhaney, VP of Paid Marketing, Round Barn Labs] author]

Why does it matter? Always Be Testing. If you are not experimenting you are not learning. We also highly recommend testing new ad units and tactics early in their lifecycle (under 1.5 years). Staying on top of platform tools, trends, data and learnings from past tests, and experiments are critical. Being early testing tactics and channels can be the difference between success and failure. Well documented but often neglected advice supported by James Currier, Andrew Chen, and our post on why we started RBL.

Why does it matter? If you are not running regular A/B tests on your site and your landing pages while also prioritizing effective paid marketing experiments, then you are leaving money on the table.