Partnering on Customer Acquisition, with John Wright

Episode 197

Today, we are going to talk about how those of us who sell things find new buyers once we’ve exhausted our own audiences. We involve partners, and we can do this in a few ways. These partners may have high-traffic sites or be social media influencers. We are trying to use someone else's channel to reach their audience, hoping they will buy from us.

Alternatively, we might be the ones who are influential or have a large audience that brands want to reach, so they pay us to be their marketing channel. The name for teaming up like this is affiliate marketing.

Today’s guest came to affiliate marketing through dabbling in online gambling. He watched the incentives sites put out to attract players, and then in 2010, he created a website that reviewed gambling affiliate programs called Gaming Affiliates Guide. This site’s traffic led him to become, you guessed it, an affiliate. Over time, he managed several gambling affiliate sites.

As you progress in this field, you always hit a ceiling with this marketing channel. No matter whether you’re the one needing traffic and paying for it, or the one who has traffic and is turning it into money, everyone gets a headache tracking it. As our guest was deeply involved at this point, getting paid to manage affiliate sites, he saw numerous problems in this industry and saw a way to solve them.

There were already applications that reported affiliate activity, but he saw these technologies' shortcomings. With his engineering degree from the University of Toronto, which had taught him how to develop things, he joined up with partners to create a SaaS tool of their own: StatsDrone.

Having scratched an itch he experienced earlier in his career, he now heads a team whose tool addresses affiliate challenges.

Let’s go to Montreal and hear from John Wright.



Chapter Timestamps:

0:00:00 Intro

00:03:35 Welcome John Wright

00:06:57 Difficulty with Affiliate tracking

00:11:27 Postbacks and tracking methods

00:18:48 tracking dynamic variables

00:23:14 PSA

00:23:54 Tracking affiliate dollars

00:42:13 Contacting John



For complete links to the People, Products and Concepts mentioned in the show, go to the episode’s page on the Funnel Reboot site.