Canadian Fintech Affiliate: Move fast and break things, or don't and lose affiliates
Coast Capital goes coast to coast, why time to market is killing your growth and meet me at this event in Toronto this month👋🍸
Morning!
Welcome to the Canadian Fintech Affiliate newsletter, a monthly roundup of industry news, offers & traffic channel updates and conferences worth attending for Canadian affiliate marketers.
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In today’s email:
Offer updates: New bank accounts and changes to credit card programs
Insights: Why time is killing your affiliate program
Best upcoming conferences including one I’ll be attending in May - come say hi👋
Traffic channel updates: Why you’re seeing traffic swings why your publishers
My favourite meme from the past month
Opinions expressed are my own*
Today’s reading time is 5 minutes.
🤑 Offer updates
Coast Capital launches 2 new banking offers with attractive signup bonuses. Plus, they’ve expanded the accepted provinces from BC only to most of Canada. These offers are live on Fintel.
Amex made changes to the majority of its credit card portfolio. The most notable change is to the American Express Aeroplan, bumping up the welcome bonus to 70k total points as they look to capitalize on travel-conscious customers. You can check out Amex on CJ.
😤 Time is killing your affiliate program
Time to market is so important when working with affiliates. Often, it can be more important than the payout.
So why is it that organizations can take over 12 months to get a program live and expect that nothing has changed on the publisher’s side?
If your program is going to take more than a month to go live, keep these 4 factors in mind when speaking to affiliates.
👋 First Impressions Matter
They say that first impressions last a lifetime, well guess what? That applies to performance marketing as well. The first taste of a relationship is how long it takes to get an IO signed and go live. The longer that takes you risk eroding credibility in your program before it even starts.
Doubts start to creep in like “will they make any optimizations once live?” and even “are they going to pay on time?”
🤔 Priorities Change
Like advertisers, publishers and media buyers have their own goals and growth initiatives. They’re constantly testing new advertisers and offers to increase performance and revenue. If another offer takes off before you’re onboarded, you’re at risk of being deprioritized while they focus on scaling with the other brand.
Think of publishers as goldfish, their memory is only as long as the last performing offer. If you have a publisher's attention, act fast and don’t let it go to waste.
👻 Traffic is Dynamic
I can’t tell you how many advertisers overlook this when working in this channel. Technology moves fast, we all know that. Well, traffic in the digital world is no exception. If a publisher or an affiliate has traffic now, they know that won’t last forever.
Google's algorithm changes, Facebook ad accounts get banned, TikTok ads grow stale, Taboola ads stop converting, email sending reputations get damaged.
These all affect traffic volumes and no publisher is immune to changes in these channels.
If a publisher shows the urgency to go live, it's because they have the traffic now and you need to move fast to capitalize on the opportunity.
💸 Competition is Fierce
This is a channel where the best performance wins. It can be the highest conversion rate or the highest payout, bottom line is that if you make your partners the most money, you’ll get the most traffic.
It’s not any more complicated than that.
There will always be a brand that’s willing to pay more or that converts better.
If a publisher is excited to test your offer, don’t let that excitement fade away by taking months to go live. By then, something better will have caught their attention.
Time waits for nobody in this space.
📈 Want to grow your affiliate program?
To succeed with the top affiliates, it’s essential to understand the nuances of their businesses and the challenges they face in growing and retaining their audiences.
In a performance-based model, time to market can be your biggest advantage.
It’s key when working with affiliates. In my experience, the larger the company the longer it takes to get an offer live and the slower to pivot or make optimizations to offers once they’re live.
If you’re going to take time to get the program live make sure that time is well spent.
Test the landing page and funnel on internal traffic sources to make sure the conversion rate is dialled in. Quadruple check that tracking is set up correctly and have a competitive payout.
Otherwise, you’re going to have a tough time recruiting and growing your affiliate program.
🍸Conferences
Upcoming conferences worth checking out:
Bankers Summit - May 15th, 2024 | The Quay, Toronto
I’ll be in attendance! If you see me at the event, come say hi 👋
I love having interesting conversations with new people but I hate breaking the ice with strangers.This is a local event in Toronto, hosted by the CLA. They host great events in the city that bring together all aspects of the industry - capital, partnerships, risk, compliance, growth, you name it.
Collision - June 17 – 20, 2024 | Enercare Centre, Toronto
I checked it out last year and the whos who is definitely there. If you’re interested in pitching your start up, raising capital or talking to accelerators, this is a good show. If you’re looking to find new advertisers or publishers, this isn’t the best conference for it.
🏎️ Traffic channel updates
Google officially ends their longest update ever
Google's latest major algorithm updated rolled out from March 5 to April 19, 2024. Here are the key details:
The March 2024 Core Update aimed to reduce low-quality, unoriginal content in Google's search results by around 40%.
It incorporated Google's "helpful content" system into the core ranking algorithms and introduced new policies to combat spam and manipulative practices.
Some of the main focuses were:
Removing content produced primarily to attract clicks and manipulate rankings rather than help users. This was a hit to affiliate sites.
Devaluing AI-generated content that lacks human oversight and originality. Google deindexed over 1,400 websites found to be excessively reliant on automated AI content.
Emphasizing Google's E-E-A-T principles (Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness) for evaluating content quality. Adjusting link analysis algorithms to better identify manipulative link practices. Sites like Forbes and Nerdwallet saw gains across the board.
The update was very broad, impacting search results across all sectors. Google warned of increased ranking volatility during the rollout as different systems updated.
Site owners were advised to focus on creating high-quality, original, and helpful content aligned with Google's guidelines.
While not providing full specifics, Google cited patents like "Contextual estimation of link information gain" as potentially influencing the new algorithms for judging content novelty and relevance
The results?
Big swings in traffic for organic publishers. Lots of site owners reported traffic had dropped 90% in some cases where their content was de-indexed entirely while others saw big uplifts in traffic.
If you’re working with organic publishers you likely saw fluctuations in traffic and conversions with your partners and possibly more organic traffic to the brand’s site.
Meme of the month
Credit to
, this one made me laugh😹