Matthew Fleri Soler: Navigating the Affiliate Jungle

The affiliate industry plays a crucial part in driving traffic to operators’ sites and increasing their audience. With new markets opening up, it is becoming even more important to find the right affiliate partner to optimise the traffic in a particular region and also by product. Apidae Digital recently launched apiRank, a new tool providing operators with a refined and vetted list of the Top SEO affiliates in their chosen market and for specific products, significantly saving resources and optimising the company’s affiliate strategies. We spoke to Matthew Fleri Soler, Acquisition Marketing Consultant at Apidae Digital, to find out more about the current affiliate landscape.

Could you tell us a bit more about your new product apiRank and the reasons you developed the tool?

Having worked in the affiliate industry for 10+ years, the recruitment of new partners was always an important part of operators’ core strategy in order to see continued and healthy growth of the affiliate program. Sourcing new affiliates however was always time-consuming and resource-heavy, so we developed this tool to make the whole process less cumbersome. In short, apiRank helps operators identify the top affiliates in any market and by product, presenting a list ranked in order, saving operators time and resources to focus on more important tasks.

Is navigating the affiliate jungle mainly an issue for smaller operators as larger companies now often have dedicated affiliate teams?

I would say that this tool can help both smaller operators as well as larger ones. On the one hand, apiRank can help smaller start-ups to immediately understand which affiliates would be best contacted and onboarded, whereas larger and more established operators can use the tool when they are set to enter new markets, to vet existing partners, prioritise which are given more importance from a budget planning and deal negotiation perspective, as well as reach out to any that they may potentially have missed.

What would say is the biggest challenge for operators trying to optimise their affiliates’ strategies in today’s environment?

In my opinion, one of the biggest challenges that an affiliate manager faces is understanding the sources that companies are using to send traffic to their affiliate program and brands, thus making it very difficult for them to analyse the performance. With ApiRank, affiliate managers will be able to pinpoint specific sites which have a strong SEO ranking across the different verticals that they target. apiRank enables affiliate managers to have more visibility over the positioning and performance of their affiliates.

Is the US going to be a focus market for you and do you envisage affiliates will have the same importance there as in Europe?

For the time being, we have focused on Scandinavia, India, Spain and LatAm, and have not yet covered the US but we might consider it in the future depending on the demand from our clients. Currently, we are seeing a lot of interest in LatAm and although we now service what we believe are the key markets, we will be adding more regions in the coming months. It all depends on the feedback we receive and where we see the most interest.

As well as adding more markets, can we expect more features to be introduced to apiRank?

Yes definitely. Although we believe that this tool will significantly improve the process for affiliate managers’ sourcing as well as understanding the potential of new affiliates, there is one more piece of the onboarding puzzle which is a bit more complicated to solve and that is the contact information of the affiliate in question. We have a few ideas of how we can resolve this, but we didn’t want this to stop us from launching the first version of the tool.

As the product gets more established, there are a few things that we have in mind that can further improve this process as well. We think we have developed a tool that will save operators a lot of time and resources as they navigate the busy and somewhat confusing affiliate landscape. We are excited to launch it to the market and to help our partners optimise their growth strategies.