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Your guided tour of the world of growth, performance marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth, marketing, and life.
Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door, and have some fun talking about data-driven growth and lessons learned!
Welcome to another edition of the Always Be Testing podcast with your
host, Ty De Grange. Get a guided tour of the world of growth, performance
marketing, customer acquisition, paid media, and affiliate marketing.
We talk with industry experts and discuss experiments and their learnings in growth,
marketing, and life. Time to nerd out, check your biases at the door,
and have some fun talking about data driven growth and lessons learned.
Hello. Hello. And welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast.
I'm your host, Ty DeGrange, and I am really excited to welcome Kalen Bush to
today's episode. What's up, Kalen? Hey, Ty. Good to, good to be on. Thanks for thanks for having me.
Really happy and grateful to have you on. Kalen has been an awesome resource in
all things fraud protection and the details of which are
are pretty important. And so, excited to dive into it with you today.
Maybe kicking off, like, give us a little bit about your background. Yeah. Definitely. I can just give you a quick
run through. So, I've been in sales pretty much my whole career for the last ten years or
so, working across mainly Europe and APAC. So after university, here in
Europe, I decided to change the, the gray west weather of Ireland for the sunny beaches
of Sydney, Australia. So I went down there for a couple of years, which was very, very nice,
environment to live in. Just working across a few various sales roles, including things
like, cold calling Australians two hundred times a day selling life insurance, which was
great entrance to, to sales. So I really enjoyed myself down there a few years. Then came back
to Europe, got into the b two b SaaS space, also kinda trip typically in in those these
type of sales growth roles. And then through that, I actually got the opportunity then to move over
to Singapore in twenty eighteen, which is really exciting, so I decided to take advantage of
that. So I've actually been based in Singapore for five years from twenty eighteen up until twenty
twenty three, up until April of this year, when due to my new role with TrafficGuard and the evolution that
we're seeing in the affiliate marketing space, I decided to make the move back to Europe to London so it could be
closer to Europe and especially close to the US because it's obviously such a big region when it comes to, to
affiliate marketing. That's awesome. I love it. And, some really interesting
experiences you've had. I I I can definitely identify with some of those. But two hundred
calls a day? Holy cow. Tell us more about that within reason. I know that
not the focus of our chat, but I think a lot of salespeople and people in general don't
realize, like, what goes into that, and and that's that's pretty intense. Yeah. I mean,
like I said, it was it was a really good entrance to sales, I would say. Definitely not something you wanna do too
long term, but it was just on a dialer. You start at 9AM in the morning. Once the dialer
starts, you speak to somebody. As soon as they hang up, you get twenty seconds. The next person comes in.
So I won't use some of the language that I got confronted with every day on the phone, but you
also just learned about objection handling. You learned about dealing with multiple people. I'm
really just, like, knowing how to actually, build up a relationship with someone, which I think is really
important and is something that has really helped me even today in in my current b two b roles. Just getting
on to someone and chatting away and and building a relationship without even seeing that person or being in the room with that
person. I think they're just really good skills to learn at the beginning of a sales career. I hear you
completely. There was a tweet recently. I think it was from yesterday that I came across that
said every marketer should have some experience in sales. It
really is beneficial to think through the psychology of the buyer and and putting
yourself in the shoes of of their objection handling and and such. So
not only is it great for the sales piece to get that training that you went through and
and experienced, which I think is admirable, but also perhaps for other
orgs. We we sometimes you talk about it with, like, customer service teams. We've actually had that
in on client customer service conversations as a as a way of learning and improving how we market.
So it definitely, like, resonates with me and respect that round floor,
growth and and learning. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, sales and marketing, they
they've always been intertwined. I think it's taken a long time for people to really see the value of
of aligning those. And so I think the more sales experience marketers have and vice versa, the more marketing
experience salespeople can have, the more they can work together. I know some of my companies previously, they've they've called
it smarketing when they just got sales and marketing as together as much as possible. Because if you don't
do that, it's very easy to suddenly end up with sales over here and marketing over there at
loggerheads blaming each other for different things. So the more people can appreciate from either side what
is happening and what skills are coming across from that side, I think it's a really important part to growing a
marketing and sales organization. I love it. And what are you what are you kind of
focused on with TrafficGuard, and what are you kind of seeing in the current role? And and maybe tell us a little bit
about that. Yeah. So I've been involved with, TrafficGuard for, just over a year now, about a year and a
half. And so before joining TrafficGuard, I'm not gonna lie, I actually had no idea what affiliate marketing was.
So it's been a really interesting period to to get involved in it. I know last week, you had you had the Yoda
of of affiliate marketing on, so I'd say I'm kinda more in the Padawan young Jedi level
still still learning the ropes. But it's been kinda nice to come in from an angle where I don't know too
much about it and have a completely impartial
working together. And so TrafficGuard as a whole has really kind of targeted this product for the
last year and a half, which is why they actually they hired me to to come in and and kinda help them scale and grow this product.
Traditionally, we had been focused more on, our core products, which were PPC, which
integrated with Google Ads and is all around our PPC protection. We then have a mobile product, which
is focused on integrating in with MMPs like AppsFlyer and Branch and Adjust, and
actually sitting in front of those MMPs and blocking fraud and traffic from from coming into them.
And then now we saw that there was a huge opportunity in the affiliate marketing space where we could actually take that technology and apply
it to affiliate marketing. And it's something that the way we're doing it hasn't been tackled before.
There are a lot of other fraud providers out there, but the way we're approaching where we're integrating in with the networks and
we're actually looking at user journeys rather than just looking at ad hijacking, it's
really providing a lot of value at the moment to to brands, and we're really happy with the progress we've made
so far. And there's a lot more, hoping to come in the next couple of years. That's awesome. That's
really interesting stuff. And I I have to say, I think coming into affiliate with a, you know,
fresh perspective and outsider's perspective is necessarily a disadvantage,
and I think it's that way in a lot of fields. I think people that I think that's part
of the ethos of kind of what we talk about a lot on this podcast. There's a lot of learnings to be had, a lot
of it's easy to get entrenched in kind of past thinking in in all areas of life,
and I respect that you're kind of coming in with that fresh perspective. To that end, can you
tell us maybe some of the things that surprised you or you thought was
interesting or notable in affiliate versus maybe other
realms of digital? Yeah. Definitely. I mean, just in terms of, like, if you compare ad
fraud and invalid traffic and the knowledge around it in affiliate even compared to those other products I talked about with PPC and
mobile. I feel like the education piece is huge in affiliate marketing. A lot of people are just kind of
unaware of how affiliate fraud works. I feel like if I had a dollar for every time
I got told by an affiliate manager, we don't have fraud because we only pay for conversions, I probably
have at least a couple of hundred dollars in in my pocket now. And that was just really interesting for me to see that there's just
this lack of knowledge around it. And I think once we actually then go through that educative
piece with brands, especially, and we kinda show them what is invalid traffic and ad fraud,
how does it misattribute conversions, how can it damage your program, what is the potential growth
opportunities out of that as well. It's just been really interesting to see that kind of change of of kind of
people knowing more about it. And I can think even alongside Traffic Guy, I think it's becoming more
relevant in in the industry as a whole. I mean, when I first went to PI Live in
London last year, I didn't see anything about fraud or compliance. Whereas now in some of the events like
PI Live last week here in London, they actually started they're actually having talks and and more focus on
ad fraud and invalid traffic and compliance and and how that can affect and be cases taken out
of the industry. And so I think it's just really interesting to see how that's, developed out of that. Yeah. I appreciate that.
I would agree with you. I think various, you know, trends, needs,
themes come up and come and go in waves in affiliate marketing,
search, social, programmatic, you name it. Some of the mobile work you've done
with your team, similar. Right? It's nice in some ways to see it
maybe come back in vogue for lack of a better term in my view. Maybe it'd be interesting to learn, you
know, laying cards on the table for folks in a candid view of, like, all of
the stuff that can go wrong, all the stuff that all the fraud that does happen out there. And I
think that might be an interesting place to, like, really go a little deeper on to kind of say,
like, all this stuff can happen and has happened, and we're seeing it regularly.
So maybe maybe I'm curious to learn from your view. What are those things that I
think people are not fully aware of? So, yeah, I think the big part of this is is the approach that
we are taking and and why our technology works so well in this space, where we're really looking at the entire
user journey. So rather than just, like, looking at click level or just looking at conversions or just looking
at the ad, we're actually looking at every single touch points from the first click to the conversion and
even post conversion to what happens. And so what I always say to people is it's it's really about misattribution,
when we look at affiliate fraud within the user journey. So it's basically how can how are
affiliates claiming that they are responsible for generating conversions that they actually aren't?
So I think everyone's probably heard of things like cookie stuffing before, things like click injection. So these are
all threats that are designed to misattribute a conversion away from its true
source and attribute that to a fraudulent source. There's a lot of problems with that. For
one, obviously, you're gonna end up paying for things that you shouldn't be paying for. They're either non incremental, or
you've actually just paid the wrong partner. So So that's one. You're just you're just wasting money on on that conversion.
And then second one is the actual analytics and optimization behind that. So if you have affiliate a
who's got a hundred conversions per month and affiliate b's got fifty conversions per month,
your natural thing is gonna say, well, affiliate a's got more is driving more growth for us, and let's optimize
towards that source. If you go into the back end analytics and start to see that there's actually a
lot of fraudulent means going on to claim those hundred conversions and maybe they're stealing thirty conversions from affiliate
b, you can then see if you're scaling into affiliate a, you're actually optimizing into the
fraud. Whereas once you have that visibility and that transparency to see what actually affiliate b, we didn't think was
that good. But once we have this analytics in front of us, we can see that they actually have eighty conversions per month,
and there's nothing fraudulent in their traffic. Let's optimize towards that and then actually start getting further
growth from that. We also look at the partner mix that people have. So in terms of top of funnel,
middle funnel, bottom funnel, because of the last click attribution model that most affiliate programs
take, the bottom funnel is very well positioned to take advantage of that. So we see a lot of
times where there's a lot of traffic from the top of funnel who are actually doing brand awareness. They're doing blog posts.
They're really putting a lot of effort into the content. They're putting out into the market, getting people engaged and
getting people onto a website. And then these bottom funnel partners are just popping up with a ten
percent discount code on the cart page. And then once that person clicks that ad, they're actually claiming attribution
for that. So a lot of what we do, it's not just ad fraud, which we kind of use the word of invalid
traffic more where sometimes it's an invalid conversion because of that setup that's purposely
been enacted, whereas it's not outright fraud. It's just an invalid
conversion. That's fascinating. There's just so much in there. I really like that approach.
So, essentially, you're kind of saying, hey. We're looking at this from a full user journey
perspective, not just at the event of the purchase, not just at the event of the click. Exactly. Yeah. And
it's even looking at the different contributions. So if there's traffic coming from Facebook or
from PPC and then we're having affiliate interaction, is that in affiliate interaction, how
much increase in conversion rate are we seeing from that? But then also how much are we seeing drop off? So we've
all been on checkout pages and had pop ups from twenty different partners trying to get us to
interact with their ads. Sometimes that can actually end up not making you want to go through with the
sale. Either the code doesn't work or there's just too many pop ups and you just get frustrated. So it's also looking at
the analytics behind that and how much are you losing by these partners popping up with these ads on at at the
end. And then just kinda getting all the data to kind of put this together, really. So we don't wanna just make
flash judgments. Obviously, affiliate programs and affiliate managers, they spend a lot of time building
relationships with all these partners from every stage of the funnel. So everything that we do has to be data backed
and has to be transparent and open to discussion. Everybody has different
buying practices with their partners. Everyone has different ways they set up and different things they're happy with
and not happy with. But, essentially, what we're trying to do with this visibility and transparency is give
the power back to the brands to decide what they are happy to pay for and what they're not happy to
pay for. Because we feel at the moment, a lot of the times, they kinda get left in the dark a bit by the attribution
model. They don't know how much is going down to the bottom funnel. They don't know if there's cookie stuffing
or click injection going on that's misattributing away from the true source. So it's really just giving that
power back to the brand because, essentially, they're the ones who are paying for this traffic. That's fantastic. Yeah.
I love love hearing that. You kind of touched on a couple of the, you know, cookie
stuffing. I not to get too in the weeds here, but what what are some of the other
things that you guys are finding, preventing,
stopping from happening that you're you're often seeing in this space? So often what we will
do is there's always going to be out and out fraud. So there'll be cases of things like
cookie stuffing where we can see a conversion. We can see clearly it's a case of cookie stuffing, and we can just
invalidate that. A lot of the times, we're looking at a number of different
anomalies together that kind of heighten the chances of this being a suspicious or
invalid conversion. And so we might look at a conjunction of things like, one would be
overnight activity. So if one partner all their conversions are taking place at 3AM for, like,
a clothing brand or something, that's kind of anomalous. Not enough to invalidate it, but it's anomalous.
If we then also see that that same partner is giving nothing in their refer domain, so they're completely
anonymous of where they're getting that traffic from, that then adds on to the suspicion that could be something
fraudulent there. If we then also get some kind of strange click activity. So because
and when we set up, we monitor every single click. We monitor every single conversion. We We also monitor the
behavior on the landing page on the website, how they interact with that. So if we also then on
top of those, see the strange click activity compared to what a standard user journey is for that brand, this
again then heightens that. So it's putting all these different rules together and saying, why is this one
partner in this program doing overnight activity of strange clicks, nothing coming through
from the refer domain? This now means we need to go and kind of investigate this further. So there's gonna be the
out and out fraud, like cookie stuffing, or we can see if it's an artificially enhanced click
using, like, an iframe or or a pop under. But then there's also the second side, which is just looking at why
is this happening across a certain partner, and taking all these different data points together. So I won't
list them because it's about two hundred fifty different signals. And then I'm curious about,
like, content. Is your team able to kinda look at reviewing content out
there that affiliates and partners and influencers are promoting a brand on and ensuring that that's
compliant, or is that kind of getting into a more different different field? So that would
be probably more towards some of the other providers like, like
BrandVerity or or Ad Police or or one of those guys. Yeah. What we would be able to do is when we
see a click coming through, we are able to track where that click is coming from. So we can look into
the user agent. We can look at the refer domain. And then we have a database of sites of some of
our biggest clients. They for example, in the terms and conditions, most terms and conditions are not gonna
allow a brand to advertise their ads on, like, adult sites or extreme sites
or anything like that. So if we can see something coming from one of those sites, we can automatically
invalidate. We can't go to the extent of actually going to that site and seeing what content is literally
on the side or where on the page it's being presented. But we can see the URL, and we can match that
across our database. And then if it is coming from a site that we know is non brand safe, we
can then also invalidate the, the conversion from that source. That's great. And then with regard
to, obviously, lead gen presents a new a different type of, you know, fraud
protection challenge. How are you kind of addressing that or or not? So with lead
gen, it's actually really interesting case, and it really syncs in very nicely with with our user journey
analysis. So a lot of times, the problem with CPL campaigns is because they're not actually it's no purchase taking
place. You don't need credit card details. A lot of times, it's just basically mainly on over incentivization.
So if you have a CPL campaign and you might be say, okay. For every lead or every sign up
that you provide, we'll give you twenty dollars. Some affiliates will then go to their user
base and just say to them all, go and sign up. Let me know once you've done this. I'll give you
ten dollars, and then I'll keep the ten dollars in the middle. So these users that are going to sign up have no
interest in the product. They got no interest in becoming a long term customer. All they wanna do is get that
ten dollars from the affiliate. And once they wanna do that, they can change IP addresses, change email addresses. They can
just keep repeating that trick over and over again. And so this is where the user journey analysis comes
in because what I was mentioning before of how we analyze every single user journey that comes in, valid
or invalid, We can pick up what is a standard user journey. So how how long
does it take typically from the click to conversion to happen? What website pages do they normally go to?
What are these kind of typical signifiers of a real user? And then typically, the invalid
users, the one who are just interested in the reward from the affiliates, they're the ones that are gonna convert in
ten seconds, or they're not gonna read any news website pages, or they're just gonna be complete
anomalous to what a normal user journey would be. And so that's what we can actually then decipher and
then pick up and then invalidate those conversions and make sure you're not paying out for any of those. And so if
I'm kind of, you know, resharing to you some of the great kind of,
like, how we look at user journey behavior, it sounds like TrafficGuard is essentially saying,
correct me if I'm wrong, this is within the band of what we deem normal
user behavior looking at that entire journey with some variance and and maybe
some anomalies. But if you see very large anomalies, very large spikes
in certain directions, for example, speed from land to purchase,
maybe the heat map visibility is a completely anomaly and strange,
that's when your your radars are kind of tipped off and you kind of notice there's something
phishing perhaps going on? It's accurate. Yes. And so to to like, it's not
completely new, this side of what we do. A lot of people do this manually, and a lot of agencies will will do that
manually. They will just look for spikes, and they will look for things that could be suspicious and go in and and analyze
that. What we essentially do on that side is just automate that and use,
AI and machine learning to actually optimize it. So rather than having to have somebody sit down and go through
that, every single user journey is automatically getting added into the system. And if there is a
spike or there is something that happens, we can automatically then get that conversion reversed until
we figure out what's what's happening there. Kinda leads into another aspect, which is one of
the unfortunate things with frauds is nobody wakes up in the morning and says, oh, you
know what I'll do today? I'll go get a fraud provider because we might we might we're probably just good to have something.
What typically happens is they wait until fraud hits them, then they find it, and they're like, okay.
We actually need to go in and sort this out. And then they come to us because they have a problem, and they now need to fix it.
The problem with that is you're never getting ahead of us. So you're always waiting for it to happen. And then once it's happened,
it's probably have been happening for the past two, three months, so you've already lost out. So once TrafficGuard's in
place, if you do see a spike, if you do see something suspicious, we can automatically,
invalidate those conversions, give the brand and if there's an agency there as well, give the brand and the agency time
to then dig into that. If for whatever reason there's a legitimate reason and the partners just
had a sale for the day or something like that, we can then just undo the reversals and let that commission goes out.
But it just means that you have the ability to stop it in the first place and then decide what you wanna
do rather than wait for it to happen and then have to come back to us and say, oh, we've we've already lost three months of revenue.
Now we need to fix it. Can you can you come and help us? Yeah. The being proactive
piece and having some degrees of protection in place are certainly,
near and dear to my heart, and and they resonate. You talked a lot about the value of
seeing a lot of the whole story and the the full funnel and the journey within
reason of what you can share. I would love to learn a little bit more about how you're able to do that. How is
that possible? What kind of setup is required to see that much of the user
data and maybe share a bit more about the how? That'd be really interesting.
Yeah. Exactly. So we take an approach that is integrated with networks. Because of that, we can't just work
across everybody. So we're kind of, as of still a fairly, new newer
product to the market. We've only got two or three that we're running with so far. We have plans to
further that next year with with more networks and more integrations. But, essentially,
how the integration works is we first set up a gateway URL through the network, which
just means every time there's an affiliate click that gets sent to the network, the network would redirect it to
TrafficGuard, and then TrafficGuard would redirect it onto the landing page. Because of what I
mentioned that a lot of fraud within affiliate marketing is misattribution, where the
user will often be real. The missed the the fraud is the affiliate claiming that they should get paid for that
conversion. We never block anything. Everything will always go through to the website. We're simply just
analyzing that click, looking for bot activity, malicious IP addresses, anything like that, and then let that
person go through to the website. That's when we then have the tag on the site where we wanna pick up the
behavioral analysis. So once they hit the website, where do they go? What do they do? What's their
activity like? Again, looking at things like click convert times, everything like that. And then the second part of
the network integration would be with a postback where once that conversion takes
place, the network would attribute it back to the click they have. They would then push that to TrafficGuard and
say, hey, TrafficGuard. We've got this new conversion. Can you just verify it? We will then verify
it on our side, looking at the click data, the conversion data, and the behavioral analysis, matching that
altogether to give that full funnel transparency. And if we find something within that that is
invalid, whether it's cookie stuffing or any of those threats, we can actually then automatically
reverse that conversion within the network and stop that commission from going out. So, essentially, it's a
completely automated process once set up. And, also, once we go in and set up at the
beginning, like I mentioned with different people having different part of partner mixes, different
partner agreements, we never wanna just go in and hit a big red button and start invalidating stuff. So the
first kind of thirty to, I would say, ninety days is really crucial where we work with the brand and we
go through each partner, and we see, okay. Is this okay? Is this okay? Is this okay? And actually customize
those rules around what the brand wants. And then once that's set up from day ninety, let's say,
then we just go into fully automated prevention. And then the brand knows from that point onwards, they don't have to worry.
They've got everything protected, and they can focus on getting new partners and building better relationships
and and all the good stuff that they, should be doing. Love it. That's really interesting. You know,
and then then I think about I'll be I imagine you guys are sitting on some really fascinating
learnings, a lot of fascinating data. You know, theme of the show, always be testing. We're we're
we're talking and sharing a lot of the learnings that we see within reason
of what you can share, obviously, within what's proprietary and what's not. Can you give us
some some of the things that maybe you have all learned that have been fascinating
from your perspective or from your team's perspective or perhaps from the partners and clients that you've
worked with with you? What are some of the learnings or or thoughts that have come from from all the work
that you guys have been doing? So do you mean, like, examples of of fraud we found or more of what we've
kinda learned from looking at across these? Probably more the latter, but I'm
certainly also interested in the former if you if you can share some within reason. Well,
I think one of the learnings would be that, unfortunately, fraud is at the stage where it
is pretty much across every program to an extent. Generally, the bigger
programs potentially have a bit more susceptible. When you have larger conversion numbers
and especially bigger payouts, it's always gonna be more attractive to somebody who is trying to fraudulently
gain money from you, whether that's to slip through the cracks because there's five hundred thousand conversions or
whether that's to only have to get five or six conversions a month in because there may be a
CPA of a hundred and fifty dollars. So, generally, fraud follows where the money is. And so if if you
are running a bigger program or you are running a program with a high CPA, it would definitely be worth at
least doing a test to check what is potentially happening in there at the moment. And I think
subscription based is also something that's come to the fore quite a lot as well, where a lot of our clients who are
subscription based suffer a lot from this non genuine engagement I was mentioning about over
incentivization, people just signing up over and over again, and then canceling straight away just to get the
reward from the affiliate. They're the typical ones I would say is is kind of highlighting as you really need to make
sure you focus on fraud within that program because otherwise, it could be a bigger issue than, than you
know. That's pretty powerful and understandable. It makes a lot of sense that a lot of
those fraudulent partners are gonna flow to where the biggest opportunity is for
them. What about on the, typosquatting realm? Is there
anything that I know I'm kind of throwing a lot of, like, what about this, what about that hypotheticals at you,
so thanks for bearing with me. Is there any anything in the like typosquatting realm? It feels a
little bit outside of what you've described, but I'm curious to know like is that still a problem? Do you
guys run into that a lot? Are you are you, like, are you even monitoring that? Yeah. Tableau's gonna
probably be another one that would fall slightly out of what our key use case would be. Again, I think
some of those guys like, like Brandberty and and SearchMonitor and stuff, they would be more focused on that
PPC side of of people bidding on Google brand terms and things like that. One thing that we
do do for some of our bigger clients, they do just they don't allow any PPC activity.
So we can't completely filter out anything that comes from PPC or if they wanna filter out stuff from Facebook or
anything like that. If they don't wanna be overpaying or double paying, sorry, for for some of these
paid channels. We can filter out everything from that. But when it comes down specifically, like, finding it
something typo squatting, that would be just slightly outside of of what our core use case would be. Yeah. No worries.
That makes sense. Definitely a lot to do with what you're currently doing. Are you
finding certain brands are this is really resonating with them in the
affiliate realm and perhaps brands that are not as aware
or maybe as as educated on the the pain point and the challenge of
fraud. Maybe you could share some of the learnings you've had in terms of working with
brands that in various levels of engagement with with TrafficGuard and with
fraud protection? Yeah. I mean, I think it's it's a really interesting environment to be in. And I think, like I
mentioned before, about the educative side is is so important because there are still people who even
when we show them the data, they just don't wanna know or they wanna stick their head in the sand or something is
if something's going okay, it's like, I'm not gonna disrupt this. So I'm just gonna keep it going, and I'd I'd rather not know what's
what's happening. But once you actually get into the data with those people and once they actually implement
TrafficGuard and the results that we see across our clients are pretty outstanding out out to say, obviously. I
do work here, so I have to be a a proponent of it. But it's it's really, really impressive some of
the results people have been getting out of working with TrafficGuard. And I think that's probably one of the most rewarding parts
is if you see somebody if you work with somebody who is a bit kind of on the fence and they're not really sure about
it, and then they decide to implement it and we run, and then three, four months later, they're
paying less for higher conversions. It's, like, such a nice thing to see that they're actually
coming around to it, and then they start to actually become a a an internal champion of traffic guide. So I think
that's kind of the nicest thing we've seen across across some of these clients. I love that. And and
maybe you can share kind of in the in the realm of learnings. Can you
share a little bit of, like, outcomes? Like, what are you know, to give all the names
or or any names if you don't want to, but I'm curious to know what are some outcomes that
you've seen that are kind of, like, wins and learnings from that from that view?
At the end of the day, we are an ad fraud prevention platform. So the first key thing that we will always focus on is
let's find the fraud and stop it. So let's find the fraud, invalidate those conversions, and stop you
paying out for things that you shouldn't. But then the second part is the growth side, and we do see ourselves also as a
growth platform. And so it's the analytics behind, like I was mentioned before, of, like, when you know which partner
is actually providing real genuine growth and which one is just poaching from other people
or using some of these fraudulent means. That data behind can be really powerful.
So the first step will always be let's stop paying for fraud and let's start reducing your your
costs. And then the second part of that will be to actually, let's see how we can actually grow this now and grow
into these genuine sources. And I think it's really nice as well when you start off, let's on average, I
would say, we typically find on the click level around thirty percent invalid clicks and on
the conversion level, something between eight to ten percent. And within the first six to twelve
months, we have consistently seen that drop across every client that we've worked with. So it's
just really nice to see that once we implement this and we implement the data behind it, the fraud starts
to to drop. And then we actually see them building much better relationships with their partners because
suddenly, the partners that were actually providing all this genuine traffic and then either having it poached,
they're now getting their just rewards. So that partner is happier, and then they actually start to place the brand higher.
And so they're actually providing more traffic, and then the growth just kinda scales from that. So it's
kinda like the longer term piece, but just altogether, just that really nice kind of
educate to invalidate to, to to grow and scale. I love it. It's pretty impressive
summation and and recap, Caitlin, and it's super appreciated. Yeah. Maybe
maybe, like, just zooming out of some of the specifics of TrafficGuard. Would love to
hear, you know, a little bit more about about you. What's something that maybe folks in the
affiliate industry don't know about you that maybe have had a chance to work with you in the past or things that
might, you know, surprise or or share with folks that wanna know more about Kalen? It's probably a
bit fresh to talk about yet, but I'm I'm a massive sports fan and specifically rugby. So for for any rugby fans
out there, obviously, we've had a pretty tough World Cup from a from an Irish side, over the last few
weeks. So I I used to play, international rugby as as a as a young gun back in my
under twenty days, and so just really into rugby and sports. Another
sad story is also I'm a Man United fan, which hasn't been great this year. So any other fellow
United fans out there, we can always jump on a call and and, shed some tears together if if you need some
support. But, yeah, just generally a massive a massive sports fan, really. So, anything golf,
football, rugby, you name it, I'll, I'll play it and watch it. I love that. I, I was
really lucky to play a little bit of club rugby later in life and and found it later in
life, and I can see why we're obsessed with it. Some of the better rugby players I I got a
chance to play with were from Ireland, and so respect the tradition a lot. That's really cool that
you're you're so into it. The next Rugby World Cup's in Australia, but I'm pretty sure the one
after that's in America. So I'll definitely be planning to, to get over for that. Hopefully, game
in Austin as well. Absolutely. There's a pretty decent rugby community community in Austin.
And, what position did you play? Center or fullback was my positions.
Always in the backs. Never fancied before. It's it's I'd rather just stay out and stay
clean. Me too. How was your kicking game?
Yeah. So, actually, when I was a football like, a soccer player first, which is probably
good to kinda hone the the kicking skills, which that kinda led into me being a fullback first when I
when I went into rugby and then kinda got more in the center just to be a bit more involved, I suppose.
But, yeah, the kicking side is definitely a big part of my game, I would say. Well, it was part of my game. I don't play
anymore, unfortunately. But, yeah, I'd say I'm quite happy with my my football related skills on that
side. That's awesome. Would, it sounded like you played at a pretty pretty good level of
rugby. Tell us more about that. Yeah. I sometimes don't say the country because it take takes away a bit,
but I'm half Irish, half Luxembourgish. So Luxembourg is obviously a a a pretty small
country, about half a million people. So that's really the reason why I got to play international rugby, but it gave me
an opportunity I probably wouldn't have had, if I'd just been trying to get into the the Irish team.
So I got to go over to, like, Croatia and Lithuania and
Bulgaria and play in, like, European championships and and things like that. So it was a really, really good experience
up until about under twenty one's level. So it was just really nice kinda way to kinda get
into team spirit as well. I think for young people, especially these days, sometimes can be a bit
scared of getting into rugby with the bigger players and bigger hits. And, obviously, a lot of work currently being done
about lowering the tackle highs and having a safer game overall. But I just think the best thing about rugby is it
is such a physical game, and you go on the pitch and you literally kick the the crap out of each other.
But as soon as that final whistle ends, as soon as that final whistle goes, you shake hands, you go for
beer after, and you're gentlemen to each other. So I just think it's a really good sport to learn a lot
about team building and just working together and and also respect and and, the
way even they talk to the referees and compare that to something like football. It's a completely different,
style and setup. So I just think yeah. I'd although I'm a big protagonist of it and love to kinda
encourage people to get into it. I couldn't agree more. It's, that it's, like,
controlled levels of conflict and challenge and physicality with
such a respect for the other person and the other team. And then on top of that, you
have such a great a lot of communication required on the team and the team support and
the team mentality. I I really respect that a lot. It's, it's very cool that you
got to experience it. I also would say you're you're quite modest. You you basically played
on a national team under twenty one, and you got to travel and play
international rugby. That's it's a very impressive feat that very few people are able to achieve. Yeah. Definitely.
I know. I was very, very lucky to to be able to do that. It's just a really good experience going on, like, a
rugby tour with with some of your best friends as well. I I think, like you said, there, there's a lot of those skills you
take from sports and sports like rugby, which really do correlate into the working world and working with
team and leadership and and everything like that and not giving up when things go bad.
There's just so many transferable skills that could come through, which is why, yeah, like I said, I'm a really big protagonist
for young people to to get involved in a sport like rugby. There's a great expression that that they use a lot, which
is, football is a hoo football is a gentleman sport played by hooligans, and
rugby is a hooligan sport played by gentlemen. It's a good way to kinda look it up. Yeah. I
would agree. It's a great great, slogan. And, I also found
the traveling kind of community, if you go, you know, abroad or you're lucky to go
somewhere and connect with someone who's a fan or a player, the connection is
just so instant when you when you meet somebody that gets it and understands the game and appreciates
it for what it is. It's, it's really cool to see. I feel like you have, like, an instant friend in another
a place that's two thousand, ten thousand miles away, depending on where you are.
And you have all these other differences, but yet that sport and sports in general can
really unify and bring people together in such a great way. It's it's it's awesome to see. There's a reason
there's an Irish pub in every town in the world for exactly that reason. Yeah.
Absolutely. Did you my Mike's okay. So quick
little segue here. Manu, immediately, I, of course, think of,
our friend, Beckham. I have to say I checked out some of the Netflix documentary.
Wasn't a diehard fan, was mildly informed, you know, appreciated what he did,
but was blown away by the documentary and and how much of an impact he had and how big it
was for for Man U, for him, for for football, for
London, for England. What are your what's your take on that? And I'm sure you have some opinion on
it. Yeah. Definitely. I mean, obviously, growing up, he was complete, role model for, I think,
every United fan, just an absolute global superstar playing for for our club. I didn't watch
finished documentary, but I watched the first few few episodes of it. And it was it was, again, really interesting just to almost
just like a bit of a memory release going back and saying, oh, I remember the workup when you did that. I remember when this happened.
I remember that scandal. So it was really nice to kind of look back through that. I did think it was potentially a bit
of a self serving documentary. There's a few aspects where I was a bit like, guys, might be a bit too much here,
but definitely for for the role he played overall, the teams he played for, the way he still is
a staunch United supporter. He still goes to the games. He still supports, the team and watches everything. And,
obviously, what he's doing in, Miami is is pretty impressive with starting a team from the ground up. And
within a year, having players like Messi, Busquets, and some of these other guys playing for you, it's
pretty impressive what he's been able to do on that side. And then at the same time as that, his wife is also
smashing the the fashion world. So just together, it's just an amazing the fact that those two people can
do so much at the same time in the same relationship and still have loving kids and loving family and and just
they seem to be really well connected with each other. I think that's probably the nicest takeaway I got from, from
his story and and that documentary. That's really cool. Love hearing your perspective. A proper
fan's perspective on the documentary of of Beckham. Kalyn, I've been just
love the conversations we've had, love this conversation, and I hope folks find a lot of value out
of, learning more about fraud protection and affiliate, learning more about TrafficGuard, learning more
about your journey. I feel like we could talk for much longer, But I wanna be respectful of your time,
and, man, it's been it's been fun. Yeah. No. It's been great. Hopefully, I can try and get over to, to
Austin some point soon, or I'll be over in ASW in January, so I'm sure we can we can catch up there
as well. But, yeah, it's been really good to to chat. Yeah. I didn't realize the rugby, passion
was strong. We'll have to watch a watch a match at the very least. And, yeah, for folks that are
interested in in learning more about you, where can they find you? Where should they connect? Yeah. I
think probably LinkedIn is is always gonna be, the easiest. So just look up TrafficGuard and and Caitlin. I'm
the VP growth for TrafficGuard. Obviously, if you if you're connected with Ty and you wanna get my email
address, I'm sure Ty can connect us as well. So email or LinkedIn is is probably just gonna be the easiest.
Be happy to do so. And, always a pleasure, Caitlin. Thanks so much for your time, man.
Talk to you soon. No problem. Thanks for having me. Cheers.