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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 DeGrange. 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. Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your
host, Ty DeGrange, and I'm really happy to have Laura Press with us here
today. Hey, Laura. Hi. How's it going? It's good. It's good. Happy
Friday. Yes. Happy Friday indeed. I think we're all ready for it as
we, it's time for the weekend. So I'm
really excited for Laura to join us today. Laura is the head of affiliate and
partnership education at PXA, part of Impact. PXA is a leading
learning platform, for affiliate and partner marketing. Highly, highly
recommend you check it out If you're in affiliate marketing, if you're in partner marketing, if you're if
you're curious about getting into it, we're gonna talk all about it. And so it's it's
pretty, pretty awesome to have her on today. A lot of learnings that she can share and I'm excited to jump in with
her. I know it's going to be good. Before that, Laura was at ShopHer.
She was at DealMoon. She was at Shop dot com and Commission Junction to name a few
other great places in her affiliate experience. So pretty in-depth knowledge of the space.
How did I do? Did I capture that reasonably well? Yeah. I feel like you
captured every affiliate marketer's incestuous journey.
It's, you know, I was at Commission Junction. We obviously are are
very familiar with all the great work you're doing at Impact and PXA, and I agree
with you. It's a very small, tight knit community. It changes. It's incestuous. It's all
of those things. So, well said. Well, maybe maybe to start out,
maybe you can tell us a little bit about the PXA. Yeah. So PXA, the
Partnerships Experience Academy, we are the standard industry accreditation
for all partnerships focused personas, which would include brands, agencies,
publishers, and creators. Love it. I love it. And what are you
building? What is the mission you're trying to achieve? Tell us a bit more about
about that. So PXA's mission is to provide free education
tailored to individual learners' educational needs by providing both
platform agnostic industry training and, of course, Impact dot com product training.
Awesome. Very cool. And how did you kinda make your way to
Impact? How did you kind of find the PXA and and and land kind of where you are
now? I mean, I was always very familiar with impact dot com, especially
spending a bulk of my career on the publisher side, having access to
all the different networks and platforms. I always found that
Impact was very user friendly and intuitive, especially for publishers.
No hard feelings for CJ out there. But Impact has always been known as, like,
a technology first organization. And when
I moved on to my role at ShopR Media, one of the
things I wanted to do was just be more vocal and active in
the affiliate and partnership industry, whether that was being seen as
like a thought leader, participating in industry conferences,
maybe as a speaker, and also serving as a resource for
other folks in the space. So I would constantly post various job listings
that came about, And usually, I'll read through what they are. That
way, it's, you know, appropriate for my network since, like, ninety percent
of my network are people within the affiliate and marketing space.
So one day, I was about to share a post from Impact dot
com regarding the Partnerships Experience Academy. And after reading through
the job description, it checked off where I
wanted my career to go. And it was a really exciting
opportunity and I felt as though it it would be a disservice to myself if I
didn't put my hat in the ring. Even though I was completely happy with where I was at Shopper
Media, they had been a great organization and small team to work with.
It's just something about this role that really spoke to me. So I had
to give it a go and here I am. Joshua Sharfstein (zero fifty seven:thirty seven): I love
it. Well, and maybe we could go deeper there because I think that
something pretty awesome spoke out to you on on the opportunity, you know, speaking
to where you wanted to take your career. Maybe you could share more about what is it about
the opportunity and the role and the PXA that really captured
your attention as it relates to, you know, where you want to go in your career? Yeah. So
I always found that in previous roles, I was kind of the go to person when it came
to training and onboarding new hires. I also really loved
just mentoring other team members, being able to serve as a resource
for them, provide advice or guidance, maybe help
them think critically about how they would respond to a certain situation,
whether it's dealing with a client or just what they could do to
better improve themselves and progress in their career. And I
really fell in love with that. I know some people, they'll want to climb the corporate
ladder. And for me, it wasn't so much about getting
to starting from, like, account manager to senior account manager, director,
senior director, VP, every step of the way. I'm more of like
an empathetic person, and so I wanted to progress in my
career that was more meaningful for me. And what really spoke to me about
this unique opportunity was allowing just that
to be part of my everyday job. And I'm not only helping to
train and mentor other Impact dot com employees, but I'm working
with an incredible team to develop industry standard courses for
things that people in this space should know once they get to various levels of their career.
And then again, serving as a resource for them to hit up on
a day to day basis or set office hours. Just help them
better themselves and further their careers. That's awesome. And I think it sounds like it
really clicked in terms of your strengths, your personality, what you
already were really naturally, you know, building towards already. So it sounds like
it it really did speak to those things. And I it certainly identify with that because, you know, huge
modus operandi for the pod, you know, is is our reason for being is really around that
education and learning and understanding what people have learned and sharing that with the
community as well through so many things. So sounds like we, have that in common, which
is cool. Yeah. And there's definitely just a a lack of communication or
resources available for our specific niche. Right now, there's
not really a good level of education within, like, colleges and
universities. It's not really part of their curriculum, and that's something that we're aiming to
do. So we we see the That's awesome. Void that's out there, and
we're also we want to be available to all. There are a lot of
different programs and especially coming from the publisher side for anyone that is starting
out as a publisher or creator, their funds might be a bit strapped. And
so by providing this free education, it
creates, an equitable, you know, case for everyone. And I think that's also
very important to call out. There's so many people that, you know, are looking
to enter kind of that digital economy, if you will, and so much opportunity in this space.
And there's so much need for good, talented, you know, people that want to learn new
things. And so I think the fact that it is available and free is an amazing benefit.
Out of curiosity, when did PXA get started?
Doctor. Actually two heads of education,
myself, where I focus on the curriculum for publishers and creators. And then
I have a counterpart, Cody Joy, who aligns her experience
with brands and agencies for that curriculum as well. Oh, fantastic. And
the publisher curriculum is actually less than a year old. So it's really exciting to have
these resources available to this very important piece of the space.
Yeah. Absolutely. And how many folks are on the platform learning right
now? So on average, we're adding around a thousand new learners every month. We
did top fifteen thousand learners last month, which is really exciting considering
that we are still, like, in the early stages, but there is
just a very strong appetite for wanting to learn more
and be part of our community. That's awesome. And and, you know, you've you've
also had so much you learn so much from your publisher experience. You're kind of bringing that to
the platform and bringing on, you know, folks that are
really sharing their knowledge. How do you how do you kind of evaluate that and how
do you kind of work on ensuring that supply of knowledge is is there and effective
and that how do you kind of think about that? Those teachers, that curriculum, etcetera.
So with the digital marketing landscape, it's always changing
and evolving, depending on what technology is coming
out. And so we're constantly making revisions to the courses
that we have. We wanna stay up to date and current with those trends.
And from at least from my experience, I was on a a
very unique publisher platform. And that was, in most
cases, the bulk of my exposure. I know and everyone else knows that
there are other types of publisher models out there. And in order to
make our curriculum appeal to the masses, we need
to ensure that we're providing all angles. So from my time
at shopper media, I've had the opportunity to work with different types of
publisher models and establish relationships based on the types of
campaigns and deals that we're brokering. So being able to tap into some of those and then
just from word-of-mouth, you know, other people that maybe my team has worked with
before tapping into our the publisher development team at Impact
as to which publishers are really showcasing a
strong, earnings right now. Bringing in their own industry
experts can help solidify that we're not just one-sided. We want to
hear all different sides, and everyone has a unique knowledge
set to bring to the table. So we're tackling each course.
So each of our courses within the curriculum, we have our fundamentals, which is more like
beginner level, the associate, which is intermediate, and then we have our expert
level. Each curriculum has it goes through the
the different phases of the partnership life cycle. So you have, like, tracking,
contract and pay, optimize, engage, protect and monitor.
And I mean, we're focusing on each of those specific learnings. And
from there, I'm trying to figure out what would be a great publisher to not
only, like, showcase during this type of training, but also allow
them to progress in their career. So whether it's someone that
was like me and wanted to be more vocal and active within the community,
this is a great stepping stone to boost their self confidence
and really show the world that they are an industry expert. I love that. That's very
cool. You've had so many, you know, learnings on the platform and in your publisher experience.
Maybe you can share, you know, what are some of those learnings that kind of pop out to you? What
are some of the things that have maybe come up through the PXA that that maybe you want to share with the audience today? Michelle (two
fifty seven): So when we do a course, we have an incredible
team that does a lot of work behind the scenes. And this is our team that's
actually they're located in Cape Town, South Africa, and I'm looking forward to the day where I
can visit them. We have a really cool office there. There's, like, a ball pit, which I
will set up camp there with my laptop and spend all day. But they
provide the storyboard for our courses. They help everything that
I do look good and polish once that course goes
live. So they're thinking from an outside perspective, like, what are
the the things that a learner should, you know, understand
after taking this course? What are those learning objectives? And they're
breaking it out into different segments of the course. That way, we know
that they can accomplish A, B, C, and D, and then take a
test afterwards and retain that information. So I think it comes
down to being able to really communicate
what a learner wants to take away from this course, which is why we break them out into
the different partnership phases, like I said before. Yeah.
Is there a course that comes to mind that you're you're seeing a ton of traction and interest in? So some of
the courses, I think, like, our tracking courses tend to do well along with
contract and pay. We do go over contract and pay industry
wide, and then we also have more on an Impact dot com product level
where we're presenting some of these less common payment models to
publishers that they should maybe start paying attention to. Everything has been
focused on last click attribution, but that's not the only
payment model available right now. And so we wanna provide an outlet
for these publishers, especially, you know, if they're more upper funnel.
Last click might not be the best payment model for them. They might want to think about how
to establish a minimum CPC, which makes more sense for them as
they might not be driving that overall conversion, but they are still very much important
with the customer journey. Yeah. Interesting. And what kind of
students, like, profiles are you seeing coming in? Is it are these folks that are new to
affiliate? Are they pretty much in affiliate? They want to kind of brush up? Are these experts that are
trying to get to a higher level? Like what is your perspective on the types of students
coming in? We're seeing a mixed bag, to be honest. Most of our
learners are part of, like, the brand and agency persona and then comes publishers,
and then our creators. But there's also a really wide netcast for, like, an
other where it's people wanting to learn more about the space. They may not necessarily
right now identify as a publisher or a brand or even an
agency, and that could even be like a consultant. But they're wanting to
learn more about just the digital landscape, and this is part of that pie.
We are seeing a lot of more mature companies, whether that's
brands, agencies, publishers that have a large group of
employees, implement our curriculum into their
overall onboarding. It helps take the pressure off internal employees
to train new hires, and that's being offloaded to us because
we have everything that someone should know in the space. And I know publishers are using
this. I've had conversations with them, and a lot of these, organizations are
even putting it into their job postings. I know that you've done this with Round Barn
Labs, and we're very thankful for that. It helps weed out
candidates, by having PXA certified as a either a
requirement or a nice to have by a candidate applying to a position
that says right on their resume, yes. I am PXA certified, whether that's in
the associate course or expert. You at least know that there's someone
that whether they're new to the space, they're taking it seriously, or they're
just kind of validating that they know their stuff. I love
that. What trends are you seeing emerge from PXE and from your observations in the
space? In regards to my role, I'm looking at different publisher models.
There's been a lot of talk regarding card link offers. It's
been an emerging business model for the past couple of years, but
it's really come to light, I'd say, within the past six to eight months.
So we're trying to keep up with those trends such as
and we do have a course that is launching in the next week where I do have,
Carrie Paradis from Fadal API. You know, we have a a q and a
style course that talks about what is CLO, how can it benefit
brands, how does it work within the partnership ecosphere,
and, you know, all of the above. That way, anyone that takes this course,
specifically brands, agencies, even, you know,
customer support teams, they have the education they need to bring it back to their
clients so they can make well informed decisions to grow their programs. That's
awesome. Yeah. There's also been a lot of talk and observation and data, you know, supporting
creator and and creator launching with impact and also just the explosion of influencer.
What what have you seen in the creator community as it relates to your, you know, view of of
publishers and and the growth of the ecosystem? So creator definitely has
taken up, a bulk of my life over the past probably five months or
so, especially with the launch of Impact dot com Creator. Some of the things
that we're finding to be very important for
learners that identify as a creator is that for our product
itself that they understand how to use the platform, the things that would be useful for
them. And then over the summer, there were those updates with the FTC
guidelines. So making sure anyone that is new to the creator space, they know
how to protect themselves and any potential partnerships down the road
by knowing what they can and cannot say when they're posting about
brands that they're working with. Yeah. That's that's really interesting. It makes a lot of sense.
Are you getting a lot of engagement around kind of the FTC guideline requirements,
and are people, you know, seeking out PXA and and you all for
help and counsel around that topic? Yeah. So, I mean, I'm not a lawyer by any
mean. So I can usually defer to Tricia from the
PMA who did help with that course I did on the FTC
guideline updates. But it was something that was trending.
And there's also been a lot of education around it that's gone out not just with
PXA, but other organizations have just picked up
information on how to share it with the masses. I think what is really
unique for creators is that we're trying to present opportunities
for them on things that they might not necessarily think of. So these FTC
guidelines, it's something they might not think of. They might see a brand they want to work
with and start posting about it, But we want to make sure they have all the tools
and resources to be successful. So being able to kind of put
this at the forefront and say, hey, we know you want to have a
collaboration with X, Y, and Z brand, but make sure that all your ducks
are in a row before you get this partnership, you know, up and running. We wanna
make sure you're putting your best foot forward, and we're putting you on the path to a
succession. Yeah. For sure. And then just what are you seeing in I'm sure
there's a lot of, misnomers and misconceptions in affiliate. I've I've talked
about them at length, and we talk about them a lot on this pod in terms of understanding the
learnings and how to improve. What are some of the misnomers that you see in
affiliate and partner marketing? I feel like it's still very much a closed off
topic and it's also comes across as like one-sided.
But with the emergence of bringing in these other channels, it's so
much more than what you would think of as just a coupon site, you know,
being part of the customer journey. There's so much more that
goes into the conversion funnel, and affiliate makes
up everything from the top to the bottom and in between. And I feel like it's
a constant battle for marketers across the globe, especially
for I mean, when I was at DealMoon, for example, it required a lot of
education for brands that we wanted to partner with. They would see the
word DealMoon and deal in the URL and automatically put DealMoon
in, you know, a deal site bucket. But there was so much more that went into
the platform. And there's just a lack of education
that maybe brands and agencies aren't necessarily open to. They they judge
a book by their cover. And we're trying to break those boundaries
and really provide the information to help
grow a brand's program. Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah.
I certainly see that. And I think, the fact that affiliate has become channel of
channels, completely beyond deal coupon
loyalty in itself. You've got so many interesting emerging partners.
It can be so diverse. You can pay the payment method is so efficient,
especially relative to others. Yeah. There's a lot of exciting, I think, things in coming
and, already available in affiliate marketing that people often don't realize. It's really good to
have a really good call out. And the pandemic definitely had a major impact on the space
because everything shifted to online. It was like as a industry,
we were finally somewhat recognized as being a reliable traffic source
and attribution model. And then once things started to
go back to maybe a sense of normalcy, there's this push for brands trying to
get in store foot traffic. So from there, publishers are trying to
think of ways on how to keep these partnerships engaged with their demographic
and meet customers where they are. So it it's a
really a lot of take and give and a lot of active listening to find out
what are the brands KPIs, where do they want their customers
to shop, and how can publishers meet them, in order to Mhmm.
Help drive a new revenue stream for them. Yeah. And you kinda touched on the
give and take and the listening skills and the active listening importance, but maybe an
opportunity to elaborate on that a little bit. If if you're counseling the brand, obviously, you've
come, come up through the publisher ecosystem primarily, but to think about the
best practices in working with publishers and partners, which we often talk about as the real
currency of the affiliate partner ecosystem, How would you counsel someone or
brand to to effectively interact with a with an affiliate or a publisher or
creator? What are some of the best
Yeah. So publishers are very much their own business. While it could
be enticing to take money upfront in in the form of flat
fees, publishers that know their business model well and know
what their audience is shopping for plays a big role.
It can be hard to say no to money upfront for brands that really want to partner with a specific
publisher, but a publisher isn't going to invest time
and resources into something that they know is not going to perform.
And I think that's what makes a really good publisher stand out is that
they know who their audience is and what they're shopping for, what the interests are,
and being able to tap into that specific niche. Whereas a publisher
that isn't quite there yet, they might seem a bit more scrappy, they want these funds
to come in, it's not going to create a win win partnership and that should be the
overall goal. I think sometimes that can should even trump
bringing in a revenue stream because a partnership is not going to
work if it's not a two way street. And anything that is one-sided,
it doesn't matter what industry it is. It's it doesn't work out well. And
for something to really Yeah. Be beneficial, it has to work for both
parties. Yeah. I like that approach. And for for those that maybe are not familiar with,
like, the long term nature of affiliate, like, what are some of the best practice
time? How long are some of these partnerships happening for? I mean, some of the
partnerships that I worked on were years and some of them were
also years in the making. So it really depends on the level of
education and also the risk that, you know, some brands
might be willing to take with a very unique approach. So
again, it's that give and take and active listening. Publishers, as long
as they have the tools and resources to present their case,
then again, this is a pay for performance model. So the risk level is
somewhat small. They're only paying for what they're getting and that goal is conversions.
So, you know, again, just being able to provide that education,
But these partnerships, they can form in a matter of days, minutes, or it
can take years. But I think once they realize what the end goal is
and how they're going to get there together is the ultimate reward. Yeah. It's kind of
amazing. I think people outside partnerships have existed in so many ways for so long
in in all areas of business. But, you know, as digital has
really become such a central part of our marketing mix, our life, as
affiliate has kind of, you know, grown up over the last twenty years, I don't think people
always realize that some of these brand creator, brand brand affiliate,
brand content site type partnerships have, as you said,
have been around for 05:10 years, some of them. And it's a
multi year, long term thing. And so I think that's where you see so many of the compounding gains
And it's also where you see that that magic of that paper performance model,
which is so attractive to so many, but oftentimes people don't always
realize that, hey. Some of these are quite a long time in the making to your point. Yeah.
Compared to other, you know, digital channels where payment is
upfront and you don't you can't tie that to the conversions down
the road. Whereas this, it's very action driven. You know what you're going to get
and you can set those goals and and hit them and and exceed them. Love it.
Very cool. And, Laura, what are some things that maybe your audience doesn't know about you
personally as we take a little bit of a detour into the fun topics? What are some things you can
share with the audience? Michelle Shughart (zero fifty three:thirty one): let's see. I love to go on cruises.
I actually, I've been on three cruises within the past year and I only
got COVID once from them. That was the very last one. That was
in August, but my husband and I are looking forward to our next cruise that is booked
for, a year from now to celebrate our ten year anniversary. And
Congratulations. Amazing. Hopefully our childcare doesn't fall through.
Fingers crossed. Yes. I mean, I love cruising. I think if
I could do anything outside of affiliate and partnership
marketing, if I had the funds and resources, I would open my
own animal sanctuary. I am a total blub for
any heartwarming like animal sanctuary type story.
And I think if I could rescue all the dogs, you know, I I totally would.
I love that. That's awesome. Do you have any, purchased item, you know,
in the last year that you just can't live without? You know, I know the hundred dollars or
less maybe. I'm just curious to know if there's any, like, product or service that you just rave about
that you thought is just a must have. Oh, that's a good question. I mean, there are
things that I see come up that are great for, like, babies
and toddlers, and and my youngest is, like, almost out of the toddler years. He's four and a
half. So there are some products that came out that are more geared for babies. I'm like, Oh, I wish
I knew about this. This would have been a game changer. I think my husband
does a lot of the cooking. I might need your suggestions on that. Oh, I don't even know. But like, at least so my
husband does a lot of the cooking. So I'm always looking for kitchen tools and gadgets that
could make his prep a lot easier. I got these
like herb shears that help chop, like, cilantro and mint and
basil, like, all the herbs into, like, finely chopped pieces that recipes
require. So you're taking a knife and just like, you know, chop it. Yeah. I might have
to look into that. I'll send you a link. But that's definitely been
a game changer because that has saved many minutes of prep
time. Love it. Trying to see if there's any other, like, kitchen tools or anything.
We just got done with Halloween, and I was carving a lot of pumpkins.
So some of the hacks that I saw was instead of carving starting at the
top of the pumpkin if you flip it over and cut out the bottom and use
a like a a hand blender to get all like the insides out you can easily scoop
it out afterwards that was pretty game changing. Oh, that's a nice one. I love
those. Yeah. I feel like those are getting those are getting pretty good. Yes. I'll I'll
definitely hit hit you up for the baby product recommendations as well on a side
note. But, Is there a baby on the way? Well, we've got a little eight month old and
we got a three year old. So we're still in toddler and baby face Yeah. For a little bit.
We're catching up to you. Yeah. I'm trying to convince my husband for a third, but,
I'm not winning that just yet. Yeah. It's the
what's the the old meme, I'll never recover from this financially. I think
that's come across my mind when I think about Yeah. How do we how do we
afford more kids? You know, that's all that my husband thinks about. And, I mean,
we're our youngest one, he's gonna be in kindergarten next year. And just
tuition for the school that we wanna put him in. It's like having two kids in this
private school. No joke. Yep.
So awesome. Laura, you've shared some really great learnings. Really thrilled about what you're building with the
PXA. I think it's doing a great service. I love that people are are
interacting and and and engaging, and it's growing in its popularity for good reason. It's
a free platform to really help, lift up the community and enable people
to kinda get engaged. For folks wanting to learn more about PXA and and you as well, like,
where where can they find you? So they can always find me on LinkedIn. I'm pretty active on
that network. We also Cody and I both have profiles
on TikTok and Instagram and I think YouTube. So
that's also a way to kind of follow along some of the things we're doing with, like, short micro
learnings. Luckily, we have an incredible team in Cape Town that is slightly younger
than I am that can manage at least the TikTok stuff. I don't TikTok. I don't know
how to use TikTok. I think I logged on once and I'm like, what is this?
Luckily, I'm, you know, providing the content, but, you know, there are ways to be in
touch with me on those social platforms. Otherwise, they can That's awesome. Send me an
email. If they're new to the space, then I do run weekly onboarding
webinars. I try to switch up the time zone to accommodate for anyone across the
globe. And That's cool. We can also I also have office hours. So if
someone just has a question on how to approach a partnership or
maybe they are even kind of looking for a job and they want some advice on how
to better prepare their resume to be a a more sought after
candidate in this space, you know, my office hours are open, and they can
always send me an email, laura. Pressimpact dot com.
And I'm always an email or DM away. Very cool.
Laura, it's been a pleasure to talk to you today. I really appreciate you coming on and, looking forward
to more. Thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Anytime. Have a good
one. Thank you. You too.