New Publishing Tech
4 mins read

Q&A: Trackonomics, PPA Industry Partner of the Year 2019

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At June’s PPA Awards held in London’s Grosvenor House Hotel, the winner of the ‘Industry Partner of the Year’ was Trackonomics, the affiliate marketing specialist helping publishers find the right products and advertisers to match their content. WNIP caught up with Hanan Maayan, Co-Founder and CEO of Trackonomics, to find out more…

Can you give us some background about your company?

We’ve been in the affiliate space for some time. Trackonomics co-founder Kfir Barnea and I had an affiliate start-up which, through twists and turns, evolved into the company you see today. In 2014 we built ASOS’s affiliate network, AsosConnect, and saw the need for aggregated affiliate data and analytics. Trackonomics was born.

Since then, our client base has evolved to focus on the publishing industry. We’ve been lucky enough to work with some of the best around; CNN, BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, CBS Interactive, Wirecutter, Business Insider, Forbes, and American Media. Additionally, we have expanded our Tel Aviv base to offices in London, New York, Salt Lake City, and San Francisco.

What business problem is your company addressing?

Making money with affiliates is all about casting a wider net. In order to make real money with affiliates, content not only has to be on-point and resonate with an audience, it has to cover a broad range of products and services. The thing is, there are literally hundreds of affiliate networks out there working with thousands upon thousands of ecommerce stores (which we call advertisers).

As you can imagine, with hundreds of networks and thousands of advertisers, getting an accurate read on how much money you are making can get overwhelming super fast. Publishers like our clients (some of which make millions of dollars a month) create so much content and work with so many networks that handling that much complex information is very difficult. They needed teams just to manage the data. They’d log into each network, download the data, then normalize it—just for basic information like how much money they made. This is where Trackonomics comes in; we do all of that work programmatically, saving our clients hours of mind-numbing work. Trackonomics helps clients focus on what they do best: create content.

What is your core product addressing this problem?

Our core product is the dashboard. This is where we funnel all the data from the networks and a few other revenue sources, such as Google Ads. Here our clients can quickly gauge how much money they’re making, along with other important KPIs like orders, sales, clicks, and click rate. Since many of our clients manage multiple websites, they can see how they perform as a whole and then break the information down to website, network, advertiser, page/article, and down to the transactions themselves. We can get very precise—very granular—with our data so that no stone is left unturned.

We recently launched some great new tools. Funnel Relay gives our publishers deeper insights by showing their content revenue at the page level. Funnel Relay automatically captures data like article IDs, author, title, date, and even referral source for every click. From there we can soon contextualize that data in relation to traffic and SEO, giving publishers a full view of the content’s performance. This enables them to make better decisions about revenue growth strategies. Using this data, publishers can also negotiate custom commission rates and content campaigns with advertisers. The possibilities are endless when it comes to what you can do with the information we can pull together through the Trackonomics dashboard.

Can you give some examples of publishers successfully using your solution?

Our goal is to help publishers scale their affiliate efforts, allowing them to focus on casting that wider net by creating stellar content that, in turn, drives more revenue. Since we work with clients about their revenue data, discretion and security is of the utmost importance to us. Generally speaking, we have noticed that since our clients started using Trackonomics, there has been an incredible year-over-year growth. It’s not unusual to see a client’s affiliate revenues triple, which is an incredible trajectory.

Pricing?

Trackonomics works with each partner to ensure it has access to the features and functions that suit its needs. We customize our pricing for each partner, taking data volume, features, and needs into consideration, while maintaining affordable and clear rates that are never based on profit sharing. We offer a free trial for anyone interested in Trackonomics.

What are other people doing in the space and why?

There are a number of data aggregation platforms out there. A few specialize in affiliates because there really is a need to consolidate this information. Where we differentiate is how we contextualize the data, streamline the workflow, and partner with our clients to help them meet their goals.

How do you view the future?

The affiliate industry is actually very old tech-wise and, in my opinion, quite antiquated. As bigger players come into the affiliate space and the industry becomes more legitimized as a revenue source, we see a tremendous opportunity for growth and innovation. Our goal is to keep in step with the pain points publishers face, which can be challenging in a space that is trying to figure out how to just survive. We are here to not just to help publishers survive, but to thrive—and we can see affiliates making a real difference for them. There’s still a long road ahead to get anywhere near a formula for success, so we are here for that, too.

Thank you.



Photo by Riccardo Annandale on Unsplash