One of our oldest and most reliable affiliate partners is Softonic.com, the world's leading safe software distribution platform. We are so excited to have had the chance to celebrate this successful collaboration by rewarding them first place for best results during our Summer Software Sale campaign.
Miguel Angel Perez, Affiliation Specialist for Softonic was kind enough to tell us a bit more about the company and how Avangate Affiliate Network fits their market strategy.
1. How long have you been working in the affiliate marketing industry and what's your main role at the moment?
I've been in marketing for over 11 years, specializing in affiliation for the last 5 years. While I am now on the publisher side, working with Softonic, I began on the advertiser side, working in the finance vertical where I onboarded publishers and media buyers.
At Softonic my scope is much wider, managing the relationship with brands and affiliate networks from all verticals globally. Softonic is the world's leading safe software distribution platform. It distributes, categorizes, and evaluates over 1 million programs for Windows, Android, and Mac worldwide, so it's on a different level from what I did in my previous role.
2. What's your biggest affiliate marketing challenge right now, and why?
The biggest challenge is always tracking and data automation, especially connections with third parties, postbacks and integrations. This is a never ending task very much needed to extract relevant insights for the performance of the campaigns. Also, blending different sources of data to enrich our reports and gain visibility over the full funnel of conversion is crucial.
Regarding the business development part of the job, scouting and identifying new relevant partners and offers that match our audiences can be easy. But requires partners to share insights so we can assess profitability and build long term partnerships - It's not a one way street!
3. Name the most successful affiliate project you've worked on. What do you think made it successful?
Working for Softonic and partnering with websites such as Digital Trends and Download.com means we reach over 100m users per month. We work with many affiliate networks and partners meaning we manage huge amounts of data. As a consequence, the ability to centralize all data in one place was crucial and it was achieved by partnering with a leading affiliate tracking platform. I am happy to say I was the champion of this integration, working with several teams from our company, improving our capacity of analysis and optimization of our Affiliate deals, saving time by checking only one source of data.
4. Can you tell us three digital marketing trends every company should look at and prepare for in the next two years?
AI: AI is transforming the affiliate marketing industry by enhancing efficiency, personalization, and scalability. Through data analysis and predictive algorithms. AI helps marketers identify high-performing products, optimize campaigns, and target the right audiences with precision.
Our focus at Softonic is to identify where we can use these technologies. Focusing on operations, improved customer experience and most importantly to automate and optimize performance of affiliate campaigns.
Free to play games: Softonic has a huge catalog related to gaming and a big part of our audience are gamers. In the last few years, we have seen how gaming developers are moving from the paid model to the free play one. Our challenge as affiliate managers is to find new business model opportunities in this new landscape.
Native advertising: Affiliates need to reformulate their advertising products constantly to engage more with the audience, in my opinion marketers in general have to develop new well integrated advertising placements on their sites that become relevant for the audience.
5. How do you think our network helps iCreate achieve its goals as an affiliate?
Softonic is a Software/tech related site and Avangate is an affiliate network with a clear focus on Software. That's the reason why we have a long term and fruitful relationship. Everytime we add relevant new software to our catalog Avangate is our first choice to monetize this audience.
6. Any advice for affiliate newcomers who are promoting software and digital goods?
Be persistent and keep trying although results are not the expected ones, affiliates work with hard KPI's as the user has to make a purchase in most cases in order to get commission, and that's not always an easy task to accomplish. Don't forget that all your failures are learnings that pay off on your future decisions based on your experience.
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