Welcome to the Affiliate BI podcast. Today I'm very happy to speak with Oliver Kenyon. He is the co-founder of ConversionWise, which is an agency specially in conversion rate optimization. And he's also the founder of AffiliateFix, which is one of the largest affiliate forums.

Oliver, welcome to the show.

Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Let's go to the very beginning of how you got started in affiliate marketing. I want to hear your story.

I love telling this story because if I told you it was Eminem and hip hop that got me into affiliate marketing.

Would you believe me? Possibly not but that's that's the truth. So I was I was actually a a full time chef. So I went to college, I did my chefing kind of degree, and I was a full time chef, but on the side I was always obsessed with hip hop. I loved hip hop and rap, and it was the days of kind of 8 Mile and Eminem when the film came out, Rap Battles, and it kind of is what really brought me to the online space as like a passion.

Like I just used to love going on all the, back in the day, all the forums in the communities that basically discussed all hip hop, rap battles, etc. And yeah, I was obsessed with like Eminem and all that good stuff. And through communities, as we kind of now know, this is before the days of like Facebook groups and discord and all that kind of good stuff.

It, it was still functioning the same, like communities were all about networking and meeting people. And I was lucky enough to meet a guy in Wales. I'm from the UK who basically showed me. What affiliate marketing was, it was back in the day of kind of CPA marketing. So cost per action marketing incentivize marketing and he was making some good money using kind of like gateways, and this is going to show how kind of long I've been in this space, but this was when like, you could get like penny likes on Facebook pages.

You then run like viral scripts around kind of clickbait videos and people would have to fill in the gateways and you'd get paid every time someone filled in the gateway. So me and him ran this kind of co project, I think it was like around the Euros or the World Cup and the football and we basically gave away an England shirt, a signed England shirt that we'd bought from eBay.

We gave it away and to enter you had to fill in one of these gateways every time the gate was filled in we'd get money and we'd run these kind of viral scripts through it And that was my first kind of introduction to affiliate marketing a side of affiliate marketing mainly cpa And the issue back then was we had like things like the warrior forum.

You had digital forum a digital point forum and several other kind of forums, but we could fire, but no one really shared anything. It was all kind of very secretive. These days we live in a, in a generation where like everything is shared, like everything is open, people just give everything away for free.

And that's the way you should be doing marketing. But back then it was very secretive. So no one was really discussing how they were making money through affiliate marketing. The, the, the amazing thing about this network I joined again, I'm just going to show my age here called CPA lead was it had like a live chat feature on the, on the, on the dashboard of the affiliate network.

But the ingenious thing they did is you could put like forward slash today or forward slash this month or forward slash all time, and it would share your earnings within the channel. So for clout, everyone was in there every day going like forward slash today, and it would come up like John has made 6,000 today.

Back then I was like, forward slash today, it was like, Oliver has made 50p today. Like, I wasn't earning too much, but I got really fixated, like, how are these guys earning all this money? But no one was sharing it. So, because I'd been on these affiliate sorry, these rap and hip hop communities, I knew exactly what, like, a forum was.

And I always remember I must have been maybe 16, 17 at times at college doing my chefing. I didn't have any money. And I sat down with my father and my grandfather and I did the whole kind of like dragon's den pitch. So like the shark tank kind of pitch. And I said if you give me 140 pounds. I can, I can buy a V bulletin license, which was the forum software.

I can buy a domain, some hosting, and I can set up this affiliate community where we can discuss more openly how people make money through affiliate marketing. And I always remember my dad and grandfather agreed they in return, they were going to get 40 percent of the business. And believe it or not, that was the beginning of CPAFix, which turned to AffiliateFix, which became the largest affiliate community online.

And the rest is kind of history, as they say. And my dad still, to this day, reminds me that he owns 40 percent of that business.

Well, good thing he's got a recording of this, so if he ever needs to take it, of course. We'll just, we'll just beep that out. Yeah, that's really cool. I think you highlighted something that if you did that back in the day with, with like affiliate fix and those other forums, you're right.

People back then weren't really sharing, but people gravitated towards it. Like Pat Flynn, where he's like, here's my monthly income. And it's kind of weird, you know, building in public is. It's talked about as if it's a new thing, but people

He was like, he was the guy, right? Like back in the day, I used to, I used to love that monthly drop that he did to like showing that breaking down his income.

I think it was what was the hosting provider. He was like the number one affiliate conversion kit was a conversion kit, but there was a hosting, a blue, blue host. I think it was one of them. He was like doing hundreds of thousands and that, yeah, I actually. I started a YouTube channel back when I had like CPAFix and managed to get a very early on interview with Pat Flynn.

I watch it now and I literally cringe because it was, it was quite funny of the, how naive I was. But yeah, he was like, he was like the goat of that back in the day, like sharing all his stuff.

It's a good thing where I think people... You know, why they don't get into videos? I think they're worried about their first video being horrible, but go to listen to Pat Flynn's very first episode and it's like night and day of what he is like now in terms of how professionally he is.

But he doesn't get that good unless he, he you know, puts himself through the meat grinder and does that day one right. Competition? Absolutely. So let's fast forward to conversion rate optimization. It's it's one of my favorite topics. I got first introduced to it by at a conference with Tim Ash doing a presentation on CRO and he did a live take on people's websites and I'm like, wow, I'm a screw SEO, like just double your traffic with CRO.

So how did you stumble into this? I mean, it's probably through affiliate marketing.

Yeah absolutely. So when we launched Affiliate Fix, well, it's called CPA Fix. I kind of bought a few of the cult following from CPA lead over and like, I never knew that Affiliate Fix was going to be the business it turned into be.

I never knew that people were going to join, but all of a sudden loads of people just started joining. I think like they just had somewhere centralized to discuss affiliate marketing. And we were really lucky. I still I'm still very in debt to this guy to this day, but one of our first members was a guy called Tim Burt.

You may have heard of him, may not your audience may have heard him, may not. He was kind of proclaimed as the godfather of Facebook marketing. And back then, before he was sort of really big into Facebook ads, he had an affiliate network called Ploos. And Tim and another old friend of mine, Vito Glazes, who owns CPA Tank.

Basically came over onto the forum and asked me if they could put banners on the forum. What? What does that even mean? Like, and they were like, oh, like, dude, we'll give you some money. I was like, I can make money from this? Like, this was just meant to be somewhere where me and my friends could discuss, like, trying to make money online.

All of a sudden, Tim and Vito are offering me like four or five hundred dollars a month to serve their banners. And I was like, this is, this is crazy. So I was really lucky to form a relationship with Tim very, very early on. And he really loved the aesthetics of the forum. It looked very nice. I was like, I'm not a designer at heart, but I love creativity.

I like things to look nice. And I'd found this designer who designed the forum CPA fix. And Tim said, can I use your designer? And I kind of, I guess maybe the entrepreneurial bug has always been in me. I don't know. I didn't intro him. I said, yeah, but I'm going to do this as kind of like an arbitrage thing.

So I will get the brief from Tim. I will send it to my designer, Sib. Sib will do the design. I will charge Tim X. I will pay Sib Y and make a bit of money on top. And that's kind of how it started, as silly as it sounds. Like, we started just building some landing pages for Tim. And Tim then Won a contract with a company called debt.

org who are one of the largest lead generation companies in the states They were very big into like social security Disability benefits, etc, etc And I was still a chef still a full time chef and Tim approached me and said I will pay you X amount per month I can't remember what it was I think it was like six thousand dollars which is like more money than I would have ever had in my bank account He said I'll pay you like six thousand dollars per month To generate, I think it was like maybe three or four landing pages per week.

So I kind of, again, I was more like an account manager. I kind of went to Siv and said, right, we've got to do this. We found a developer and we started producing these pages for Tim with really good results. And I, I must admit, like, I didn't really know too much what I was doing about, you know, conversion elements and principles.

And luckily we had Tim on our side and we used VWO back in the day and doing multivariate testing. So we quickly got results and I became honestly, absolutely fixated with like how some subtle change can make such a big difference. And we started building out these frameworks, like literally building out like.

This is what a perfect lead gen page looks like. We then got into doing multi step lead gen pages because the offers were, were like asking more questions. We then started to introduce advertorials. They were called pre sales back in the day. So we were then becoming obsessed with like how an advertorial was written.

And then it just grew from them. Tim, again, Tim has been a huge influence on our kind of career, but he then. Started doing some e com stuff. So very early in the day, we started doing e com. He would introduce you to another person and we were doing all the kind of like rush my trial pages and all the kind of aggressive affiliate landers back in the day.

And honestly, it just grew from there. The more people we did, we then created a business around it. People from the community. Wanted to utilize it because all affiliates need landing pages or they're doing host and posts on lead gen or they're selling their own products. And luck, I was lucky enough to find my co founder inside the community as well, which is just nuts that he joined my CPA fix forum and he actually lives.

30 minutes away from me, which is just crazy. Met up with him, formed a partnership and yeah, I think 11 years on, we're still going.

That's crazy. I'm going to jump right into the CRO stuff. Yeah. How small of a sample size of data do you need to run a good AB split test to get those early wins?

Yeah. So when it comes to like ongoing CRO, I split CRO into two, two categories. Really? One is like landing page design. So that is like. Building a landing page around best practices and best frameworks, which we have kind of pioneered over the last 10 years to say, like, if you put X, Y, and Z in this order in this layout, it should convert better than if you just got a random good looking design of 99 designs, for example, you then have the other side, which is when you have a certain amount of volume of data and traffic per month, you can start running exactly as you've said, these kinds of A B tests.

And for those of you who is, it's literally where you hypothesize that like This would convert better than this. You use a bit of software that spins 50 percent of your audience towards version a 50 percent towards B, and you soon find out which one converts. Now it's a good question. It's a question we get asked a lot.

It's like, what volume of data do you need? We suggest that anyone below. 50 to 100,000 hits per month sticks to landing page design. You can take bigger swings because you haven't got enough data going through the test, you can afford to take bigger swings, bigger changes. And you can, you can, you can build something that's based on a high converting framework.

If you have over 50 to 7,500,000 hits per month. That's when you can kind of unlock A, B testing effectively and quickly, because basically you need, you need at least two weeks to run through a test. And the reason that is, is because external factors can sometimes. Contradict your test. For example, if on a Monday, there's a bit of news about the product that you're selling in the market, there's probably going to be more people who are trending, going to your pages and buying your product, there might be something you know, external again, that kind of affects it like a sale or.

Prime day or something, you know, something on that specific Monday may alter your test. So you need to let it run two Mondays just so you can kind of counterbalance that and say, okay, it wasn't just a fluke on that Monday. As far as sample size of volume, you're really looking at around about at least 100, 000 hits.

At least kind of, yeah, sort of 1000 thousand hits. But also you need to look for statistical significance. So you can actually become stat sig a lot shorter time of volume, but you need to make sure that it is kind of like that 85, 90 percent up on, okay, this one is statistically proven to convert better, and sometimes you can actually make a bit more of a quicker decision if a test should win.

You can do A B testing on any volume of traffic. It's just going to take you longer, you know, to get to that 50, a hundred thousand hits. If you're only doing 20, 000 hits per month is going to take five, six months. Whereas if you're doing over that a hundred thousand hits, you can just get statistically significant a lot quicker.

And then you can make a decision on whether the test won or lost and implement it on your store. But I would always run it over two weeks, just so you have like two Mondays, two Tuesdays, two Wednesdays, two Thursdays.

And let's assume that we don't have an agency like ConversionWise to help us. What sort of tools in the toolbox would you use to run these A B split tests to improve your conversion rate, let's say on an affiliate website?

Yeah, absolutely. So I think you have to educate yourself on how to create hypotheses and, and why, why you know, effectively all, all A B testing is, is like guesswork. It's a, it's a sort of stab in the dark of this. I think this will convert better than this. But if you, if you have the education on, on why it should, and you, you have the education around how to look into analytics, how to look into reporting, how to install heatmaps and analyze scroll and heatmaps.

Then I think that's really important. So two resources that I think lean that way. One that's affordable if you don't have budget is our conversion rate academy, not just to plug our stuff, but it's very good, less than 50 per month. But if you do have enough money, like I think it's a thousand dollars, then CXL's course is.

is bar none, probably the best on the market. It's fantastic. It's gonna go a lot more into depth about kind of analytics and and kind of reports and how to read them. But getting a basic understanding of conversion design is crucial as far as like software to run the tests. There's not obviously now that optimizes sunset.

Google optimizes suns in sunsetted. There's not too many that are like really mass market affordable. However, convert. com is what we use and we find that a very, very good bit of kit to kind of run those actual AB tests as well. But I think understanding why you're running the test instead of just kind of like stabbing in the dark is a very important first step.

And for all the different types of AB testing you can do, or the heat map tools what is your guess on the percentage of affiliates or affiliate programs? That actually do conversion rate optimization. 

in my experience. Minimal. I think, I think affiliate marketing and lead generation two huge markets that are very untapped when it comes to CRO.

And I say this from someone who runs a large CRO agency. We primarily focus on e com. I think e com gets it. E com just knows that above a certain volume, you should be doing tests because. I'm going to say this outright, more tests will lose than win, but those winning tests on large volume of data can cover the losses of the, of the losing tests and some, they can be like literally life changing game changing for your business.

But I, I feel like affiliate marketing. In my experience is a, is a little bit more let's just get out there and, and put all the pressure on affiliates as opposed to like taking responsibility of actually does this convert we'll let the affiliate worry about it. So again, even if you're using advertisers pages.

Or you're allowed to use your own pages. I think it's hugely, hugely untapped in the affiliate space for sure.

Next question I've got is kind of what I believe to be true. And I kind of want to see if you agree or would correct me. I just believe like, you know, for all the. Like the topic of conversion rate optimization for how long it's been around.

I feel that people gravitate more towards SEO and as if like CRO has been kind of neglected. Do you believe that to be true?

I'm going to go one step further here and I'm going to say that I think media like paid media or acquisition traffic is, is a hundred percent. Shadows kind of CRO. I think everyone is fixated.

You know, I'm, I'm lucky enough to have spoken on some like this and incredible podcasts and, and, and some of the biggest kind of affiliate and events in the world. And 90 percent of the talks are all about acquisition. It's about traffic. It's about how can you get more people to your site, whether that's by a search, whether Facebook, Instagram, snap, it doesn't matter.

Like it's all about how can we just get cheaper clips and more people to our site to scale. And what gets neglected is actually turning more of those clicks into customers. You are sending, you are paying, for the exact same, this is, this is if someone asks me like, how do you explain CRO to your like, grandma or someone who has no idea what, what it is, which I have to do a lot by the way, I don't think my parents do even understand it.

I use this analogy. You are paying for a hundred thousand people to go to a website. Now you are still paying the exact same amount and the exact same 100, 000 people to go to an optimized website. Now the unoptimized website may make you 1,000 sales. The exact same amount of people that you're paying the exact same amount for go to site B that's optimized and then that might make you 3000 sales.

So like you're literally double or tripling your business just by optimizing traffic that's always going. And I think to go back to your search and SEO related question, I think it's the same, you know, if you have a good amount of traffic coming to a website, yeah, you want to get more. Of course you do.

But first and foremost, Make sure that that website is so fine tuned that let's say the 10,000 people who are coming through search Every single month are turning into a thousand customers instead of 500 customers And I think that's that's what that as you said often gets kind of forgetted and neglected because people just they want to scale With acquisition instead of, okay, we can actually double our business from the same amount of traffic by focusing on CRO.

I believe this to be true on the affiliate program or operator side of business where I've got thousands of affiliate accounts and I've never, ever, ever had one affiliate manager approached me and said, John, you know, this tracking link you're using, we have one that converts at two and a half times better performance.

Would you like to switch it? Just never happens. And I ask these affiliate managers and operators, do you know the conversion rate of your, of all your tracking links? They say yes. And then when I ask them the next question, would you like an audit? They also say yes, and it's like you wouldn't say yes to both questions if you really knew what you guys were doing.

I think I think it's the amount of advertisers or affiliates that we work with versus like econ on product owners is is yeah, probably 95 in the favor of econ so we we do work with The occasional affiliate offer.

And there are some people that put value on CRO or good, good, highly performing landing pages when it comes to affiliate marketing, but I think that's, that's a very, you know, small sector of the market. And I think affiliate marketing in my opinion, in my experience, and I've been in this industry for a long time.

is a lot more like set and forget, just chuck it out. How quickly can we get a page out? How quickly can we get some affiliates to send some traffic? How can we scrub a bit of that, that, that, that, that money that's coming in? And how can we move on to the next shiny object and get a page out? And, you know, it's, it's I think you can build a really big, sustainable business around affiliate marketing.

If you actually take the time to, you know, believe in things like building actually a real good page that's branded and. Is, is, you know, very much white hat, but also focuses a lot on kind of CRO and optimization. So, yeah, I think it's hugely untapped.

And how does conversion rate optimization help and influence search engine optimization?

It can, so definitely can, because when it comes to like web design, so search is a unique beast. And I say that by, if you are getting a very good amount of traffic via search, the argument is always, okay, well, we shouldn't really change our website because. You know, that can affect the kind of algorithms if you remove text or move text around that obviously Google likes and ranks you can have a negative effect.

And I don't disagree, but what you're doing with CRO is you're not playing with like, especially when you're doing AD testing, you're not playing with like a completely different website. You're not replacing the backend, you're not placing the content layout. You are, you're testing individual elements that, you know, can we get more people from the homepage through to a collection page, or can we get more people into our lead gen funnels?

Because we're getting paid per lead on our website. And that's not necessarily always like. Okay, let's look at rebuilding the whole site, which would then obviously maybe potentially affect your search search results. It's instead saying, okay, can we add this section above the fold that has a directional queue and has some social proof that encourages people, more people to click through to your lead form that's going to generate you more revenue and get more people into your flow.

And I think that's... That's almost like a myth is like, you can't really pair SEO and CRO because, you know, it's going to be huge changes to my site that are detrimental to my rankings. It's not often the case, especially if you have a lot of data, you can certainly play the two games at once you just have to use a an agency that knows they can't change the whole website because it's going to affect your rankings

Given your experience in building communities Do you think communities are going to just get stronger as we're now in the the era of ai content where?

I mean google's getting blasted with content left right and center and I think the the two channels that maybe are Where people will gravitate towards will be video because you can't quite fake video and communities where you're basically connecting with real people.

I think that last statement is crucial.

Is that like real connection? And that's, that's really what I've, yeah, I have a CRO agency. Yeah, I built an affiliate community, but effectively it was always a community CRO agency, everything we do is organic. I am the face of the business. Years ago, I read a book called by an English artist called Key Person of Influence, a guy called Daniel Priestley.

And I just became fixated on this, like, being a key person of influence within whatever you do. And that's all about community. You know, you can actually put community into so many different... Walks of life, you know, an email list, a newsletter, Facebook group, discord, a YouTube channel. It's all about like having that connection and that network and that direct touch point with people that I think is never going to go away.

It evolves. Of course it does. You know back when I started, as I said, you know, Facebook groups were the forums were the thing. There was not no such thing as a Facebook group. We were on like fee bulletins then for like. these actual hardcore forums that you had to sign up for and physically type in.

I mean, I'm still owning one. We have one for our conversion rate academy. It's built on Zenforo because I'm a community geek at heart. But, but now, you know, you don't have Facebook groups that evolved. Then you had sort of Discord, Telegram, WhatsApp. It's never going to stop. I think what is really important is having that direct connection, you know, even in the world of AI, you can kind of tell you, you might not be able to tell like when people are kind of using AI to ghost write for them or come up with content, but you can tell when someone's not getting on video or not doing podcasts like this or not directly connecting with their network.

And I think the connection part that you mentioned is, is the bit that's just going to go on and those who continue to connect and actually show up and show that a real person are going to be way more. Followable, if that's a word, or, you know, connectable than someone who's just kind of spinning out all this AI sort of fake content, for sure.

What do you think about AI heatmaps and do you think CRO is going to be more automated with AI?

Yes. I think, I don't think, excuse me, I don't think the actual testing of CRO is going to be. More automated, but I think AI makes reporting a lot easier. So I have a very good friend, a guy called Dylan Ander.

And he recently launched heatmap.com. I don't know if you've seen it. For those of you who haven't seen it, this is the only heat map you should be using. The reason I say it, it's the first ever revenue backed heat map. So Dylan had this genius idea of like, okay, things like a hot jar, et cetera, will tell you where people click.

That's cool. We can see where people click, but a click doesn't always add up to a sale. Whereas what heat map does is it attributes the click to the sale. So you might actually have an element on your site that gets fewer clicks. That heat, that a hot jar, for example, would say that's your, that's your get rid of that, that's getting fewer clicks, but that button actually might be the one that's generating you the checkouts or the revenue.

So heatmaps. com for sure. Check it out. That is that's a game changer as far as the kind of heat map industry. They are building in some really cool AI automation in there. That's going to kind of, again, it's not gonna, it's not going to do the work for you, but it's going to make the reporting and the understanding of the actual software a lot easier.

So it's going to make suggestions based on your data. So, you know, it's going to come up and say, have you looked at this? I'm doing this because of this button, for example. So, you know, it might suggest that you know, have you, have you noticed that the, the button below the fold is actually generating you most of the revenue, why not change the content above the fold to follow the same?

So it will definitely be more of a suggested approach and I think. reporting and kind of analytic, analytical side of things is going to get easier. And information is going to be made more abundant through AI and more kind of accurate, but I don't know necessarily if creating the actual hypothesis and testing is going to be automated.

I still believe you need someone with a bit of knowledge on the kind of frameworks and because it's not landing page design is very much, you can very much wireframe it and you can kind of hit. Hit those high, high conversion rates. 90 percent of the time when it comes to mass volume of data where audiences and demographics are so different based on different products, different offers.

It needs some form of human. Interaction and knowledge to know what to test. And again, a lot of tests lose, they do, even if a human's doing it. But I think AI will advance as far as software and reporting. But I still think you need a conversion wise to do the testing for you.

Given your experience I want to ask it's, it's kind of like your chance to showboat.

I'm going to give you, let's say a hundred hypothetical landing pages. I'm going to ask you to optimize them without using any of your tools, just your experience. What would you say your score would be in terms of always getting an improvement in score?

Improvement, I would say. You can, with landing pages, as I said, you can follow specific frameworks that we have kind of pioneered and built over the last decade and nine times out of 10, depending on your niche, and I'll go into a little bit more about that they will convert better than probably what you have already where there are discrepancies and where there are I guess, differences in that are very specific niches, for example, You know, If you own a apparel brand that is a luxury apparel brand, it's highly branded.

It's more about the kind of aesthetics. It's more about the look, the brand the colors used. You know, we may suggest on other brands to use a specific colored button that stands out against your, your normal brand. So it gets more clicks. However, On an apparel brand that can actually play a negative effect on certain things.

We might suggest using inventory stock alert icons that say like only four left in stock or 10 were bought today on some particular luxury or high end kind of brands that can actually have a negative effect. So there are definitely computations where it's not a one size fits all a hundred percent.

And that also is way more easy to find out what they are when you get to a high level of traffic. But if you are under that kind of like 50, 000 hits per month. There is definitely a framework to follow where you tick conversion principle boxes. And just very quickly, there are things like trust, credibility, social proof, desire you know, correct layouts having a strong value proposition, handling objections.

Using FAQs to handle those objections, using reviews with objection handling statements within them to then remove friction from your customers. Usability is huge. So actually having a site that's actually really easy to use and doesn't have bottlenecks where people drop off if they're in the car at the checkout or they're going down a multi step.

Forum on the lead gen side, but they don't have a progress bar. So they don't know where they are within the, within the funnel. Like there's all these little things that depending on what you're trying to do, if you're doing coaching, if you're doing digital products, physical products, e comm, lead gen, VSLs, advertorials, like all these different wireframes that have a different layout that work best.

And we're just lucky that we've worked with like 3, 500 plus brands that we have been able to build frameworks based on their data. So we've kind of used them as guinea pigs, obviously more so eight, nine years ago, when like Tim was kind of running offers and we were using BWO to build these frameworks.

Now we kind of pretty much have it nailed down, but it doesn't always work. It doesn't, but eight, nine times out of 10, it will.

So on the opposite side, I believe most designers, they don't really understand or study user experience design or conversion rate optimization. So how often do you run into clients that say, Hey, I have a new web design and it's actually converting worse.

What happened?

Yeah, a lot. And typically that is you've kind of summed it up in your question. Typically that will happen where people employ. Designers that make beautiful websites and they may look aesthetically amazing. You look at it and you just think. Wow. That's really nicely designed from a brand perspective, or, you know, it's got all these visual effects and colors and blah, blah, blah.

But ultimately the question I always implore my team to ask people is like, do you want something that looks nice or something that makes you money? And the end goal for me is always revenue. It's revenue per visitor. Conversion rates are actually a bit of a skewed metric. You shouldn't really focus on conversion rate.

What you should focus on is revenue per visitor because AOV and conversion rate can sometimes clash. And you can actually get a lower conversion rate but your AOV is up and it, you think that the conversion rate is down or you can get higher conversion rate AOV is down and you think you've done a good job.

You're actually losing money. But it is that whole kind of age old thing of like, yeah, I agree, ugly converts and it does. But also you can have a fine mix of branded design with CRO that is going to, is going to work. But you're, you're, you're right. We see it a lot. And it typically is when people employ a non performance related designer for a performance related business.

Perfect way to summarize it. And last question, what do you see as the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence?

Future of affiliate marketing, I don't see affiliate marketing going anywhere. I think the way I've seen it is the way I've seen affiliate marketing in my sort of small bubble and space over the last few years is it's gone more led into partnerships as opposed to affiliates.

So like it's more partnership driven. Obviously I work a lot with agency to agency. It's less now about kind of affiliate links and it's more like direct intros, et cetera, but on the on the affiliate side where you kind of, you know, you have affiliates running your traffic and you have lots of traffic going the way I've seen it evolve over the years is just, it's just becomes a little bit more kind of compliant.

It probably becomes a little bit harder to. Do things that you used to be able to do that we were maybe doing 10 years ago but I think that's all for the for the benefit of the industry and I just think affiliates is just a very still a very kind of like untapped and huge space that Again, we work primarily now with econ brands and the percentage of econ brands that actually have affiliate programs Is is minuscule and I think there is again a huge opportunity for people to open up affiliate programs Yes, you have to vet your affiliates.

Yes, I would provide them with landing pages that are approved by you guys and kind of make sure they're zero optimized But I don't see it. I don't see it going anywhere. It's a brilliant model you know, you get a slice of the pie, they get a slice of the pie and the customer should end up with a good end result.

I don't see it fading any, anytime soon.

Absolutely. And Oliver, thanks for doing this. Where can people get a hold of you?

Really appreciate it. Yeah. If you want to kind of get some more tips and tricks about CRO and kind of general marketing and e comm, then you can follow me at Oliver Kenyon on Twitter or X as they call it these days.

Or if you want to just learn a little bit more about what we can do for you as a company we can build landing pages. We can run your ongoing CRO. You can find us at conversionwise. com.

I'll put all those links in the show notes including the conversion academy.

That's a great place (Conversion Rate Academy) if you want to learn.

Yeah, absolutely. Thanks a lot.

Thank you so much for having me, John. Cheers.

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