On October 15, 2018, the winners of International Performance Marketing Awards were announced with Affise winning the Industry Choice of Technology. Affise is a SaaS performance marketing platform to manage, track, analyse and optimise affiliate programs and the performance of online advertising campaigns in real time. We caught up with Affise founders, Stanislau Litvinau and Dmitrii Zotov, to find out what is unique about the company, and why the industry made the choice in their favour.
How do you feel about winning the Industry Choice of Technology?
Stanislau Litvinau: We’re very excited about this win especially given the fact that the winner for this accolade was determined by public votes. It makes our victory even more special to us. A year ago we claimed ourselves as a startup, but we’ve gone from strength to strength, and we are so happy that these efforts were rewarded. It gives us life to move forward and improve our product even more.
What is your USP?
Dmitrii Zotov: From the very beginning we have been striving to change the established rules and transform the traditional vision on affiliate marketing by saturating the industry with the best in class products that will form a complete affiliate ecosystem. With over 15 years of experience in affiliate marketing, we know exactly all the pains affiliate marketers face day-by-day and what they expect from a high-quality performance marketing platform. We use our knowledge to promptly address changes in the affiliate industry and modernise outdated approaches to make sure our customers are ahead of the competition.
How do you enable to increase ROI from the performance channel?
DZ: It goes without saying, that nowadays technology is a factor that could make or break your success in affiliate business. So, we are staying on the top of modern technologies to be the first who integrate the features for saving our clients’ time, yet increasing profits. The matter is, that choosing ready-to-use solutions, affiliate marketers choose to rely on the expertise of technology providers so that they could focus on the main purpose of their business. Therefore, their peace of mind is our main goal.
As a performance marketing platform, there are some core features that we provide: the most accurate statistics with over 50 slices for deep analysis and traffic optimisation, flexible system setting and API, advanced caps management and targeting, etc. But beyond that, we do our best to automate as many processes as we can to help our users get rid of manual tasks. We witness how the companies are growing with the help of our technology, and this is the main indicator that we are going in the right direction.
What type of support should someone expect working with your platform?
SL: As we focus on building strong long-term relations with our clients and partners, we feel responsible for their growth and success. That is why we provide excellent support and customer success service from the very onset. Each client gets a personal “wingman”, customer success manager, who guides them into the world of affiliate technologies and helps to use them at the fullest capacity. Thus, we always ensure that each client gets the highest revenue, let alone efficient 24/7 technical support.
Could you share a bit on the origin of Affise, your growth and expansion globally?
SL: As for me, the creation of affiliate programmes has become an integral part of my life since 2002. Now I have a background of more than ten successful projects in different spheres of affiliate marketing as a CEO as well as a Founder of several CPI networks. And each time, starting a new affiliate programme I was wondering which tracking solution would be the best option for the campaign, but each time I faced the imperfections of the solutions existed on the market. It forced us to develop and implement necessary features into existing platforms on our own. It was obvious that the industry needed a change. Thus, we decided to make this change on our own and launched Affise.
Now Affise is a rapidly growing company. We are opening new offices all over the world, as the number of our clients is steadily increasing. By this time we have offices in 5 countries: Lithuania, Israel, India, Cyprus and Belarus. And we know that this is just the beginning.
Affise is also famous for being the first of a king technology that offers performance-based pricing. What does it mean?
DZ: It means that our customers pay only when desired action (conversion) has occurred and resulted in their direct profit. The industry is changing, and advertisers no longer want to pay to their partners just for traffic. They want to see the results of the campaigns, which are estimated in sales, installs, income and so on. So it was quite a logical reply to these changes, and thanks to the technological solutions we implemented into the platform, we proved that this approach works great. Besides, performance-based pricing allows our customers to predict the budget spent on advertising campaigns and control it within approved limits.
What are your plans for the rest of the year?
SL: We are planning to grow further, exploring new markets. As we see the uprising interest in our product, we are going to launch local offices in other countries (China is the first in the row). We know how crucial local and personalised support is for our customers, as it helps them scale much faster.
We’re also preparing a bunch of upcoming features both for the back-end improvements and for performance optimisation. With more features being introduced, we want to remain the leading position on the market and do whatever it takes to meet, and even exceed clients’ expectations.