Annabel Gray: Anyone who can refer traffic to you or can refer outcomes can be an affiliate. A brand can't just say something, it needs to be verified by third party sites. The Funnel just Collapsing in the Middle hi, I'm Annabelle and on this episode of Add to Cart, I talk about affiliate marketing and how it can be an incredibly powerful driver for your business, but one that needs to be used with great care.
Nathan Bush: For every one sale that your affiliate
Nathan Bush: program can see, there might be 11 that it can't. That's a lot.
Nathan Bush: That's the early test data out of one partnership platform that our guest today shares and it's an indication of how AI Search is collapsing the middle of the funnel when it comes to influencers and partnerships. Annabelle Gray has spent 15 years in affiliate and partnership marketing across two continents and she reckons this is the biggest
Nathan Bush: shift she's watched happening in the channel.
Nathan Bush: Annabelle is the Vice President of APAC at Silverbean and she's the one who brought them here originally opening their first office outside of the UK in Sydney back in 2019. She'd worked in the channel from both sides as a retailer and agency before that. Since then Annabelle and the team have been working with clients such as Virgin Australia, Modibody and MJ Bail on their
Nathan Bush: affiliates and their partnerships.
Nathan Bush: But what I love about Annabelle is
Nathan Bush: that she's not here to sell you partnerships and affiliates. She gives us so much information on how to make them work, but her mission is that she wants brands to stop getting ripped off in them.
Nathan Bush: She knows how powerful affiliates and partnerships
Nathan Bush: can be and she wants everyone who
Nathan Bush: experiments and scales with them just to
Nathan Bush: have a good experience.
Nathan Bush: In this conversation we get into why
Nathan Bush: a private Facebook group of mums swapping
Nathan Bush: money saving tips outperform Shopback on its
Nathan Bush: very first post, why a random chiropractor turned out to be the most valuable partner that a mattress brand could sign. And she also let something slip about
Nathan Bush: a big social selling announcement that could
Nathan Bush: could be happening in Australia next year.
Nathan Bush: Now before we get into it, I want to say a big thank you to our partners at Shopify and Klaviyo. We can only go this deep on a channel like affiliate because they back
Nathan Bush: the show and we really do appreciate it.
Nathan Bush: And this episode only exists because Annabelle dropped in a set of AI prompts into the Add to Cart community a few weeks ago so brands could audit
Nathan Bush: their own affiliate programs without needing an agency. Madness.
Nathan Bush: But that is the sort of thing that often turns up in the add to Cart community.
Nathan Bush: We'd love you to come and join us. It is free to join. Come and join us over on add to cart.com.
Nathan Bush: that's it for me. Let's get into the chat. Here is vice president of apac of Silverbean, Annabelle Gray. Annabelle, welcome to ADD to cart.
Annabel Gray: Thank you. It's lovely to be here.
Nathan Bush: Oh, lovely to have you here on ADD to cart, joining us from your very prestigious office that I can see.
Annabel Gray: Excellent. Yes. Decorated just for you.
Nathan Bush: Lovely.
Nathan Bush: Just my style.
Nathan Bush: We were talking before, of all the things, you've just moved your office into your daughter's room and in the craziness, haven't had a chance to redecorate yet because it is a crazy world of affiliate and partnership at the moment, which we're going to get into. But I thought it was just such a good time to have you on the show because you've been in the world of affiliate and partnership, goodness me, for as long as I've. I've been around it in Australia and I really wanted to pick your brand because we've got impact.com's IPX coming up next week, which I'll be at. You'll be at. And I'm on stage and I was like, who can I pick the brain of so that I kind of sound like I know what I'm doing? So you're my guinea pig. Thank you for doing that.
Annabel Gray: You know what you're doing. Vishy though, you definitely know we'll do our best.
Nathan Bush: You did come into the ADD to CART community and the thing that really triggered it was you said, hey guys, I've got these LLM prompts to help you in your businesses work out how affiliates and partnerships are performing. So I really want to dive into that because it feels like there's so much shifting in this world at the moment. For instance, you know, TikTok and YouTube are really making huge plays in the US and we're not seeing it here in Australia yet. Our cashback platforms are moving and shutting down and opening and all over the place.
Nathan Bush: Search seems scattered.
Nathan Bush: Obviously we've got AI Mode, which is stealing results and attribution all over the place. And then rewards programs continue to evolve and change as margins get tighter and we get a bit protective about them. From a affiliate and partnership perspective, what's the biggest challenge in your world at the moment?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, so there's, there's a few. It's dealing with today, but also preparing for tomorrow because like you say, the landscape shifting so much and we're trying to build solutions to solve for tomorrow's problems, but we don't know what tomorrow's problems are going to be and how that's going to fall. So we're sort of trying to manage both sides of it, like solving what we know and optimizing for now, but also making sure that we have something that will stand the test of time, whatever that looks like. And I think that's probably it across all of digital marketing at the minute, while everyone's sort of scrambling across what their channel is going to look like in six to 12 months time. And it's the same for affiliate because it is changing and we're seeing like, in my opinion, like I'm quite passionate about what we're seeing at the minute and I'm really interested in it because I feel it is the biggest change we're seeing in like in our behavior and it's huge. Like the landscape's going to look so different and particularly more so in Australia because we're seeing the adoption here a lot faster.
Nathan Bush: Really?
Annabel Gray: Yeah. So Australia has, it feels like it's slow. Yeah. I know in some ways in terms of AI adoption, we've got some of the fastest rates in the world. So we're really comfortable using LLM models for research, even like, you know, driving purchase behavior in terms of actually sort of like startups and the problems that we're solving, we're a little bit more cautious. So we're really leaning into it from a consumer perspective but not so much from like the tech solution side of things I find really interesting.
Nathan Bush: So consumers are relying on AI more and more and quicker than other markets around the world.
Annabel Gray: Yes. Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And what's the implication there from an affiliate perspective?
Annabel Gray: So from affiliate we're seeing consumer behavior change. So it's going to sort of drive consumers sort of like to two ends of the funnel. There was an article I was reading, I completely agree with that. It's, it's talking about the funnel just collapsing in the middle. So it's. The middle is not happening and it's harder to track and we've known that for such a long time, like customer journeys aren't linear, it's very fragmented, it's all over the place and they're very, very hard to track. What happens now with LLMs when they're using content to surface recommendations, but there's no click, it then makes it harder to attribute that back to an individual and what's, you know, an individual content partner and who's influencing that sale to then allocate the rewards to it.
Nathan Bush: So the content partners are Feeding all the content into the LLMs. The LLMs are summarizing and servicing up the information. But those sources of content never get credited.
Annabel Gray: Yes, in at the moment. So there are a few models that are coming out that have been tested at the moment which look at cost per influence because there are tools that you can use which show which content publications and which articles have been serviced for which prompts. So what are the different citations which have been used? So there are some models which are being developed and some that are in market that you can use to then attribute, you know, to pay per influence, which is a very untested model and there'll be some sort of results coming out into market early next year. And that's one theory, that's where things could be heading towards.
Nathan Bush: And are they third party measurements? Like Google isn't going to come out with a pay per influencer.
Annabel Gray: No, they're not. Like Google's one of the biggest culprits with AI mode. Like it's, it's an interesting model I think AI mode because it's really dependent on the content publications and everything that they've got on their site and yet it's destabilizing the whole infrastructure, you know, by taking away the traffic and the audience from them. So it's, in my opinion it was Google just trying to grab land share whilst everyone's sort of getting used to AI and LLMs and then they'll solve those challenges that are caused by that later.
Nathan Bush: It's really interesting because we often think about the impact of AI mode on PPC and organic search but we don't really. Well I don't think so much about affiliate and influence so it's a fascinating space. You're in there too.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, it is, it really is and it's. We work in the LLM optimization space so that's where I feel like affiliate is going to and I'll talk about the conversion side of things but this is on the demand generation side and instead of it making the market smaller, it's actually making a huge opportunity for growth there now because there are so like content articles and review pieces are so much more important. They've always been important in a decision making process but now it's not just humans is influencing, it's LLMs which are influencing people. So it's making sure that brands are being cited in the content that's deemed valuable to specific queries.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. Before we move away from it, that pay per influencer metric, how would we measure that? Would that be in terms of cost per citation or how will that actually come to light?
Annabel Gray: So it's different across the different platforms. So these are affiliate platforms are creating different ways of tracking it and it's their technology. So it would still be sales based, so cost per influence sales. So I went to a talk yesterday and one of the partners was sharing like a technology that they had and because they're running some tests with it already and it's, it's vertical specific and it's also region specific. So there's a lot of niches or nuances within the data. But for every one sale within this category, there were 11 other influence sales which weren't being detected from that one content piece. And if you don't have that visibility, what it means is you're then not investing in content, you're investing elsewhere and then you're losing that demand generation piece. So it's when the models get fixed and we can have better access and better visibility to all that data. Yeah, it's going to completely change and support a lot the both ends of the funnel in terms of demand generation.
Nathan Bush: It's always going to be a bit blurry, isn't it, because the walled gardens are going up higher and higher to try and keep that attribution apart.
Annabel Gray: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Especially from a performance perspective. But I can imagine it goes to an influence as well.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
Nathan Bush: So I want to come back to the world of AI because I want to unpack those LLM prompts that you shared in the community. But before we do, I think it's important exactly what you said at the start is to have a look at where the world is today before we future cast too far. But I'm keen to understand from you, from E commerce businesses today with affiliate and partnerships, what are the main channels that you see working today? You know, we've talked about rewards programs, we've talked about search, we've talked about social cashbacks, et cetera.
Nathan Bush: If I was an E commerce brand
Nathan Bush: today, where would I expect the majority of my affiliate partnership influence to come from?
Annabel Gray: There's such a politician's answer, but there's not one size fits all. And I hate doing that because I get asked that all the time, like what contribution should we have from this partner type and what contribution should we have overall? And like, for a contribution overall, it depends on what other channels are doing. Like if it's too high, it says to me that you either got low quality partners or your other marketing channels aren't driving as much as they should because there's a Balance between all of your marketing efforts in terms of where it comes from. The traditional is coupon, cashback and loyalty. So coupon has a role for some brands, but I think there are a lot of coupon sites out there and there's a lot of rogue ones and they're ones that need to be managed or not included in your program. I think brands, particularly startup brands need to have the confidence to say no to some partner types and some partners. And that's okay because every site is representing your brand and promoting your brand.
Nathan Bush: Can you give us examples of like the most popular coupon sites?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, so Global Savings Group or Atoll is. We work closely with them and they, yeah, they're transparent. They're always making sure they've got up to date codes. Like they're adding value and that's the key piece. Whichever partner you're working with, however they promote their audience. They need to add value and add something in there that sort of justifies them getting a commission for it. So yeah, sites that are running old coupons and you know, it's like click here to reveal and there's nothing there and then they're taking a clip on the ticket. That's what you want to stay away from. But if they are actually in exclusive codes or they're helping promote a specific brand and get you sales, then they have played a valuable role and it's giving them, you know, recognizing that.
Nathan Bush: And are those code sites still the old school aggregators of all discounts all over the place or is it more content driven coupon sites?
Annabel Gray: Traditional coupon sites are taking a hit at the moment. So we are seeing a lot, lot less. That is down to a couple of things. I think it's down to market maturity in terms of being more selective with which partners that they work with. But also in terms of Google's had a few algorithm updates which means that aggregator content has taken a hit and so it's getting surfaced a lot less. So those, those sort of sites that are just top surface and there's no depth to them, they're taking a hit. They're also not visible in LLMs very well because there's no limited value to them and they don't have the depth. It's a declining market. But in a program you don't need to have many coupon partners. You work with the good ones and then that's easier to monitor and you can work closely with them and they drive good results.
Nathan Bush: Direct attribution then.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, completely. Yeah. And support your campaigns and help you. You Know if you do want to look at brand bidding, if you want them to support and some of your sales opportunities, that helps take up real estate away from your competitors. So you can be very strategic with it, but it's just, it's not set and forget. So you can't just turn it on and be like, hey, it's going to rack up to 25% or whatever. It doesn't work like that.
Nathan Bush: Damn it. All right, so coupons and cashback are still up there as some of the main players.
Annabel Gray: Yes. So cashback, I get a lot of questions about cashback as well. Cashback can be very, very powerful in your program. But again, it's. If your competitors are there, then it's worthwhile being on there. If your competitors aren't there, if you're part of consideration set and someone's saying, am I going to shop with X, Y or Z, who am I going to? Then they go back and see who's got an offer on and that helps them choose, then that's when it's valuable. But then other brands and it's at set and forget, like they'll just turn on a cashback program and that's when it just sort of like mops up existing demand. People like, I'm going to purchase this from this brand. Here's their cash back. I'll go get that. Whereas what we encourage brands to do is you need to, if you have in a sale, you need to run promotions, you need to change behavior in order to make the sales that you're getting incremental and add value. So running CPA increases, going in newsletters, going on front page. So everyone's like, oh, I was thinking of buying this black dress or whatever it is, I'm going to get it from this brand because they're doing a massive commission boost and that's changing the behavior. So they can be very powerful, but it depends on how you're using them in terms of what that value looks like for your brand.
Nathan Bush: They're really interesting.
Nathan Bush: I remember we did the interview with Anthony at Cash Rewards a few years ago and I knew about the model, but I never really used it. And in the research I went and played with it and I told Sarah, my wife, about it and she became just addicted to it afterwards. Like every holiday, every purchase was like, did you put that through Cash Rewards before you bought it? And she doesn't speak like that, so. And she doesn't listen to this, so it doesn't matter.
Nathan Bush: But do you think there's a certain
Nathan Bush: type of customer who that behavior is ingrained with. Is it kind of like just this cohort of who always use Cash Back and then a cohort that don't because even when I told people about it afterwards, they're like, I've never heard of it or think about it.
Annabel Gray: Yeah. So Cash Rewards closing was such a loss because they've been in the landscape for such a long time. And it was interesting because we had like Top Cashback are growing quite a bit over here. They had very distinct audience profiles. So Shop Back and Cash Rewards and Top Cashback as well. So you would expect it to be a similar audience across all of them. And they go to wherever they get the best discount. And it's not at all people are shop on Shopback or they shop on Top Cashback and they like to get or one of the other cashback sites out there and they like to see that balance growing. So they do end up being quite loyal to it. And each of them have strategies where they talk to their audience specifically. So Shop Back is very sort of Gen Z millennial. It gamifies it a lot. They put lots of like notifications and it's all sort of mobile and app delivered, which makes it very strong for that audience. Whereas Cash Rewards was a lot more Australian, kind of skewed a little bit older. That's why it got me so very different, even as I say mechanism at different audiences across all of them.
Nathan Bush: Lorna Jane built a whole brand on the idea that movement is medicine. And it turns out their customers took that long literally because they do not stand still. They'll discover the brand in a store, shop online a few days later, then tap through the app sometimes. All of this happening in the space of a couple of days, that is beautiful for loyalty, but a nightmare to keep up with, especially when like Lorna Jane, your email and SMS are stuck in two completely different systems. So they brought it all together with Klaviyo. One platform, one customer profile, and a shift from blasting campaigns to nurturing proper lifecycle journeys. Post purchase upsells alone now drive three to four times the order rates. And across the last year They've pulled an 84 times ROI on email and SMS. 84 times. For a brand that swears that movement is medicine, that is a very healthy result. Head to klaviyo.com au and see how brands like Lorna Jane are doing it.
Nathan Bush: Right. Okay, that makes sense. So they're still going. Maybe not as strong in the Australian market as they once were, but still significant.
Annabel Gray: They. They're just as strong. So cash rewards closed nearly a year ago now and that was a significant loss. But on the most recent stats that I've seen, the revenue is equal to what it was from those partners. So that means that it's stabilized and that gap's been completely closed. So if they'd still been there, they would have grown pretty significantly.
Nathan Bush: Bizarre, isn't it?
Nathan Bush: It's funny, it was just the timing of it.
Annabel Gray: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: All right, so if we've got coupons
Nathan Bush: and then we've got cash back as core elements, generally speaking of an affiliate and partnership strategy and obviously different for every brand, what are some of the other areas that you're typically looking at as well?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, so our approach with partnerships, and this is where I really like it, you've got your traditional, which is optimization, and then it's anyone who can refer traffic to you or can refer outcomes can be an affiliate. So when you take that lens, it means that anybody could be an affiliate. So anyone could be affiliate so long as you can track it. So it's understanding who your audience are. So who's your audience? Where do they spend time online? What are their trusted sources? Where can you get in front and engage with them in a meaningful way? And then those are your partners. So that could be anyone from social commerce. And so social communities like forums are pretty big content publications which we've talked about influences as well. So influences is a really interesting one because influencers always been brand budget. But when you bring that into the performance space, it's like brand and performance lending, which is a really lovely area to bring some more sort of measurable and meaningful outcomes to brands. We have comparison feeds, so shopping feed, so it moves the value up the funnel so you can see where, you know, compare like for like. Or compare different attributes. Yeah. So it's a range of different ones and then outside of that there's non traditional brand to brand. So that would be more sort of like niche partnerships.
Nathan Bush: So.
Annabel Gray: So it could be kids, nurseries. If you've got a family product and you want to promote something across to them, if you're in healthcare, doctors or healthcare providers going out on EDMs for those ones. So it's really limitless in terms of the options. It's just. It's a different size for everyone.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and I know exactly what you mean now when you say, you know, there's not one size fits all. It really is down to who you're selling, who you're talking to, what your message is in market. So for you, one of the things that we were talking about before we hit record was that you're really passionate around making sure that your clients especially don't get ripped off in this space, that there's a lot of misinformation and there's a lot of money wasted. Where do you see people making those mistakes most often?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, it's not just my clients, it's everybody. I don't want anyone to have a bad experience with the channel because I think that does us all a disservice. So the challenge with Affiliate is that it's so vast and so varied and you're working across multiple different partners who are optimizing your program in different ways. So that's what's great about it, is its ability to scale. But it's also what makes it quite challenging to manage because you need to understand what each of those individual partners are doing and to monitor them. So that quite often causes a bit of a knowledge gap in terms of what do I need to look out for and what are the flags in terms of is this valuable? Is it not? And so that's what I sort of. I try and work to close, is to make sure everyone has confidence in the results that they're getting and they know that they are adding value. But some of the things that we look at, so we have a range of different triggers. So there's behavioral. Do we suddenly see, like, performance spiking from partners that suddenly haven't done anything and then suddenly it's just gone through the roof overnight? So if we see that, we reach out to them to ask them what they did, and then if they can't come back to us, sometimes they don't reply, sometimes they don't give us a very good explanation.
Nathan Bush: And I suppose that that would be different depending on who it is. Right. Because someone like a coupon code site would have all the infrastructure set up or supposedly. Whereas someone who's a content creator might
Annabel Gray: be a bit looser in terms of replying.
Nathan Bush: In terms of replying, reporting, having, reasoning behind.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, yeah. But spikes are. That are normally driven by something. So if someone's like performance suddenly spikes, there's usually a driver for it. And so we're just trying to understand, you know, if it's a content producer, they'll be able to see where their traffic's going and they can say, oh, yeah, I just had this article that just suddenly went viral or whatever it is. And then we'd be like, great, what can we do to jump on it? Let's do more but some don't come back to us. And that's when we, we then flagged that as okay, this needs to be reviewed. We're not sure what's driving this and we need to investigate that a little bit more. Other, other areas that we look at brand bidding. So you don't have to have brands bidding on your terms. You can have that against your program terms and conditions. So we use tools to monitor to make sure that no one's brand bidding.
Nathan Bush: What do you mean by brand bidding? Sorry.
Annabel Gray: So bidding on your brand name plus discount code usually. So they're, you know, appearing on terms that you don't want them to appear to. And if that's against your program terms and conditions, not adding value and not adding value in the way that you want your program to.
Nathan Bush: So they're just cannibalizing essentially the offers that you got out out there and taking a clip on getting that clip. Yeah.
Annabel Gray: So it's making sure that all of the sales are being driven in the way that you want them to.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Annabel Gray: And compliant. So we have tools that will flag if there's any of that sort of behavior. It's like all digital marketing. There's ways that everything can be, it can be injection or things, you know, browser extensions appearing at the checkout. All of these we keep an eye on to make sure they're not happening in a program.
Nathan Bush: And you've got some pretty amazing clients that you're working with all the way through. And you know, we saw the case study from Modibody was the one that stood out for me where you had revenue up almost three times, 300% but commissions dropped from 14 to 6%. And on that case study where your commissions dropped from 14% to 6%, how did you actually do that? Because that's a huge draw. Did it all happen at once?
Annabel Gray: Over time it took a bit of work and reviewing the way we approach commissions. I always say to brands your commission is your most powerful lever and so many brands don't use it well or take advantage of that. So at its top level we look at commissions and paying a fair outcome to the publishers. So should a content publisher be on the same as a coupon publisher for the level of effort and the outcome that they've delivered? Probably not. So we tend to put those top of funnel partners on a higher commission and those bottom of funnel partners on a lower commission. So when we first set up in Australia, not many brands, like 80% of brands didn't even have that segmentation within their program. So we're seeing that's done a lot more and that's your base level. But then you get more sophisticated with it in terms of supporting your wider business objectives. So this is where we get into understanding how valuable the sales are from the channels. So if you want to drive new customers then you can build in a new a new customer versus existing customer tier and incentivize new customers at a higher rate. If you want to look at margin outcomes then sale vs non sale products so you're not losing margin on sales. And we work with a few bricks and mortar who want to drive in store traffic. So then we incentivize, click and collect. So it reduces delivery costs, but it also drives that in store traffic. So once you've got the foundations, you can be really strategic of what you are trying to achieve with the channel and or what you're trying to achieve as a business and how you can use the channel and your commission structure specifically to support it.
Nathan Bush: Do you have to be careful with
Nathan Bush: how complicated or how nuanced you get with your commissions? Do people ever go, actually that's all sounds too hard. I don't know what I'm like, I just don't know. Like yes, I give up.
Annabel Gray: Like there is a bit of a balancing act. Like you can get super granular but then you have to manage all of those on an individual basis and it's how does that translate to outcomes? So we start broad and then we get narrower and narrower to find out what the right fit is. Instead of starting with SKU level commission.
Nathan Bush: Perfect outcome. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Does affiliate get easier as you get bigger?
Annabel Gray: I'd say with all growth you get diminishing returns the bigger you get because you tackle your lowest hanging fruit first. So we've built out what we call our progression model and the reason we did that is because brands weren't clear on what the future growth looked like within the channel. So the idea is you focus on your, where you're going to get the best returns next. So it's what's your next highest impact opportunity. So you're always optimizing those and moving forward. And so you've, you've covered off all of your big gains and then you're looking at other areas for growth which may be a little bit more strategic or may require a little bit more heavy lifting or a bit more niche and you can get great returns from those. But you need to make sure you have your foundations built and pretty solid. First of all, it probably gets easier in terms of the appreciation of the channel and the ability to have those internal conversations because the results are demonstrated and trusted. So when it comes to other projects and building on those, it's much easier conversations.
Nathan Bush: And I suppose there's a resourcing piece internally too, right? In that it's not a paid performance where you can flick it on and let it be. You've actually got to think and provide content and even form a relationship in parts over time to get the best out of it. And I suppose as you start seeing more and more results, you can justify putting more effort into those. Right. Relationships.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, absolutely. You hit the nail on the head there. So it's partnership marketing. It's a partnership. So every publisher is a partner. So it's, it's a value exchange. So we work with all of our individual partners and we make sure that they're getting paid fairly for the effort that they put in. And likewise, we make sure that the results that they're generating are valuable for the brand. So that's the value exchange there.
Nathan Bush: Are there any emerging platforms or channels that you're seeing your clients get some great results in that are kind of flying a little bit under the radar at the moment, that you're like, oh, this is really interesting. Yeah.
Annabel Gray: So again, it varies. It's by brand and it's knowing your audience. We had some really great results with social communities. So we were a budget conscious mum brand that was their audience. And so we identified a social community which was targeted. They weren't in the world of affiliate. It was targeted at mums who were trying to save pennies and they would share all their tips and deals. And so we reached out to the admin and worked out, educated them on affiliate, got them onto the platform and worked out.
Nathan Bush: Are you talking like a private Facebook group?
Annabel Gray: Yeah. Yep.
Nathan Bush: Okay.
Annabel Gray: Yeah. They went in the world of affiliate and so we ran a campaign for our client and it outperformed Shopback on the first post, which is absolutely unheard of and was fabulous results. And it resulted in that being a global strategy that this brand adopted to then roll out across other regions, which was fabulous. And it's, it's hard, you know, finding those golden nuggets can happen. But it comes down to, again, who's your audience and where are they? And let's have a conversation with them there and let's meet them there and then. Emerging opportunities. So with content having its, its heyday and becoming increasingly important, we're seeing some really great opportunities come up within that now. And there's like definite first mover advantages. So there was one for a mattress brand and some of their key terms were back pains, you know, good mattresses for back pain. And one of the most highly cited like resources for this was a chiropractor. Was just a random chiropractor, but he was very good at producing content. Didn't have an affiliate relationship with anyone. So it's one where you can go in and you can negotiate exclusivity for a time, get some really good rates locked in and increase your visibility by, by moving early with sites that are already ranking for your target terms.
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Nathan Bush: Wow. When you're going out to those new potentials, whether that be a community or whether it's an individual, what's kind of the range of commission that you're offering them? Like what's worth their while? Cause if I'm thinking about a chiropractor, I'm like, they're busy running a business, they've obviously got great content. They're putting a lot of effort into their content as well. How do we make this worth their while? How aggressive do you have to be?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, so that's a great question. So because affiliate is largely still last click, the way we structure it is you tend to do higher commissions for upper funnel partners because there is leakage and they won't get recognized as much. But there is also other models. So they may have a CPC for X amount of budget or a tenancy, which means we do a fixed placement because we know that there's value outside of it. So we do a tenancy plus a commission on it so that they are getting a guaranteed outcome for the time that they put into it. And then we measure, we measure that in terms of like last click, but also what else we're seeing in analytics as well.
Nathan Bush: Okay, that makes sense. So it's just putting yourself in their position to go, how do you make it worth their while? I was interested there that you mentioned
Nathan Bush: Facebook groups and it's actually a theme
Nathan Bush: that's come up a lot on Add to Cart and we've had some founders have a lot of success with Facebook groups.
Nathan Bush: You also mentioned forums.
Nathan Bush: And the old school world of affiliate is like blog posts, like give me a blue link in your blog and that pays off. Obviously there's a lot of focus at the moment on social and on video,
Nathan Bush: but would it be wrong to ignore
Nathan Bush: the things like the forums?
Nathan Bush: Where are they still a thing? Like, is there still a lot of
Nathan Bush: traffic going to them?
Nathan Bush: Forums and blogs?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, massive. Everything I feel is getting a lot more niche.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I think that's the theme, like
Nathan Bush: coming through here, right.
Nathan Bush: Is like almost niche down and find your people.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, it is. And you can get these really obsessed sub cultures and that's, you know, at your core. Like they're your. Your fanatics on a target, but they're largely very influential and they will quite often have blogs that they write for. So, yeah, they are still relevant. It has to be something for something that people are passionate about and something that people care about. So if you're in one of those categories, then you can always tap it into your audience and tapping into that passion. Ones that always bring to mind it's babies, like so many, like baby advice and sharing. And there's a lot of discussion on it when everyone's doing it for the first time. Pets as well, and then games and then some toys and bikes. So there's different communities.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, it's categories where if you fuck it up, there's a big implication. Right.
Annabel Gray: Like, I don't know what I'm doing, please help me.
Nathan Bush: That's right. Exactly. That's. That's awesome. What about Reddit? Because they've obviously got their own advertising model. When you talk about forums, Reddit's the biggest forum in the world, as I understand. Is there partnership opportunities there or are they kind of. It's all very much in the Reddit ad model.
Annabel Gray: Yeah. So there are partnership opportunity partnerships with Reddit. So we work with Reddit across a few different brands and they work on seeding. To be honest, I'm not in the detail of a Reddit strategy, so it's not my area. But they, they do, they lent into it a lot after they were so popular with ChatGPT, and it's been a big area of focus and obviously that's not working for them now as much as it was before. So it changes very quickly.
Nathan Bush: It's crazy how much the LLMs have fallen off Reddit pretty quickly. Still influential, obviously, but not as much as they were originally.
Annabel Gray: Yeah, and I think that's because it's getting gamified. So as soon as people figure out what's working, then we're just going to see a lot of that, aren't we? Where everything keeps changing big time.
Nathan Bush: One more question on platforms before I want to get into your LLM prompts is social commerce. It feels like the US gets all the bright shiny toys. I saw this week that YouTube just did a deal with Amazon to allow affiliates to sell via YouTube with Amazon links and we've obviously got the Google Universal cart coming soon or at least rolling out right now. Where do you see Australia's role in social commerce? Are we going to get TikTok shop? Are we going to get all those ways to make affiliate a lot easier than what it is today?
Annabel Gray: I heard a rumor. I don't know if it's official, so
Nathan Bush: I don't know if I can say it's official now. As soon as you say it's official.
Annabel Gray: I wasn't told that it confidentially and I wasn't told this by TikTok, so I think that means it's okay. I had TikTok shops coming to Australia next year, so it is going to be getting launched next year and one of the platforms over here is also sharing affiliate links into YouTube. So we have got access to some of those things already and then the rest of it apparently is not that far behind.
Nathan Bush: Okay, what would you be doing to prepare for that? Because I feel like we're on this precipice of like it's been coming for
Nathan Bush: years and now it's like.
Nathan Bush: Well, it does look like it's going
Nathan Bush: to come because it's been proven in the US now and it's such a significant channel for E commerce.
Nathan Bush: If you were an E commerce brand
Nathan Bush: today for the rest of 2026, is there anything you'd be doing differently to get yourself ready for that direct affiliate conversion in social?
Annabel Gray: Yeah, making sure that you've got your technology set up, making sure that you've got your logistics set up behind it. Like, what does that look like? And that's in terms of what's your, your creator profile, who do you want to work with? Who's your target? There's a lot of admin and influencer management. How are you going to manage getting the product to them and then what's the timelines and what's the agreement like, what's the contracts look like? So have I Think set up ready to go in terms of targeting. And if I was doing it, I would do a big push on the commission to get content created quickly, which is always a nice little way to do it. So you can do higher commission for launch period and then bring it down. And that really incentivizes them to start creating content quickly. And then you can do sort of bonuses in terms of if you hit this threshold, you get this commission or like a bonus payout so you can be quite creative with it to sort of drive that noise all at the same time. So, yeah, making sure you've got your platform and your technology set up and your logistics sorted and then a plan on what it is so that you can just when it goes live, you're ready to go.
Nathan Bush: Great tips. I suppose as part of that first mover advantage that you talked about before is having those trusted partners and creators and influencers ready to go. So it's almost like as soon as it drops that you can get them creating content with those affiliate links in platform ready to sell if you've got all your tech and your operations and everything set up as well. So it's almost like everyone will be learning together, but you've got to be ready to go to get that early first mover advantage.
Annabel Gray: Absolutely. And then the other side of it is what does the agreement look like in terms of amplifying that content? So it's not just the creator, it's then your ability to amplify that content, which is where you get much stronger returns or much longer returns from each piece of content. So being able to amplify that through
Nathan Bush: your own socials makes a lot of sense. I'm excited, I hope. Like, I feel like we've got a shot in the arm with E commerce, with AI and there's been so much to do and I feel like if next year the great promise of social commerce actually arrives, it's going to be another shot in the arm, like something else that's exciting to be able to experiment and jump on.
Annabel Gray: I know we're not going to be able to keep up.
Nathan Bush: Bring it on. I'm happy for it. All right, let's get into the LLM prompts that you released with the team at Silverbean, because I'm really interested in that and that you've essentially gone, hey, here are some prompts that we would use if we were in your shoes, and we actually use as an agency to make sure the affiliate is working for you as a Channel One, I'm fascinated to know why you're giving this away because you're an agency who probably, I don't know, I assume you want people to buy your services, not turn to an LLM. And number two, let's dive into how you're using them. But maybe start with the first question. Why are you giving out LLM prompts when you're a service based agency?
Annabel Gray: Yeah. So what we spoke about earlier is I want to make sure that everyone has a positive experience in the channel and so I can tell when I audit a program or when the team order a program. We immediately know where the savings are, what's wrong with it. But there are some barriers for us to be able to do that for a brand. It requires now we've got a get them to trust us to have a phone call to get program access to run it and they don't know what the scale of the problem is. So I wanted to create a way to empower brands to be able to, to have a look and to give them some metrics or an overview in terms of what needed fixing first. There was a challenge with it so I wasn't able to put as much as I wanted in there. I really wanted to address the incrementality and build that into a prompt. But LLMs are quite tricky, will often go off in their own direction. So I had to program it quite specifically. And as we spoke about with incrementality, it's not one size fits all. There's so many different triggers and flags that we need to look into. I couldn't put that into a prompt because it's, you know, it's 20 years of experience. It just was too much. I tried, I tried to make it have that answer. But the problem is when LLMs, when they have a bit of free rein, they then come up with an assumption that may not be right and then that's got our name next to it. So I had to pull in some of those. So it doesn't address the incrementality which was a big one that I wanted to, but there's a lot of other information and value in there from a starting perspective in terms of who are your partners, what are they driving for you? These are some of the flags that we look at from a top line program perspective and then another one. So I took apart our, like the internal audits that we do and tried to break down what I could share as much as possible. So it's not our whole audit as does do a lot more because there's, we have our internal tools that we can use. But one area that we look into is third party networks. So a third party network is they're really good partners because they help you scale with long tail. So if you think of it from a content partner perspective, if they're working with commission, Factory Awin, Impact, Partner Eyes, Rakuten. For every single article they write, they have to log into a different platform, go find that advertiser, get those affiliate links and put them on their blog, which is really like a lot of heavy lifting from their side. So some of these third party networks will automatically sweep it and then flip those brand mentions into affiliate links. So it removes a massive amount of admin for those content partners. So that's awesome. Really, really valuable. The challenge is when you look at it in your platform is you'll just see the name of the third party network so you won't know who all of those brands below it are that are driving value. So some of these third party networks are great and they give you a lot of transparency and they work really closely. So skim links is one that we work with a lot and they're fabulous. And other ones don't give you that sort of visibility and you may have them on like a, a content partner commission when actually 80% of those sales that they're driving are from coupon sites. And they can use it as a bit of a backdoor to get onto your program. You could reject them direct and then they can come sign up through one of these third party networks. So it's really important that you have visibility to ensure that everyone on those programs is brand compliant. They're getting commissioned fairly for the value that they're bringing. So we see some problems with that just because it's where you have poor visibility.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, that makes sense. If you are a brand who maybe has experimented with affiliates and partnerships a bit, but never really like nailed a program consistently over time. Where would you start? With LLM prompts? What kind of queries and prompts would you use to surface if there's an opportunity out there for you?
Annabel Gray: Well, there's, there's two different sides. So it's starting with the LLM prompts is understanding what's happening within your program and where the biggest opportunities are and where the red flags are. So looking at referral URLs to see who's driving sales, the LLMs are amazing. Like they can do such good data analysis. You can have a look at if you're doing commission increases, how did that work out? So you can really optimize what you're doing by working closely with them or you need to validate the data. And it also depends on what model you say, depending on like how good you get. But it can really help you optimize the known and flag some concerns. I'd say if you're being led by your LLM, you need to give it some pretty strict guidelines on what's good and what's not and what you look out for just to make sure it's not going rogue. If it's recommendation or jumping to assumptions. Outside of that, we're talking about content partners and growth areas. So I would start with what are your key prompts that you want to target? Like what are your sort of generic brand awareness, like discovery pieces, are you solving a specific problem like back pain or flat feet or big feet. And then it's getting visibility in, in those. So there's a few different platforms that we work with that show the citations. I think Google is building it into their platform, isn't it? But it's just to Gemini at the moment to get AI visibility. But it's a good starting place.
Nathan Bush: I love that though, because even that example that you gave before, it wouldn't jump naturally to people to go, I'm a mattress brand. One of our claims is that we're good for people with bad backs, therefore we need to go find people who help people with bad backs. So there's a little bit of a string there, isn't there? And I could imagine that that can almost fan query out into different things because it could also be actually we help people get an extra hour of sleep every night. So let's find sleep experts.
Annabel Gray: Yeah. So there's another brand who, they make a lot of boots, so women's boots. And they found out through this research that a lot of their search terms or a lot of their prompts were curvy women who are looking for boots that went with their outfits. And it wasn't an area of growth that they'd considered, but they found out that it was a high discovery area for those and then they were able to sort of optimize those listings and reach out. And the results they got from that were phenomenal just from those sort of connections.
Nathan Bush: Yes. And that's interesting because it's responding to queries that are out there. Do you use partnerships much to shape new identities? So say you were the same pair of boots and you're like, actually we want to be known for being high end boots and we want to be known, can you create an Identity with partnerships or do you kind of already have to have that and then use partners to amplify what already exists?
Annabel Gray: Yeah. So that I think is going to be one of the biggest shifts that we see because up until sort of, sort of historically like brand.com has always been where the storytelling's been done and that's where the brand values and brand storytelling. And now this shift that we're seeing is a brand can't just say something. It needs to be verified by third party sites. And that's the big role that affiliate plays because it's. We work with all of these third party sites to verify that story. And with everything moving away, my, my theory is we're going to see brand.com, the value in storytelling and the claims that are made on there becoming less important. And that's the external storytelling piece. So your social commerce, your TikTok shop, your reviews, your third party sites, your social is where your brand story gets told. So whatever story you tell has to be true.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Annabel Gray: Because it's been stress tested.
Nathan Bush: And it also then comes down to how you measure it. Going back to the start of our conversation around measuring pay per influence when building that brand story might not necessarily lead to an immediate sale as per the old coupon model.
Annabel Gray: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: It's actually multiple points of brand story over time leading to an eventual sale. So it's going to get murky.
Annabel Gray: Yes.
Nathan Bush: Murkier.
Annabel Gray: I think it's been murky like, like all channels. Like attribution's been an ongoing one and incremental across all channels and no one's found the silver bullet for it yet. So I think. Yes, but I think it will just improve our appreciation that there's a whole big piece of the journey and we're putting the pieces together.
Nathan Bush: So the funnels collapsed, but you've still got to think about partnerships and influences from a brand building and storytelling perspective as well as a conversion perspective as well.
Annabel Gray: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Do you think about them as separate campaigns or can they kind of merge into one?
Annabel Gray: Oh no, they connected. So influencers, depending on what sort of outcomes, we work with them on sort of a funnel strategy as well. So different messages. So it could be a brand awareness, your aspirational messaging. Then you middle of the funnel is sort of like product reviews and comparisons. And then you also want to have your tactical and like, hey, this brand's doing a sale now. So you mix up those messages with those different channels. So it's not an influencer is just brand. An influencer can also be demand conversion.
Nathan Bush: Yep. Makes total sense and it's going to be fascinating.
Nathan Bush: I love this space.
Nathan Bush: I think it's a fascinating space.
Nathan Bush: I think it's a really difficult space.
Nathan Bush: So I love that your mission is to try and help people navigate it and make sure that they don't get ripped off because I think it can be really powerful. But I don't think there's any retailers or e commerce people without a bad story to tell or a bad experience. And that can come from anywhere. But when it happens, and it happens, well, incredibly powerful.
Annabel Gray: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: So I love that you've shared that with us today. Annabel, thank you so much.
Nathan Bush: Next 12 months, what's on the radar for you? What are you keeping your eye on?
Nathan Bush: You've already given us a hint around what might be coming. Where's your eye in the world of affiliate and partnerships content?
Annabel Gray: Well, they're both ends of the funnel, so content, but also like conversion isn't going anywhere. Even with the change in role. We're very loyalty driven in Australia. We love our incentives. We love that. And with the, you know, universal cart coming, those partners are going to be really important at driving. Providing first party data that may be becoming a little bit more difficult to get as we see everything progressing in markets. So focusing at both ends, going more into AI, so deeper analytics. How can we automate? What can we automate from a program perspective? Because there is a lot of partners, there's a lot of heavy lifting. So anything that we can automate in terms of insights and actions means that we can spend more time on growth. So how do we improve that analysis piece for better outcomes? And yeah, partner discovery. So big on the LLM piece next year.
Nathan Bush: Very, very cool. I think a lot will continue to change in your world and I know you are the person to keep up with it. I look forward to catching up with you next week at ipa.
Annabel Gray: Thank you. Me too.
Nathan Bush: But if people want to get in touch, what's the best way to get
Nathan Bush: in touch with you, you or the team?
Annabel Gray: Well, pop on my LinkedIn is probably the easiest. Or yeah, on the Silverbean site I could give out my email as well. I'm happy to give out my email, but I'll give that to you so you can share it.
Nathan Bush: Don't do it, don't do it. Awesome.
Nathan Bush: Annabelle, thank you so much for joining
Nathan Bush: us on Add to car. That was so much value. An hour of conversation. Thank you so much.
Annabel Gray: Thank you. You're welcome. I enjoyed it.
Nathan Bush: How good is Annabelle? That is one of the best deep dives that we've had into the influencer
Nathan Bush: and partnership channel so far.
Nathan Bush: I always go into conversations around influencer and partnership like with my head scattered because it can go in so many different directions. But I think Annabelle really gave a good framework there around what part each part of the funnel plays when you're
Nathan Bush: thinking about influencers and partnerships and also
Nathan Bush: not to be afraid to niche down. It really helped get my head right around them going into next week and
Nathan Bush: hopefully saying something that's half sensible on stage.
Nathan Bush: All right, here are the three things that I got from that conversation with Annabelle. The first lesson that I took out
Nathan Bush: of that was that 2027 could be
Nathan Bush: the year that social selling finally lands here, and the work that you need
Nathan Bush: to do in preparation for it isn't actually the creative.
Nathan Bush: Annabelle's heard the TikTok shop is coming to Australia next year. Nothing confirmed and she was very careful about that. But one Australian platform is already pushing
Nathan Bush: affiliate links into YouTube.
Nathan Bush: YouTube has just done a deal with Amazon in the United States and Google's Universal cart is rolling out now. It's just coming from too many directions to ignore. Australia has to have a piece of the soil social commerce puzzles soon, but Annabelle's prep list is actually all admin tracking setup, logistics for getting product into creators hands, knowing who your creators actually are, contracts and timelines drafted and sitting ready. It's all boring stuff, but on day one everybody will be learning the creative at the same speed and the advantage goes to whoever finished the boring part ahead of time. The piece that most brands are will miss is amplification rights. If your agreement doesn't let you run a content creator's content through your own channels, you probably need to get ahead
Nathan Bush: of that game right now.
Nathan Bush: The second lesson is that your content partners are almost certainly doing more for you than your reporting can see right now.
Nathan Bush: And the danger is you're making decisions
Nathan Bush: based on a fraction of the influence
Nathan Bush: that they're actually having.
Nathan Bush: The funnel, the famous funnel has collapsed in the middle. Some say it's disappeared totally, but we all know someone asks an LLM a question, it pulls a recommendation out of a publisher's article and the shopper is influenced and buys without ever clicking or even visiting that publisher's site. But they have influenced the purchase. Nothing then attributes back to that publisher. Annabelle sat in a talk this week where a partner shared shared their early testing for every one track sale in that category, 11 more influence sales came off that same piece of content but were never detected. The models to price that influence are being built right now cost per influence sale and real results should be during the market early next year, but expect to hear much more of that cost per influenced sale. I think that's a really good, fascinating metric. And the third lesson is that your brand story might not be yours to tell anymore. Annabelle's view is that Brand.com has always been where most of the brand storytelling happened. The values, the claims, the founder's letter. But that era is getting harder to control. A brand can't just say a thing now and expect it to land because it is the final source of truth. It gets checked against review comparison sites, content partners, whatever a creator said about you, and increasingly against whatever an LLM has pulled together from all of it. Her line on it was probably one of the best in the episode whatever
Nathan Bush: story you tell has to be true
Nathan Bush: because it gets stress tested. If there's a gap between what your website claims and what the Internet has concluded about you, the Internet will win. Which makes this less about writing better content copy and fancier and flowery copy, and more about being the sort of business that holds up to external checks
Nathan Bush: when needed because it's becoming a lot easier to check externally.
Nathan Bush: Thanks again to Shopify and to Klaviyo for helping bring us this episode. Conversations like this one with Annabelle happen because they back us at ADD to Cart and we are incredibly grateful for their support. If you got something out of of this episode with Annabelle, please hit subscribe or leave us a review wherever you're watching or wherever you're listening. It really does help us.
Nathan Bush: All right, I'll see you next time.
