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- [00:00]
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Foreign.
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Welcome to another episode of the Always Be Testing podcast. I'm your host Ty degrange and today we've got a treat for you. Yuri Halevy, SVP of Sales and marketing with Stack Commerce. They're one of the better networks in the affiliate world. We're talking about the complex intersection of commerce, editorial, content, media implication. So you're in for a treat. It definitely hits on trust, it hits on distribution, it hits on affiliate partners, quality content. And he's got a lot of great things to share. So you're in for a good one and stick around. Hopefully it's going to be a good episode. Talk to you soon.
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Thanks for having me on.
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B
Let's do it. Let's do it. How was your Memorial Day holiday?
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It was great. Got to get away with some family, take the kids swimming, be outdoors, which is a nice change of pace from the city life. I'm located in New York City, so it's hard to get away and go into a more quiet part. So we went down to Florida, had a great time and now back and ripping it back at work.
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B
Yes, you're a amazing wealth of knowledge jumping in. I've talked a lot about, especially recently, this moving beyond Last Click. I think our last guest was really into it. In our measurement conversations I have with the pma, we talk about it, we talk about with clients. You, you're hitting on it here. When you think about going beyond Last Click, what are some of the things you look at and how do you think about improving the view of attribution for people?
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A
Yeah, I think attribution is an ever evolving problem in the media buying space. I think that there is a variety of different companies that use different tools that fit their needs to a T. And especially when it comes to Last Touch, I think it's a bit of an ancient way of looking at how to properly media buy, especially in today's world where customers like to either jump into LLMs and ask for verification from authoritative opinions. Looking at social proofing such as and understanding product reviews and what that means and that is also a very down funnel touchpoint. And looking at just that in a singular way is just not a proper function of how to to market in my opinion because you're completely skipping the discovery portion. How did your product get discovered? And if it's a repeat buyer, then it might be more appropriate to look at Last Touch because you've already made the impression they're coming back for seconds or thirds or whatever number that is. But when you're trying to Discover net new customers. A lot of the time it's about what hooks them in or what draws their attention. Is it a review that they saw elsewhere that drew them somewhere else? Are you showcasing a need for a customer that they had but they probably weren't pursuing and they just weren't aware of? And looking at Last Touch is a very singular way of measuring whether someone converted because you don't know whether they took one step beforehand or they took 10 steps to actually find out about the brand.
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B
Yeah. And with, with Stack Commerce and with brands running on, you know, let's say multiple or, or singular content sites within your network and let's say, you know, campaigns run, what are some of the things that you could look at that maybe, maybe if there wasn't as many conversions as let's say they had last click and let's say they ran a campaign, is there, there's some methodologies you look at to kind of educate brands around where things fell off or how to shine light into things that they might be aware of that are valuable that maybe they're not seeing in the dashboard?
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Absolutely. Especially with the way that we operate our content funnels. We're educating the consumer throughout the process. And it's important to not just look at the down funnel data such as, you know, solely cac, roas, whatever it might be, and also looking at the entire journey. Right. Whether our click through rate on our ads are doing well, whether our, you know, view rate is longer than three or four seconds on videos, which is, you know, nowadays what you need to capture attention. And taking that one step further, our bread and butter is our content and our authenticity in our content. So looking at reader engagement in the content, looking at heat mapping, understanding time on page, the location where people are clicking or not clicking, whether or not they're scrolling through multiple pictures in our content or they're just clicking on the first carousel image that they see. These are all relevant data points that help us not only understand a little bit more about the user journey, but also optimize the landing pages for our content to be the most informative for our users to get them to that next step to the brand site. And it's important to not just solely focus on the bottom of the funnel because there's a lot of touch points for User Journey nowadays, a lot of desire to learn more, more than ever before. So it's important to look at all these data points and understand, okay, which one stuck out the most? Where do we see a fall off and optimize that particular point, but it doesn't end there. You have to go back and then see how that optimization affected the funnel. Right. And understand whether or not did I see marginal improvement or statistically significant improvement. And if it's statistically significant, you have really good data points to inform your next iterations. And if it's not, then go back to the drawing board and you re review all the data again and understand. Okay, what else can I do here? How else can I optimize?
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B
Yeah, I love that we, we've kind of, I think a few of us in, in our world are clearly we're seeing a lot of the trends and reacting to where what works and what performs. And I think that my perspective is that we have over many years, we're talking like 50 plus, like seeing this general erosion of trust across so many things. And it's hard for brands to effectively break through that trust gap, I call it. And I think that stack commerce in your commentary and your conversation is really hidden in that Venn diagram as well. You know, others are talking about it too. Where you've got to have trusted third parties is like the antidote to this trust gap, to where they can kind of, you know, tout the message and do the evangelizing for you, but in their own voice without feeling like it's scripted. What are you seeing with trust in particular around testing? Obviously that's the theme of the pod. What are you seeing around? How do you kind of engineer that? How do you kind of test for that in your world?
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A
Yeah, it's always a fine balance because you want to build the trust with the brand and then on the flip side, you also want to build the trust with the customer. And sometimes those don't mean eye to eye and sometimes they do. So it's really about, you know, connecting those tissues as best as possible with a heavier weight towards the consumer. Every brand is going to have their brand guidelines. Every brand is going to tell you we want to be perceived as xyz. And the reality is, is that I think that's where a lot of brands are going in the wrong direction. I think a lot of them can have an understanding of what value they provide, but they need to understand how the customer perceives them from an impartial point of view. So coming out and being visual to the consumer as a third party, it's important that we lay all the facts out on the table. If somebody, for example, has a higher price point, does their product have better offerings than the competitors? And if so, that's the Important information we want to highlight so people can understand why they justify that price point. And of course a brand can say we're better, but what brand isn't going to say that they're better? Right. Or they provide better value.
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B
What's an example of a test where you kind of, you saw this play out like, not, not maybe not the classic like, okay, this is real. I mean, I'd be curious if there's one where it's like, hey, this is super polished. This is not. This is more real. What are some, like, maybe. Is there a story that kind of comes to mind that you think is interesting for folks to recall?
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Yeah, absolutely. So we work with a makeup brand and they particularly like to address the older demographic, women 50 plus. And we've written several different content types for them. One of which can be five reasons why, you know, this brand is great fit for women 50 plus. And we highlight the benefits and a lot of this information while it is wrapped in our opinion, of course, and validated through that which our experience with the product, a lot of it is information that you could kind of find out there. And then we ran a secondary content piece which we call social proofing, where we just source reviews from Reddit, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook that aren't sponsored, mostly just people's commentary. And we use that and the imagery of it within the content itself. And we wanted to look at whether the social.
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Love that social proof.
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Yeah, whether that social recap or social proof drives better results than just the information directly. Like the five reasons why we love this brand and the reality is, is that it has a higher click through rate, it has more time on page because people are engaging with it more. They're watching the videos that are embedded in the content. They're watching and scrolling through the carousel of imagery and reviews that we populated. And when they land on the landing page, they already know that it's, you know, been reviewed by other folks and that this is information not sourced by the brand. This is something that we went out there and it's true. And it's all information that we found across the social networks online that brings a lot of credibility to the brand. So we saw higher engagement rates, higher click through rates, higher conversion totals across the board simply by showcasing that, hey, just because we're a publisher and we write about you and the five reasons we like you doesn't mean that we're the end all, be all. It means that we found this information and this is what we believe. But seeing that third party credibility from users across the world effectively is what really drove the point home for people that are discovering this product for the first time.
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B
Yeah, I love that. I love that. We talked a little bit about like educating the brand and also we talked a little bit about educating the audiences and going, you know, how, how in depth do you go in a landing page explaining and telling a story and you know, sometimes that really overlaps well with what converts really well and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes what converts well isn't, is maybe more brief or more to the point, how do you balance that? How do you kind of measure that and handle that trade off?
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Yeah, that's, that's a really interesting question because I don't believe it's a one size fit all answer. I think different content types require different benchmarks. What I mean by that is a social proof or a social recap article like we just went over that might have a higher time on page benchmark because you're expecting people to look through all that information and if you're looking for like quick hits or very short sort of content, you're not going to have that same time on page and you're expecting a higher click through rate because there's less information to look through. Right. Or a higher click out rate from the article to the landing page. So that's what I mean by it's not a one size fits all. I think different content requires different benchmarks, especially with where you're meeting folks in the funnel. If you're doing for example a competitor analysis or an industry analysis across the entire industry for a specific product, you're meeting people in the consideration phase, you're not meeting them any longer in the discoverability phase. So you want that click out rate to be a lot higher because the user in their mind knows that they need this product but they haven't decided who am I buying it from.
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B
Yeah, absolutely. That's super interesting. Just a reminder for folks like zooming out for just the fifth grade level. Can you remind people Stack Commerce, what do you guys do? I know we know it, we talk about it a lot. But I think it's an important reminder for people who are not as affiliate centric and are not as plugged into our industry.
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In short, we work across the entire media sphere. We have an E commerce platform through Stack Social that we put some of the best products out there, whether at discounted rates or specific offerings that you might not be able to get elsewhere. We have a media department that I spearhead where we do a lot of Content marketing across a variety of publisher networks that we partnered with in order to help brands gain visibility across the entire marketplace. And we also own and operate several publishers as well in house to ensure that. We're also putting that authoritative voice and our editorial component out there because it's important for people to know that we're testing constantly. And review.com, which is our owned and operated publishers, is known historically for doing rigorous testing of products and bringing true credibility to the marketplace. That's really our bread and butter.
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B
Love it. Yeah, the credibility and trust is huge. It goes back to our theme and I think another thing that we've really plugged in on and really appreciated is the content is so great oftentimes when it's in a vacuum where it's built out and it's like how does this being discovered, how is this being distributed? And I think you and us have really honed in on that need to, you know, bring some of the paid media mindset, understand that content needs its favorite co pilot of distribution and media to kind of go with it and is it getting to the right people? You can't just expect it all people to come. How do you kind of think about experimentation in that lens? And I'm curious, when something is distributed, what are some of the data and variables that you're looking at for people to be aware of and to be thinking about when they, when they distribute or they work with you guys on these types of experiments and distribution of content?
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A
Yeah, when it comes to distribution in today's advertising world, it's a lot different. It's, it's turned the world upside its head over the last several years, especially with the rise of LLMs. And what I mean by that is nowadays you really need to drop drive your discoverability through social media more than ever before because the LLMs and the search of the world have become a place for more of the consideration and down funnel results than anything. So doing amplification, for example of content is important because you're introducing new ideas, products, topics to users based on the algorithm of their existing social profiles and you're meeting them in a position where they're probably going to be interested in your product because of their search history or the people that they follow or videos that they've watched for more than four or five seconds. So the content that you're actually putting out there through the use of the updated algorithms on the social networks is a lot more personalized to you as a person. And it's important for us to be authentic in that initial touch point on the social side of things to ensure that people are getting content that they deem to be real and that they deem to be important to what they're seeking or if they're not actively seeking yet, something that they would like to learn more about.
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Yeah, sure. The, the, the elephant in the room. Everyone's talking about AI explosion, AI taking over, AI having all sorts of downstream impacts in particular for content sites. This is your bread and butter. Give give us the candid perspective here. Like what is AI stealing your content for your, for their benefit is I, I know that's a, you know, hot button topic, but love to kind of break down the basics for people and just give you the candid view of your off, you know, your personal take on where that stands. I think there is valid concerns and questions from the publisher side, the content side, like is this the end of the open web? I know Brooks talked about that recently and many others have and how does the distribution change is do affiliate partner publishers get pulled out and OpenAI becomes a super publisher? So we'd love to get your candid perspective on that as much as you can speak to it.
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A
Yeah, I think we're in the wild, wild west of AI, right. It's rising right now. Of course everybody's using their preferred AI. Whether it's. If somebody's using Google predominantly, then they'll probably lean on Gemini. If somebody was an early adopter of ChatGPT and wants to continue using it, they'll continue to use that, et cetera. And I think it's important for us to recognize that because we need to be okay with the whiplash of how we utilize AI to our advantages, especially as publishers. And one interesting thing is that a research study about particularly owned and operated publisher reviewed and how often we get syndicated across searches, particularly when it comes to product purchases. Right. The down funnel. That's what every brand wants to know. And we saw really positive results depending on the industry that we typically like to be authoritative in, such as home and garden or big appliances, things like that. And I noticed that the biggest publishers per industry are the ones syndicated the Most, roughly about 50 to 60% if not higher. For example, for home appliances, reviewed was probably syndicated around 90% of across 400 queries that we ran. And that's the important thing to remember about AI. It's a byproduct of the user's prompt. It is not meant directly for discoverability as far as I'm concerned just yet. I think the prompt and answer can lead to discoverability. But the initial prompt is based on a preconceived idea or question from a user. And it's important to start to understand how people are leveraging or how they're prompting AI in order for us publishers to understand what sort of content fits best to answer those questions. And it's the continuous cat and mouse game of trying to catch up to the way people use AI, which is still undefined, and the manner of which each AI is used, how Claude is used versus how ChatGPT is used versus Gemini, et cetera, and even perplexity. So it's, that's why it's the wild, wild west. I don't think that there's a lot of rules and regulations to how to best use it quite yet. But what we have seen is the fact that our publishers are being syndicated within particular industries has really led to a lot of desire from affiliate companies, from brands that fit within those industries to get content on the publisher because it's important for them to get that credibility and to get that syndication across the search results.
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Yeah, no, for sure. And looking at some of the profound studies and other AI measurement tooling has come out and talked about it. Partner networks have come out and talked about it. We've observed our data. Depending on how you slice it, it feels like on the conservative side, I mean we're seeing roughly half of know citation exposure being affiliate related, which is I think if anything maybe a bit of a renaissance for our industry. And it's building up a lot of added credibility. It's, it's doubling down on the need to go outside of the last click model, it's doubling down on the value that the, that the channel provides. So I think it's really exciting. While we have all these unknowns, while we have these fears, while we have these things that we're trying to make sense of and get up to speed quickly on. I think there's a lot of positive tailwinds that we are benefiting from and trying to bring value for our clients and great partners like you all.
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A
And I'd say even to take it one step further, especially when it comes to brands, I think it's important for brands to come to terms with the idea that you can try to control the way you're perceived through LLMs as much as possible. But the bigger the brand that you are, the more reliant on actual reviews and actual long form editorial content on sites like Reddit that get pulled quite often. So it's less so about trying to get the users to perceive you how you want to be perceived and more so to look around across the social networks and understand where are your pitfalls and how do you address them. So that way, when more reviews are put up and you get syndicated more often, you get searched about more often, you're addressing the issues that consumers are talking about and you're not just addressing how you wish to be perceived. And that's what gives a true leg up to some of the smaller companies. And I know we spoke about this for a little bit a couple of weeks ago, but the smaller brands are at an advantage that I don't think they've been at for a long, long time. When you launch a new brand, you can control your perception in the marketplace because there isn't a ton of social syndication just yet. And the information about you is pulled directly from content that you can control. And as you grow, if you can address the way that you're perceived in the social world and that will inherently be picked out by the LLMs and syndicated in a manner that fits your needs because you're addressing those issues head on and you're not relying on a random person's review like some of the big brands or multiple people's reviews just to be able to be perceived how you wish to be perceived.
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B
I love it. Yuri, what a. What a great way to wrap up some of the juicier pieces we've talked about and give your expertise just kind of coming down the home stretch and giving a little bit more of your. On the personal side, what's something that people do not know about you aside
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A
from being very much in tune with. With data? I am a big sports nerd. I like looking at the data when it comes to sports a lot. Understanding, particularly for the teams that I follow, you know, what makes them tick and what doesn't make them tick, what makes them successful or unsuccessful. And also being okay with the fact that data isn't the answer to everything. And I think looking at the entertainment industry in particular in sports, you see this quite often. You hear about it from players as well. So often that's like, don't look at my box score sheet to understand how I play. There's so many intangibles that come into play here, and that's always a good reminder for me because I like to live in the data and make those decisions. And I understand that there are things that data doesn't capture wholeheartedly. So it's important to keep that in mind. And I think that's always A great reminder for me, especially when I spend my time, you know, watching my favorite teams and making sure that I don't rely on the data to understand what works and what doesn't work.
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B
Yeah, that's such a great. That themes come up a lot on this pod of like the data will tell you some of the story, but not necessarily all the story. Sometimes the quantum, the quality conflict and it's, it's, it's fun stuff. It's been an explosion of that for, for the sports world, the entertainment world. Who are your teams again?
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I watch almost every sport. If I had to boil it down, I am a huge soccer nerd, big Arsenal fan, and have been for 22 years of misery up until this year where they finally got us to the line. So it's a nice feeling.
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B
Congrats.
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Thank you so much. And honestly, seeing the underdog starting to win again, and not just in the soccer world, but across a variety of different sports is, is a nice feeling because I think a lot of people want to see some variability in, in success, especially when it comes to entertainment.
- [25:08]
B
I love that, man. Any. Anything that you think is required reading for our listeners?
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A
Required reading? Not so much. I think I, I would listen to more of this podcast for sure. And I think one thing that, that's really important and something and more of a, an anecdote, especially for brands, is stop trying to push your messaging and your visuals through every channel possible. Let authority and let third party talk about you in a manner that's authentic, that's going to do you a lot more wonders, even if it doesn't fit your brand guidelines. People don't want polished anymore. People want real.
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B
Yeah, that's a beautiful statement and just again, so aligned with our industry. What we're, we're aiming to do, where a lot of this market is, is going and it's, it's, it's. There's a genuineness to it. I know you did a little trip recently, a little relaxing getaway. Are there any maybe dream trip recommendations or just travel recommendations of spots or travel that you, you recommend or that you recall as being some of your favorites?
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My favorite of all time, I went with my wife on a baby moon years ago to, to Italy. And of course we had to go to all the big tourist spots transparently. My favorite place was a town called Siena in Italy. And at the time, it was at the height of the Game of Thrones era. And I remember stepping in, it's like an enclosed fort and they have small neighborhoods within this town. That's in this enclosed fort in Siena. And each town, each little neighborhood had their own symbol and flag pertaining to an animal. There was one that's a turtle and there's amazing horse races in there. And it was so unique and so different from everything that I've seen that my wife and I still talk about it to this day, about how cool and different this little town was. We just happened to discover because we were driving from Cinque Terre to Pisa and we just stopped by and we ended up in probably our favorite town visited.
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B
That's one of my favorite examples of trips that have been on the pod. That's. That's really cool. That's a beautiful, beautiful idea. You're right. Love chatting with you. Can't wait to see you again in Austin or in New York and looking forward to the next time. Where can people connect and find you and just learn more and chat with you?
- [27:34]
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Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for having me on. If you want to learn more about all the things that we do here@StackStackCommerce.com our site, be happy to chat with you and get some really awesome content for you and your brands.
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B
Amen. Let's go, baby. Great to see you. Have a great day, rest of your day and a fantastic weekend. Yuri.
- [27:53]
A
Likewise, Ty. Thanks for having me on.
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B
Always.