At a time when the status quo is constantly being challenged - whether it's tracking, transparency, data ownership, customer focus, or partnerships - advertisers are forced to rethink their marketing mix and question their technical expertise.

Take a behind-the-scenes look at the impressive reality and far-reaching benefits of building a state-of-the-art private affiliate network!

This episode is about busting the following myths

• Setting up a private network is only relevant for large advertisers and requires serious IT knowledge (from 4:40)
• ITP killed tracking - why bother with a blackbox? (from 15:50)
• Partner Marketing is laborious, tedious and thus inefficient - why invest more resources into a private network? (from 23:50)
• Doing your own housekeeping and reporting is hard and confusing (from 31:20)
• Affiliate marketing offers no control mechanisms and leaves you at the mercy of your partners (from 37:10)

Setting up a private network is only relevant for large advertisers and requires serious IT knowledge At the time of the setup only a handful of people worked for idealo's affiliate marketing channel and only two employees were together with the Ingenious Technologies team responsible for the setup while the rest still focused on the ongoing business. Instead of implementing all their advertisers and publishers right away, idealo chose well thought-out strategic partner to start this project with. Andrea Springer-Ferazin also assures that advertisers will not be shocked by large amount of upfront sums at the beginning as legitimate software-as-a-service provider bill on an event basis. Meaning the fees you have to pay only grow accordingly to the development of your program. Before deciding on a private network, it is important to realise that a private network is not an acquisition tool, rather than an opportunity to work closer with your existing partners. On top of that importance of privacy regarding both your own data but also customer's data is really essential. Three important notes on the technical setup: With Ingenious Technologies you have a white-labelling system. The tracking-engine will be implemented straight forward by tag. A dedicated team of solutions engineers are helping you along your private network journey. So to sum this myth up: it's the other way around. You should buy into a vendor, which doesn't provide you only with technology but also with experience in using, adapting and installing that technology.

ITP killed tracking - why bother with a blackbox? Tracking is not dead. Tracking & attribution is the motor of your partner marketing. By first-party tracking you can measure all the data you need. With complete data you can then recreate customer journeys. Based on those data and customer journeys you can decide on attribution models. Tracking is essential and private networks are one of the best ways to do it.

Partner Marketing is laborious, tedious and thus inefficient - why invest more resources into a private network? With the help of automation you can actually optimise your processes to a point where you benefit from the time saved. Automation is the hidden employee of your partner marketing working for you 24/7. No one is interested for you to do manual and tedious work and invest resources wrongly. The software should be there for you. So this myth is clearly busted assumed you have a partner who really focuses on that.

Doing your own housekeeping and reporting is hard and confusing With reporting it's all about accumulating until now. Tracking, automation, all of that is collecting data to decide on what to do next. The idea: just connect your business intelligence tool to the data of your provider, and then you can report on it. Ingenious Technologies is providing an analytical data base, we have the Google BigQuery support, so that this data source becomes the source for your business intelligence team. There's not hiding data from you behind proprietary APIs, there's not additional task for your internal IT department to export data from Ingenious Technologies to import it to your business intelligence tool. You shouldn't work to collect data, you should work on data. So by setting the right environment reporting and housekeeping is definitely not hard nor confusing.

Affiliate marketing offers no control mechanisms and leaves you at the mercy of your partners To find human optimise, you really need to take a look at everything you've done so far and if you've mastered every task correctly you now have plenty of options of deliberate steering and curation of your advertiser program like commission presets for different publisher business models or individual conformation of each additional adspace allows you to really curate partners along the entire funnel. So rather than focusing on volume driven partners you can also go towards more content driven partners and reward them in their own unique way. There are control mechanisms and it's really fun to curate your advertiser program. So why not climb up that pyramid to do it.

Further resources and links

• Presentation Slides to the Podcast: https://bit.ly/38DPN5V

• Website of this podcast episode: [https://blog.ingenioustechnologies.com/andrea-springer-ferazin-5-myths-busted-a-behind-the-scenes-look-at-idealos-private-affiliate-network]

• All episodes of #Partnermarketing: https://blog.ingenioustechnologies.de/tag/podcast/

• idealo: https://www.idealo.de/