Affiliate Summit West 2020: All the Key Takeaways

What happens at ASW doesn’t stay in Vegas!

If you missed the event or any of the sessions, we’re here to recap the key takeaways from the top moments at ASW!

Launched in 2003, Affiliate Summit runs the biggest performance marketing events in the world.

Attendees can expect to network and learn from top companies and key decision-makers from the affiliate marketing industry. Affiliate Summit happens four times a year, in four different locations – East, West, Euro, and Asia – bringing together the latest trends and topics under discussion for the industry. Last week, the Outbrain team was proud to attend Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas.

And it’s not just the great networking and legendary “Meet Market”, or the terrific keynotes by Tim Burd and Jenny Fleiss  – we’re covering the top sessions from the event so you can get a quick rundown of what you missed and all the actionable tips for your affiliate campaigns. So let’s get started!

How to lift conversions by over 130% using video

Speaker: Hope Horner, Founder, and CEO Lemonlight

Following our pre-ASW interview with Hope, here are some amazing tips for video advertising Hope presented at the show:

Key Takeaways:

• Video works because:

1. It creates emotions: do you remember the last time you cried from a text or a banner ad? Emotion helps to connect users to your brand and to your product in a way that a text ad can never compete with.
2. It helps you build trust: use it wisely, work with your product team to display the benefits of your product in the right way. Work with your customers to create testimonials videos and share their experience from your service or product. Hearing a customer talking positively about your brand is much stronger than hearing the brand talk about itself 🙂
3. It entertains: Video has the ability to deliver the most “boring” product or explanations in a fun and entertaining way – use it!

If an image is worth 1,000 words, then video is worth 1.8M words! The amount of content you can deliver in a 30-second video is almost endless if you’re doing it right!

• Use videos in every stage of your funnel. Learn how to adapt videos for the specific stage – they will differ in length and form, depending on where they are in the funnel:

1. For the TOF/ Awareness stage – Use fun, light-hearted videos to attract the audience to your page/site. Length should be 6 / 15 / 30 seconds max with a focus on connecting via the emotional side.
2. Mid-funnel / Consideration stage – Longer videos that deliver deeper information about your service/product and focus on your products’ benefits (remember, this isn’t the time to focus on features!) Keep it to 3-5 benefits, in a 30-second to 2 minute video (maximum)! One minute will usually be the sweet-spot here.
3. Retention stage: Short testimonial videos that build trust and confidence in your service, with a length of up to 30 seconds.

• In today’s social-media-saturated world, captions are a must for every video that you create. Some videos are set to auto-play on mute, so you want to ensure your message makes it out there even if the user hasn’t clicked on the video.
• Videos on social should entertain or educate without being overly formal or serious, they should include captions and the best length is 6-15 seconds max!

If you’re not using videos as part of your online 2020 strategy…well, you need to start now!

One last thing: Outbrain’s video product can help you hit every stage of the funnel, from short-form to longer form, so if you haven’t tried it yet – there’s no better way to kick-off 2020!

How to audit your website and blog

Speakers: Casey Markee – Founder Media Wyse

Arsen Rabinovich – Founder TopHatRank

Key Takeaways:

Before running to an agency or external resources, you could leverage these great tips to make sure your website and blog are working properly and are optimized to get maximum results.

• Diagnostics:
  • Start by creating a detailed timeline – be as specific as possible. This will help you during the diagnostic stage.
• Look over your timeline – did traffic start to decline before the update?

If it did, here are the actions you need to take

1. Isolate affected areas (use GA traffic to locate them)
2. Identify queries that lost position
3. Start rolling page-level assessment

• If running a WordPress site or blog, what is your PHP version?

Surprisingly, most WordPress sites do not run updated PHP versions – make sure your PHP version is 7.3 or higher!

• How can you check it?

Via the display PHP version plugin. Upgrading PHP can result in a dramatic traffic increase.

The speakers mentioned that they saw a few clients move from 5.6 to 7.0, which resulted in a +200% speed increase!

And moving to 7.2 can result in an additional 15-20% increase!

• Broken links:

Install a broken link tracker.

Most broken links are “comment based” – monitor these regularly.

Run a broken link ONCE a month – don’t run them all the time; they take up a lot of bandwidth.

• What about writing? Keep it Simple Stupid!

Write for your users to a word count – even short posts can be relevant and super useful too.

Being relevant is no longer enough! Bloggers need to focus on being USEFUL.

How easy is it for users to navigate on mobile? Read your content? Troubleshoot issues?

Our top key takeaway? Be useful! That’s really the #1 ranking factor on Google!

Paid search & social made easy

Speakers: Jonti Bolles – Owner WhiteHatOps

Chris Boggs – Marketing consultant WTA

Navah Hopkins – Director of paid Media Hennessey Digital

Key Takeaways:

When setting up a campaign, think about your ideal customer but also about the wrong customer (this applies to native ads campaigns too!)

Put time and effort into your ad copy and use it as your “bodyguard”. Be specific. This will help you pre-qualify your audience, save irrelevant clicks (that’ll cost you $$$) and make sure you’re driving the right audience to your site and landing page.

Make sure you’re always A/B testing your ads.

Make sure your media mix is diverse – by running campaigns on other networks (Native, Social) you’ll be able to increase your branded searches and lift conversions.

So what were your top ASW sessions? Hit us in the comments.

We cut the marketing fluff to bring you the No-BS Guide For Affiliate Marketers.