The team at Partnerkin recently conducted an insightful interview with Gala Grigoreva, the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of the Adsterra advertising and affiliate network. In this exclusive interview, Gala shares her personal journey of entering the affiliate marketing industry and shares the successful growth story of Adsterra, which is currently one of the fastest-growing advertising and affiliate network in the industry.
Gala discusses the challenges faced in the early days and how Adsterra has emerged as a prominent player in the industry. She also provides valuable insights into the strategies, achievements, and unique aspects that have contributed to Adsterra's success.
Drawing from her extensive experience in the field, Gala also shares useful insights for affiliates regarding traffic formats and offer combinations that are likely to be profitable in 2024, considering current market trends alongside other best practices for running advertising campaigns in 2024.
If you are looking to start off your 2024 with winning campaigns, you surely don't have to miss the insights shared in this interview.
Gala Grigoreva, CMO at Adsterra
Can you tell us a bit about yourself and how you got started in affiliate marketing? What motivated you to enter this space?
My name is Gala, and I’m the CMO at Adsterra. I’m a seasoned marketing professional with over 13 years of experience in global brand marketing, encompassing both B2C and B2B sectors. For the last nine years, I have been dedicated to managing marketing teams and building products in mobile, crypto, and AdTech projects. I have a degree in International Relations and an international education in strategic marketing, including a Master's from the London School of Business and Finance. I’m also a certified business mentor, a jury member of international awards, and a leader of the Women in Tech Cyprus community.
You're currently working with the Adsterra advertising and affiliate network. Can you share the story of how the network was founded, including the initial challenges you faced in launching it?
Adsterra started with a friendship and grew to be a successful business. The company was founded in 2013 by professional affiliate marketers and webmasters with (as of now) 20+ years of experience. The big idea was to create an ad network that would enable thousands of advertisers and publishers across the globe to earn decent money online at ease. At that time, the challenge was to eliminate the lack of proper technology, so there we started. Being veterans of the industry wasn’t easy when we began: there were only 2 developers who brought up the MVP of the platform within just a few months. Then, step-by-step, Adsterra grew, while the team, very small at that point, was focused on delivering seamless user experience and only a couple of sales managers held negotiations with different media outlets and advertisers from different parts of the world.
Although the company grew significantly, we always remember our roots and our core values remain the same: teamwork, commitment, consistency, and quality. Like before, we still always emphasize being there for our clients (we call them Partners) and employees, paying attention to their needs and ideas.
How did you grow your network in the early stages? Can you highlight a specific strategy or decision that significantly contributed to its growth?
I think the answer to this question makes sense if we talk about the exponential growth of Adsterra that started in 2018-2019. Although it’s probably not the earliest stage, these years are the ones that really boosted our team and product for the coming years and laid the foundation for all the massive updates and future endeavors. So, 2018-2019 was when we hired project managers and product owners along with releasing multiple ad formats consequently. We adopted a really high pace of development: 30 mln impressions turned into 150 mln impressions, and so on it went.
The team also grew rapidly: CPM specialist, a huge technical department, you name it. At the same time, we thought that we wanted something very own, that would make us stand out in the AdTech market. That’s when we started working on the famous Social Bar - our unique ad format that until now helps our partners grow their revenues and ROIs, and is, therefore, very highly praised in our community.
Now, among other things our partners praise us for, Adsterra is well-known for its unique Partner Care Approach. It wasn’t always this way: the Partner Care Approach as a part of our new brand identity came to life in 2020 with a massive rebranding. I was the mastermind behind this concept, and it really did bring us to a new level strategically. Partner Care wasn’t a blind shot: we interviewed the management, the client support teams, the active and churn clients to identify the strengths, weaknesses, and growth opportunities. These interviews brought about an evident need for transparency and friendliness in the service. That’s why we decided to build upon these needs and redesign our brand identity spotlighting Partner Care as our core value.
2020 was also the year I joined Adsterra, and back then the marketing team consisted of only 3 people. Now, it includes 15 professionals and even regional representatives, so looking back, it’s a huge thing for Adsterra.
Can you share insights into the current state and scale of your advertising and affiliate network?
Adsterra never stops scaling, and so do our affiliates. We are proud to offer our affiliates a top-notch service loaded with unique features that will help them succeed. Starting with ad formats, we offer the classic ones, the “old but gold” Popunders, OS-friendly In-Page Pushes, and, of course, our own development - the unrivaled Social Bar that boosts CTR up to x30. Recently, we have expanded the Social Bar format to include Interstitials as a subformat, so we invite our affiliates to try it out!
As for our verticals, Adsterra successfully works with e-commerce, utilities, finance, iGaming, dating, sweepstakes, VPNs, and subscriptions.
Now, moving on to the top regions, it’s worth mentioning that we have 248 geos in total, and we are highly focusing on Tier-1, Tier-2, and Tier-3 geos. In 2023, as per statistics, our strong regions are the US, IN, BR, DE, ID, GB, FR, TH, JP, MX, ZA, CN, NG, CA, and IT.
Without revealing sensitive details, could you discuss any notable trends or milestones in terms of revenue or financial performance that highlight the growth of your ad network?
Although I couldn’t possibly disclose any detailed financial information, I have some quantitative results we’ve achieved during 2023.
Namely, we’ve conquered new heights in terms of ad impressions, conversions, and publisher payouts. We can now proudly say that our monthly ad impressions account for 35 BN. The yearly conversions reached 1.5 BN adding up another 200M to last year’s number. Last, but not least, our publisher payouts soared to be $87M which is 26% higher than in 2022. We are proud of Adsterra’s achievements as of 2023, and are ready to carry on in 2024!
In your opinion, what key opportunities exist for affiliates in today's affiliate marketing space? How does your network support affiliates to capitalize on these opportunities?
Nowadays, the AdTech market is saturated with a variety of tools and services for managing advertising campaigns and monetizing all sorts of traffic. It may be hard to choose from hundreds of similar tools, especially, when all of them aim at selling their service. However, what every person needs in the end, is friendly guidance, interface simplicity, and accessibility. That’s what Adsterra is all about! These are the key opportunities that we capitalize on in the affiliate space. We constantly strive to offer affiliates this user-friendliness and openness along with a smooth experience.
To give a few examples, let’s take a look at our intuitive and powerful self-service platform. Adsterra SSP is equipped with a great variety of tools that help to launch effective campaigns without a manager even if you are a complete newbie. We have everything you need to craft outstanding customizable creatives that will drive your campaigns to the moon. With that said, just imagine you can A/B test up to 15 creatives and then launch as many campaigns as you want!
Moreover, tools like Traffic Estimator, Traffic Chart, Offers Wishlist, Custom Bid, Smart CPM, and CPA Goal will be helpful to optimize your campaigns and save money without compromising efficiency. All in all, Adsterra’s SSP allows advertisers to launch, manage, and analyze advertising campaigns without assistance.
However, it’s not only tools that Adsterra uses to support the affiliates. Tools are the technical base, but they wouldn’t work without people. As I already mentioned, we have our unique Partner Care Approach aimed at supporting and nurturing a friendly relationship with each of our partners. More than 80% of our partners say Adsterra’s managers are most approachable and helpful and always respond promptly.
Building strong relationships with affiliates is very important for ad networks. What strategies does your network use to foster positive relationships, ensure transparency, and build trust with affiliates?
I believe the core of our trust and transparency building is, yet again, the Partner Care Approach. Our managers are very responsive and always there to lend a helping hand. At Adsterra, we strive for excellent results: if our partner succeeds so do we!
In addition to our Partner Care approach, Adsterra offers valuable free educational courses for its clients. For advertisers and affiliates, it’s our free affiliate marketing course. With this course, you can dive into affiliate marketing with 21 video lectures recorded by Adsterra experts.
Moreover, we communicate with our audience. As simple as that! We are present at the largest conferences in person, we have active social media, and we engage in all the important and well-known affiliate marketing forums to stay in touch with the community. We also collaborate with affiliate marketing influencers and professionals, create events together, and invite other affiliates to participate.
For example, we’ve recently organized an amazing event: Christmas Live Expert Talks. I was a speaker there along with my colleagues and renowned influencers from the affiliate industry: Attila O’dree and Joey Babineau. We discussed the trends of affiliate marketing that will unfold in 2024, and believe me it was rather insightful. Luckily, it was a recorded event, so you can check out all the insights on our YouTube.
With advancements in technology, especially AI, how do you see AI shaping the future of affiliate marketing? Has your network integrated AI, and if so, can you share instances where it has positively impacted operations?
No secret AI has grown immensely during 2023, and it will continue to do so in 2024. AI is a great helper in managing campaigns, keeping track of key metrics like ROI, and eliminating malware advertising - these are just some of the very many implementations AI can have in affiliate marketing. Adsterra is also keeping up with these technological advances. For example, we have our 3-level security system, Smart CPM, CPA Goal, and Traffic Estimator.
- The 3-level security system is there to protect advertisers from low-quality traffic and connect them with high-intent, clean traffic checked manually and by AI algorithms.
- Smart CPM is a relatively new tool we have introduced this year. It’s a bidding model that enters auctions, picks bids, and wins ad views at a better price. It works based on an intelligent algorithm that adjusts the payout keeping it at the most competitive level. The point is: that you don't have to refresh bids to ensure you're getting enough traffic, and the bid required to win the auction is usually lower than the cap you set.
- Traffic Estimator estimates the volumes of traffic and competitors’ bids.
- CPA Goal by Adsterra is yet another smart rules-based instrument. With its help, you can create rules to automatically unlink traffic sources that don't meet your eCPA or the number of conversions.
In general, Adsterra is rather well-versed with AI: our algorithms analyze publishers’ platforms and traffic to choose the best advertisers suitable for them based on this analysis.
What advice would you give to new affiliates aiming for success in the competitive affiliate marketing space?
Surely, we can’t deny the ever-increasing competition in the affiliate market. Nevertheless, it shouldn’t stop new affiliates from entering the market: with enough effort and determination, there’s room for everybody!
I can give a few tips for new affiliates wishing to embark on the exciting affiliate journey in 2024. First of all, learn. Learn about the market, tools, trends, and cases. The more background you have, the easier it is for you to implement your knowledge and succeed. Adsterra is an awesome place to start with it. As mentioned before, we have our Affiliate Marketing Crash Course to help you get acquainted with all the basics at once. Moreover, I’ll say it again, Adsterra SSP is very smooth and easy to use. No matter how skilled you are in affiliate marketing or media buying, Adsterra’s self-serve ad platform fits both beginners and professionals.
Once you get over all the basics and set your foot on the Adsterra SSP, you should explore the Offers Wishlist and take the simplest single opt-in combinations. Also, it’s best to test offers with Popunder ads, and after successful tests scale with the Social Bar.
Yet, these pieces of advice are just around 1% of everything you can find browsing through Adsterra's blog: there, we publish cases, expert insights, educational articles, tutorials, and how-tos, pretty much anything you can think of. Don’t hesitate to consult our blog, I assure you the information you can find there is a tidbit that will definitely make your affiliate journey more profitable.
Looking ahead to 2024, what trends do you anticipate will shape the affiliate marketing industry? How is your ad network preparing to capitalize on these trends, and what advice and opportunities do you have for affiliates to stay ahead?
I’ve already mentioned our Christmas Live Expert Talk that took place on December 18th, so, yet again: we’ve unveiled the hottest trends to shape affiliate marketing in 2024 there. The recording is on our YouTube channel, so you’re only one click away from everything you need to know to succeed in affiliate marketing and advertising in 2024. However, not to leave anyone hanging, here are some trends I like and look forward to:
- Creatives ought to be brief, personalized, and opinion-backed
- The growing importance of automation & tracking
- AI continuing to take over the stage
As for Adsterra, we’re not entirely relying on trends to draw our roadmap for the coming year. We think that trends are not the foundation of development and planning but a tool to enhance them. We see six main areas where our effort will go next year:
- Customization for higher performance: We plan to improve the existing advertising formats. We are following new trends, exploring new forms, and making them accessible even for individual affiliate marketers who launch campaigns independently.
- More quality traffic from all over the world.
- Trending GEOs development: We are planning to dig into trending GEOs such as LATAM, Asia, and Africa regions. We know we can bring more quality traffic from these GEOs, so why not focus on the countries that appear to be popular with advertisers?
- Making the platform even more useful and handy: As part of our Partner Care program, we are planning releases that will make the platform even more convenient and the service better. For example, advertisers will enjoy a reduction in campaign moderation time, GEO limits, auto-replenishment of the balance, and an API upgrade for advertisers. Some ideas are kept secret, so follow us on social media to stay updated.
- Connecting through events: We take pride in getting to know our partners better, so attending a lot of conferences in the coming year is certainly a checkbox in our 2024 plan. We’ll go into regions with our local representatives.
- Elevating content creation and localization: We are focused on creating more video content, both branding and educational, to teach our audience and convey our core values. Localization is a huge project for us in 2023-2024. We have started with PPC campaigns and FAQ translation, but we’ll go further with blog and website localization and regional marketing activities.
How can affiliates and advertisers get to contact you or reach out to your team?
Adsterra is basically available almost anywhere online. First of all, you should definitely use our live chat — all our managers are there, ready to answer each of your questions as soon as possible. You can also email us at advincome@adsterra.com if you are an advertiser, shoot us a DM on Twitter, Instagram, Linked In, or Telegram.
Conclusion
This insightful interview with Gala Grigoreva, CMO at Adsterra, provides a fascinating glimpse into the journey of Adsterra's growth into a leading advertising and affiliate network. Drawing from over 13 years of marketing experience, Gala outlines the strategies, achievements, and unique aspects, especially the Partner Care Approach, that have fueled Adsterra's exponential growth since 2018.
Looking ahead, Gala shares insights into trends that will shape affiliate marketing in 2024, like the growing use of AI and automation.
For affiliates aiming for success, she advises learning extensively, leveraging Adsterra's free educational resources, and testing simple offer and traffic format combinations to get started. With Adsterra's user-friendly self-serve platform, both beginners and experienced affiliates can create profitable campaigns.
If you are looking to get started with affiliate marketing, or want to polish your affiliate marketing skills, we recommend you check out their free and up-to-date affiliate marketing training program.
