Improving Online Ads & Ecommerce Campaigns’ ROI in 2021 [Matt Gillis]

Today’s episode of The Marketing Innovation Show brings Matt Gillis, the CEO of Clean.io, a company that leads in the prevention of cross-platform malvertising, protecting website publishers and online businesses sites from malicious ads by blocking coupon provider extensions.

 

The main discussion points of this episode will be the issues that malvertising or malicious advertising brings to performance marketers brands, eCommerce websites, and publishers, as well as how advertisers can increase their budgets, return on investment for 2021, and how to maintain a good customer experience on websites in the upcoming year, by leveraging software like Clean.io.

 

Connect with Matt:

Website: http://Clean.io/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gillisusa/

Email at matt@clean.io

 

Connect with Andrei:

Marketiu: https://marketiu.com / https://marketiu.ro 

Andrei on Linkedin https://www.linkedin.com/in/andreitiu/

Marketiu on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/marketiu

Marketiu on Twitter: https://twitter.com/marketiuagency

Marketiu on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/marketiuagency/

Email at hello@marketiu.ro

 

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Episode Transcript:

Andrei Tiu  

Hello, everybody! This is Andrei and you're on The Marketing Innovation Podcast Show. Our special guest for today is Matt Gillis, who is the CEO of Clean.io, a company that leads in the prevention of cross-platform malvertising, protecting website publishers and online businesses from malicious ads, by blocking coupon provider extensions. Today, we'll discuss issues malvertising brings to performance marketers, brands, eCommerce websites, and publishers, as well as how advertisers can increase ROI, as well as maintain a good customer experience on sites in 2021, by leveraging software like Clean.io. And here we have Matt Gillis. Hi, Matt, how are you? 

 

Matt Gillis  

Good, good to be on with you and this is truly a global podcast with you on the other side of the planet, right now.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yes, that's true. A pleasure meeting today, as well. Really exciting for our episode together and for the discussion. We briefly had the chance to quickly catch up now and I think it's going to be a really insightful and really good one. It's the first time on the show where we actually dive deep into these issues that many advertisers face on a daily basis. So really, really, keen to hear your thoughts, your experience, maybe some of the case studies that you were faced with, and how you were able to help these websites and these marketers to make better their marketing results. So let's see, tell us a bit about you. Tell us who you are, where you're from, what's the journey with Clean.io, and what you guys do?

 

Matt Gillis  

Excellent. Well, thanks for having me on. As you mentioned, I'm the CEO of a company called Clean.io. We protect digital engagements and we'll talk a lot about that over this podcast, my journey to this role has been pretty fun and interesting one, I've been in mobile my entire career. So I'm as old as dirt. And I started in this business, back in the early 90s, working for the cell phone operators. So I've had four distinct areas of my career. So I worked for cell phone operators in the early days of the mobile internet, on your cell phone, days when you would download ringtones or play games, or do any of the things that you do other than make phone calls. And then I've gone on this entrepreneurial journey, for about five years, I was a mobile games publisher. So we created games and entertainment content on mobile devices. I then left that and went into the ads business. And so we did ad monetization for publishers. And I did that for probably the better part of eight years at a few different companies where we were a startup and then we were acquired and I closed out that at Verizon media, which is a big telecom company that owns a conglomerate of advertising technology. And one of the biggest challenges I had, when I was responsible for websites and helping them make money is that we had these things called malvertising. You may have experienced it yourself as a consumer. When you're sometimes on your mobile phone, and you're scrolling up and down, and all of a sudden, it kind of redirects to a page and it says congratulations, Andrei, you won an Amazon gift card, or click here to spin the wheel or take this survey and once you complete it, you'll be entered to win something. That's called malvertising. It was one of the banes of my existence in my last role. And when I had left my job at Verizon media and was taking some time off, I ran into a few guys that had started to build this company called Clean Creative, which was the predecessor to Clean.io. And they were headed out to solve this problem of malvertising. And so very curious and obviously had never seen anybody really, truly solve it. And that's how I landed where I am today. And our company has been around for about three years. I've been in the role of CEO here for about two years now. And it's been an amazing journey to see a team and a product kind of build over time. I'm Canadian, so I love hockey sticks. And we've had hockey stick-like growth. And so it's been super cool. And it's really just the start of our journey in protecting websites and user engagements from malicious and untrusted code.

 

Andrei Tiu  

I see. What challenges do you see today? What are some of the most encountered scenarios where somebody will be the victim of malvertising? Maybe depending on industries or depending on the niches, what's the most occurring case for you, guys?

 

Matt Gillis  

Yeah. The one thing that I love to do is to take a step back and remember that we're all consumers. So even though we work in this business and you work in marketing and I work in cybersecurity, we're also consumers. to rely on our mobile devices, we're on them all day, every day. It's the first thing we wake up and look at in the morning and it's the last thing we tune out in the evening. And this challenge related to malvertising‘s been a long-standing issue. You go to many websites, and it's not something that happens all day, every day. And I think the reason behind that is you need to look at the motive and who is actually the person that's behind these malicious campaigns that are destroying user experiences and destroying revenue. You represent a lot of good marketers, and there are tonnes of good marketers on the planet. The reality is: malvertising is really conducted by bad actors who are also advertisers. And they're bad advertisers, they're advertisers that are seeking to engage with users, they've got offers that they're trying to get users to complete. And they're using malicious technologies to really establish those connections. If you think about normal marketers, normal real marketers, they'll buy 1000 ads on a page, and they'll hope to get a half a percent click-through rate and a half percent click-through rate, 5/1000, that would be amazing. Right? Well, malvertisers, because of their sophistication, they have figured out how to buy that same ad, and effectively get 100% click-through rate. So this problem exists because of economics. These folks can figure out how to buy an ad, how to get 100% click-through rate, and how to get that user to land on that page and they can target them very effectively and they can put beautiful looking creatives in front of them and really inspire engagement. Probably not from you or from me, but my mom probably would click on those sort of ads, she would be deceived to click on those sort of things. So in that sense of what is malvertising, what's happening, a lot of it kind of rears its ugly head in these form of malicious redirects, where it takes over the page, takes over the user experience, either drives the user to fill out a survey, give their personally identifiable information, either give their email address, or their phone number, or some sort of information that they want to capture, or usually drive the user to click into the app store in an automated fashion to download an app. So it's usually kind of one of those behaviours and the behaviour of choice really depends on what action the malicious advertiser is trying to engage.

 

Andrei Tiu  

And what control do companies have over limiting this? If they are not using any software, they just have a website, how are they falling victims for this?

 

Matt Gillis  

That's the challenge of the programmatic media ecosystem. I'm sure you're familiar with programmatic, where impressions are bought and sold by algorithms and it's really an open ecosystem. So anybody can go and get a seat on a demand-side platform, and set up campaigns and start to buy ads. And you can buy ads on some of the biggest websites on the planet. If you are a publisher, and you're trying to monetize, you have ad placements set up on your website, and your goal is to bring in the maximum amount of demand, because when you bring in that maximum amount of demand, that creates demand density, which drives the price up, which obviously creates fill rate, and all of the metrics and the KPIs that any website publisher would live by. It's their livelihood. And the programmatic media ecosystem has created this backdoor, where bad actors now have open season to be able to access end-users on some of the biggest websites on the planet. Websites that you would normally have thought back in the olden days, where you would have had to write an insertion order, and you'd be clearly vetted before any ads run and usually, it's big brands that are writing insertion orders. These bad actors now with a dime, can go and get a seat on a demand-side platform and just start buying and inject their code. And usually what these guys do, is they have very sophisticated economics, where it's a game of arbitrage, where they know that if they can buy a certain amount of ads for a certain price, they can usually get a multiple of that number in a return on their investment. There's a tonne of great things that have come from the programmatic ecosystem. Obviously, publishers and end-users that are getting very targeted ads, and that makes the user experience much better. But it has created this window of opportunity for bad actors to really creep in the back door and start to conduct malicious actions.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Okay, so let's say somebody identifies that they are the victim of malicious software like this or malicious actors that damage their users experience on their websites. So you identified this problem, and then you together with the team grew Clean.io so that you can help these guys clean up their platforms. How do you do it? What's the journey? How does the system work? Maybe even start from the general scenario and tell what you do, and then specifically what you guys do, so that we can all have a good understanding of how to best think about protecting ourselves when it comes to malicious software or malicious actors like these ones.

 

Matt Gillis  

Maybe I'll start back where how people used to do it, and how some still do it and how it's ineffective. And that's how we ended up where we are. In the very early stages of folks that tried to prevent these malicious behaviours, what they would do is they would scan creatives in an offline environment, to see if it exhibited malicious behaviour. And by the way, back in the early days, when the bad guys weren't so sophisticated, they would be able to catch that sort of stuff. Well, what happened is, bad actors have figured out how to fingerprint and understand if they're in an offline environment, or they're being scanned, to not exhibit the malicious behaviours. That methodology kind of proved to be an ineffective way to try to solve the problem. The next wave of folks that really have tried to solve this problem, really trying to anchor it around what we would call like URL blacklisting. Basically known malicious URLs, you would put them onto a block list and if a buyer was exhibiting behaviour that is tied to that malicious URL, you would prevent that person from buying that ad, and therefore, obviously, block any hopefully block malicious activity from happening. The bad actors have figured their way around this. Obviously, they can change their URLs every five minutes now. Bad actors can change their URLs and make them unique for every end-user if they wanted to, which makes that approach ineffective. The challenge with URL blacklist means that something bad has to happen and the software provider has to capture that URL to put it on a blacklist. And by the way, if you are trying to automate or become what I would say, probabilistic methodology, what happens is you end up with a tonne of false positives, and then you're actually blocking real revenue. There's a whole bunch of concerns around URL blacklisting, that make it ineffective and make it predisposed to false positives and actually costing real revenue. The solution that we came up with, which I think was obviously very unique, it's behavioural analysis. What we do is we give our partners a single line of JavaScript, they put it at the head of their page and that is the first thing that loads when the page loads. And by the way, everything that we do is on real humans, real devices, real networks. That's the only way to catch bad guys. Marketers that probably listen to your podcast, the fraud that they think about are things like invalid traffic, and bots, and viewability, and all these other things, right? Well, by the time our software is running, all of those technologies have basically run their processes to determine that everything that we're running on is, generally speaking, a real human real device, real network. Bad actors, as you can imagine, they're sophisticated, they wouldn't want to buy bought traffic or invalid traffic, because they're looking for a real user engagement. And what our solution does, is a single line of JavaScript, we're analysing the execution of JavaScript at runtime. When we see an ad get purchased, and then an ad start to render on a website, if that ad starts to do a malicious activity, what we do is we block the malicious activity. We don't block the bad actor from buying the ad, one of the big things that we felt that the only way we were going to be successful with this technology, was that if there was a financial disincentive for the bad actor to do what they're doing. In every other solution prior to us, there was almost a free at-bat. The bad actor could try something, and if it worked great and if they got blocked, it didn't cost them any money. So then they could change their tactics and try something new. With our software, we actually let them buy, that means that they bought an ad, that means that they are committed. That means that that ad renders and the thing that they truly bought, which was the impression and the and the render, they have to pay for that. That actor, because they've paid for that, they are hoping to get ROI. What we do is we block that malicious activity from happening after that ad renders. And because we do that, the user never gets redirected to that malicious page that says congratulations, Andrei, you won an Amazon gift card. So first off we've made sure that the user experience has been preserved, that the user experience is awesome. Because the user never lands on that congratulations, you want an Amazon gift card page, the bad actor doesn't get an opportunity for ROI. And so earlier in the podcast, I said these guys are the most sophisticated performance marketers on the planet. Anyone that's a listener of your podcast, that's a good advertiser, what you're hoping for is ROI. You're hoping that if you buy an ad, you get an engagement. And that engagement turns into either a sale, or a click, or a call, or whatever the metric is that the advertiser is seeking. In this case, because these guys are the most sophisticated performance marketers on the planet if it doesn't turn into an engagement, what do sophisticated performance marketers do, if they get no engagement, they actually change it up, and they block that site, and they no longer buy from that site. If you were a performance marketer, and you were buying media across a whole bunch of sites, and a whole bunch of them were giving you no engagement, you'd actually say: Let's stop buying on those sites, let's start buying on these sites. And what truly our software does, is that the bad actors actually go elsewhere. And that's the secret sauce about what we do and why it works and why we're different than anybody else. We do a 30-day free trial, so any website can come on that has ads, and they put our software on their page for 30 days. And you'll see that during that first 30 days, there's always some malicious activity. There's usually a pulse of malicious activity. Sometimes there are spikes, like this past weekend, which was the weekend of Thanksgiving here in the US and bookended with Black Friday and Cyber Monday. On Sunday, there was an attack. And many folks saw an escalation in threat level on Sunday. But generally speaking, what they'll see is that over time, the longer you have our protection, the less it spikes a malicious activity that you see on sites that are protected by us.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, because the malicious advertisers would lose money and then they would go to another site. Okay, that makes perfect sense. Super. So let's see. Now we presented to everybody how this thing works. Would somebody know already if they had such ads? Can they fall victim without knowing? How is typically this issue being detected? Is it the customers that complain? Is it somebody randomly discovering it? Are there tests that should be carrying out on a frequent basis to ensure you don't have such advertisers? 

 

Matt Gillis  

I would say all of the above. Let's tackle in two areas. If you're an advertiser, you're hoping that the websites that you're buying on have various levels of protection, whether that's invalid traffic or prevention from bots, or hopefully giving a high level of viewability. When one of these things happens, as you know, if you're on a mobile device, and you're on your favourite website, and you're scrolling, there's usually not just one ad on the page. There are multiple ads on the page. If there are four ads on the page, the bad actor isn't buying all four. Right? The bad actor is intent on arbitrage in the site. So they're going to buy probably the lowest cost one that they can, that can create that unique takeover of the device. That means that there are three other advertisers that bought ads on that page, that because that user was hijacked and taken away to another website, those ads are no longer engageable. Because as you know, you can't hit the back button, because the bad guys have disabled the back button, you can hit the close button, you can't get back to where you were very easy. Sometimes you actually have to reboot your phone or actually close your browser down and get back to the page that you're on. And so for advertisers, my gut says that during times of increased malicious behaviour, you would probably see a deterioration in things like your CTR and those sort of KPIs. As a website publisher, there's probably more metrics that you would know. Some of our folks that actually are our customers, when we first launched, we didn't even have a reporting dashboard. Publishers, when we asked them what were the top three things that they wanted us to do, they said: I want effectiveness, effectiveness and effectiveness. A dashboard that gives them you know, a CT scan of what's going on in the website, they've got tonnes of dashboards. They've got Google Analytics, they've got tonnes of places they can go to check out what's happening on their website. And so the first folks that we actually partnered with, what we said to them was: look at your KPIs. When our software is not on your page, when our software is on your page, look at the KPIs that you would actually look at every day. What is your session time? What is your session length, number of ads you serve per unique user? All of those sorts of KPIs that actually power the economics of your website, tell me when those are disrupted. And when those are disrupted, then put our software on your page and watch them recover. So we had folks that had a typical time on site of eight-minute. And that means that a user would spend eight minutes scrolling, three or four stories and reading or consuming photo galleries, or whatever users do on their mobile phones. During that eight-minute period, you would serve an average of 42 ads per session. When these sites were under attack, they would see those KPIs decline, they would see the average time on site go from eight minutes to one minute. They would see a number of ads or per unique user go from 42 to 6. The very sophisticated folks in the ecosystem understood the economic damage that this can do to your website, not to mention the almost irreparable harm of the end-user experience and how destructive that is, right? There's economic harm and end-user experience harm. Economic harm- we can all recover from that. And user experience harm, it's hard to put a price tag on that. That person may never come back to the website. Creating content is very expensive. Driving user traffic to your website is very expensive. If you've done those two really hard things, and you now have that user on your website, preserve that user experience and make sure that that's not disrupted. You asked me how do I know if I have a problem or not? Well, one- we'll give you 30 days, and you can figure it out. We'll show you all the things. And we have a dashboard now. But I think some cases, one-your users are going to tell you. If you have a problem and it's bad, your users are either going to send you emails, they're going to flame you on Twitter, they're going to do whatever they can to let you know that you have a problem. Some folks have traffic that comes through Facebook, Facebook obviously has a great ecosystem where people can type comments, and they'll get comments of the crazy ads that are disrupting your user experience. The second thing is: most people tell me: my CEO is on our website, and he saw this. It usually happens in that way where the CEO is on there and she's surfing around, and she's like: Oh, that's a terrible user experience and then someone gets yelled at. It's either users are yelling at you or your management team is yelling at you and you can't win either way unless you have our software.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Got you. Okay, so this was very insightful in terms of the advertisers. Now, let's go a bit into the extensions and the other side of malicious software that can occur or disrupt the user experience. I know we were discussing it a bit just before we started recording, but I would like to hear your thoughts and your insight into what's out there, and what's bad and why, and how can businesses limit it?

 

Matt Gillis  

Our software runs on about 7 million websites right now. We have senses of the internet level data, we know what's happening out there on big massively global and we know what's happening on the body and tail. So we protect everything in and everything in between. Our core business started out preventing malicious ads originating from malicious ads. In that business line, everything is deterministic. Meaning, we know exactly the place of origin, what the supply-side platform is, where that bad actor bought their ad. We call it a smoking gun. We have a smoking gun on every bad threat that happens in the ecosystem, where our software is. What we started to see was bad actors start to shift their behaviours, not necessarily from buying through programmatic media, but also using what we would call client-side injections to initiate their malicious behaviour. Those client-side injections could happen from a rogue Chrome extension that you've downloaded and you forgot about it and it's sitting on your laptop and all of a sudden, it's been hacked or hijacked, and they're using that as a slave to inject malicious activity through Chrome extensions or whatnot. We started doing a bunch of research around these extensions. And what we started to see, not every one of our partners only monetizes through ads. We've got folks that monetize through ads, we got folks that monetize through eCommerce, in the same sort of site and some sort of environment. And we started seeing these client-side injections happening through these compromised Chrome extensions. When we started to do a whole bunch of more research, what we actually noticed was, there's a whole bunch of Chrome extensions and Safari extensions and Firefox extensions, that one might deem to be "trusted". The end-user really wanted that Chrome extension on their laptop, but the website owner may not want that Chrome extension to be interacting with the user experience on the website. We firmly believe that if you are a website owner, whether you're a publisher, whether you're an eCommerce site, you own your website, you should be able to control everything that happens on your website. You should be able to control the user experience, you should be able to make sure that, things don't happen that impact your revenue, or your brand reputation, or any of that sort of stuff. It's your website, you know, you should have those controls. What's happened is, there's a lot of software out there that actually takes that control away from you. And one of the things that we've noticed, specifically in the eCommerce ecosystem that takes that control away from you, is these extensions that power the automation of discounting. Things like Honey and Wikibuy, they're Chrome extensions, or Safari or Firefox extensions, that sit resident on your laptop or your PC and when you get to the checkout at an eCommerce merchant, up pops a little box, and it says, hey: It's Honey, I'm here, hit OK. And I will try and throw in a whole bunch of promo codes at checkout. And hopefully, I'll save you some money. As an end-user, this is awesome, right? It's kind of rolling the dice, and you may get a 25% off discount, or you may not. But it's kind of fun to watch it do its magic. What this has done to merchants is almost irreparable harm. Merchants have lost control of discounting. Honey and Wikibuy and the various other extensions are now scraping codes up to off the internet. And when you, as a merchant had given a code that you really intended for a single purpose, for a single user to experience. Codes that are designed for first responders. We're in COVID right now, it's December of 2020 when this podcast is being recorded, and many websites have said: if you're a first responder, come to my website, and you'll get 20% off and use that code of first responder-20 or whatever that unique code that they've given. Well, what Honey does is let's just say I am a first responder, and I go in and I've got Honey on my machine and I type in first responder 20 at checkout, I deserve that code. That's great. I should get 20% off. The first thing Honey does is it pops up and says we got more codes, would you like us to try them? When you hit OK, the first thing they do is they scrape that code out and they catalogue it. And they use it for everybody else that comes after me. And so that means that people who aren't first responders are now eligible to get a first responder 20% off discount if that's what the merchant had gone out the door with. What that really does is one: it becomes the wild west of promo codes. Any promo code is now available for everybody. And the worst part is: it's at the highest level. When we're in closed, beta right now, by the time this podcast gets out, there will probably be in general availability. But we've heard horror stories from a tonne of merchants about the damages that Honey and Wikibuy and the various discount codes have done to their business. Many folks buy ads and use exclusive or unique promo codes to try and track where a lead or where a purchase came from. This actually clouds all of that. It actually makes most marketing immeasurable. Because that code that you used for that podcaster or that code that you used for that YouTuber or that code that you use for that Instagram influencer, is now available to everybody. Let's just say you're a vitamins company and you wanted to go and partner with the most famous triathlete on the planet. And you go and partnered with a triathlete who has 50,000 followers on Instagram, which is pretty big. That person put that code in and probably one of their followers actually use that code. That code then got sucked up by Honey. So it got scrapped and put into Honey. And so what they were doing is they were looking at their analytics for their marketing campaigns and they're like: holy Geez, like, we really figured it out. This guy has this many followers, and he generated 400 sales last week. How do we go and repeat this? Well, lo and behold, it was Honey that took the coupon, and now applied it to anybody who came to their site, regardless of whether they were, connected or knew of this influencer. And so it really has destructive tendencies to revenue, because now everybody gets access to that discount. So let's just say it was a 20 or 30% off discount, and your average order was 100 bucks, you've now lost 20 to $30 per sale, you're probably now paying affiliate fees. And you've got to pay fees to these influencers, who've actually "driven the sale" when they truly didn't drive the sale. And then not to mention, you sit here and you go: Oh, my gosh, how do we plan our marketing? What podcast should we buy that are effective? Or what influencer should we partner with that are effective? It really makes it impossible from a measurement perspective for marketers.

 

Andrei Tiu  

That's very bad, actually. Is there a way for the folks out here that are tuned in and maybe they are responsible for eCommerce websites or eCommerce businesses, to audit if their codes are maliciously being used by Honey? Because Honey is popular in the UK. I think most people know about it, I think there is a chance that if you have a medium-sized, at least if not being eCommerce, your users might be using that for your website. So what are some ways to audit and see if they are safe?

 

Matt Gillis  

Well, listen, there's no better way to audit them become a user of each of those services, right? So it's free to download. Download the extensions, and put them on your PC and go to your own website and have a look at what Honey is applying and how it's applying. We said earlier in the podcast, but on the malvertising side, have we launched without a reporting dashboard, right? Most of these marketers have reporting dashboards. They're probably looking at something every day. One merchant that I reached out to, they had a code that was tied doing sponsorship of a basketball team. And that code was only ever spoken about in a very small crawl that ran across the bottom of the screen. And it said: Hey, go and buy get 30% off typing the code magic at checkout. Well, guess what? Guess what their top redeemed code was in the month of July of this year. Of course, it was magic. Now, guess what? That basketball team does not have that many fans. If you've got codes that have taken off if in your gut it feels a little weird, it looks wrong, what you ought to do is to maybe turn some of them off for a day. Now what this merchant did was, they shut that one-off. Well, guess what! When they shut that one-off, that like that was 30%, they had two other codes that were valid, that were 25%. And those then popped up to be the most used codes. And so that will start to give you an understanding. With us, we're in a closed beta right now. We've got about 20 merchants that are using our software and we're giving them reports so that they can understand, we give them analytics so they can see what are the most impacted codes. What are the most prevalent discount engines that are loading on your end-users machines, when they're at the checkout and how is it impacting conversion rates and all that sort of stuff. What I would say is: go to our website, if you're a merchant, and you want more information, and you want to actually go into our trial you can go to blockcouponextensions.com, and that will redirect you to our website and that will take you right to the point where you can actually see more and hear more about what we're doing and, and how we're helping merchants really get control of the website that they own, and also get control the revenue and their discounts. There are very few things out there that can help you grow your revenue without actually growing your sales. And I think we're one of them. The person that checkout, they're probably going to convert and I know there's a whole bunch of folks that abandon carts at checkout and that sort of thing. But think about this analogy: if you're at the grocery store, and you've got your groceries loaded on that conveyor belt. Imagine if there was someone standing beside the checkout that had a mitt full of coupons that were going to hand them to you at checkout. You'd be like, oh, okay, yeah, I guess we'll try all those coupons. And if you save 30%, how great would that be as a shopper? Well, if you're the grocery store, you would not let someone come and stand right beside checkout and start to redeem and destroy your revenue. So I think really, it's about merchants getting control of the user experience on their website and really growing the revenue without actually growing sales.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Yeah, big time. And also, if you think about traditional eCommerce like goods, probably even if it's 5% - 10%, is your cost of acquisition for a marketing effort to think about it that way. Certainly, it's a big-budget saver here. I would actually recommend you guys tuning in that have eCommerce websites to have a look at this and I guess even if you identify one code that has been much easier to use, you probably have saved up for a lot of money.

 

Matt Gillis  

I think you're spot on Andrei. Let's just say it's 20% off. If you have $100 order value and you can prevent a $20 loss of revenue, that effectively is $20 more than you can then go out and spend to drive incremental traffic to your website, incremental purchases. And some of what Honey is doing is that they're stealing attribution for the sales that may have already or would have already happened on your website. You're getting hit with that revenue reduction, and you're paying affiliate fees and whatnot on that transaction. Get control of your website, you'll have $20 more to go out and market and drive real net new incremental users to your website, that's a lot of money for a merchant.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Mm-hmm. Super. That was a very good talk. Most Marketing Leaders on the show and probably also entrepreneurs are looking at sketching their strategy or finalising the strategy for 2021, we are living very different times than previous years, so I think it's very important for everybody to be able to have a plan that they can stick to, at least for the first couple of months, until the world hopefully is going to get back to some sort of normal. So let's see how we can help them best inform their decisions further. So we have discussed some actionable points here already about what they can do to audit what's going on in parts of the business, or the marketing system that maybe they haven't looked into in-depth so far, maybe. So let's see if we were to have a free point checklist or very important things that they can do this weekend, or this end of the week, to maybe improve their performance for 2021. What are your top three advice points? 

 

Matt Gillis  

Probably number one, two, and three is what gets measured, gets managed. Measure everything, whether you're a publisher and you're looking for malvertising protection. Measure impacts to revenue and to user experience and all those sorts of things and then solve those problems. And the same thing on the marketer side. What gets measured, gets managed. I would say ask lots of questions. Ask lots of questions of your agency, or your affiliate agency, or anyone that you're working within that transaction flow. Questioning everything, I think you're probably going to get a lot smarter about what is really happening on your website. As we've kind of ventured into this new business for us, we're learning a tonne about the varying sophistication of eCommerce merchants. And we're learning that there are some that are incredibly sophisticated, and they understand everything about what's happening in their user journeys that are on their site, and they know exactly the harm that things like Honey and Wikibuy and whatnot are impacting on their site. And then, I think that there's another class of folks that believe the data. One of the merchants that we spoke to, they were getting ready to make their 2021 plan as they started partnering with us. They actually had sponsored a podcast, they had a code for the product, on the podcast, and that podcast, in their mind, was magically successful. It was driving tonnes of sales and they sat down and they were about to make a very big decision for the rest of their marketing plan for 2021 to take out sponsorships on a whole bunch of podcasts and lo and behold when they actually started questioning the data, and really understanding the whys around the data, that's when they really uncovered that: Oh my gosh, Honey and wiki bi are really the culprits here. This podcast is not that effective of a marketing platform for us. Wishful thinking, as a marketer, you always hope to find that silver bullet. I've been a marketer in my past, you want that one thing that shows that rapid take-off of your product and your sales and you can make repeatable. And I think the challenge that we've seen with merchants that are impacted by Honey and Wikibuy is: the data is somewhat lying to them. The data is somewhat telling them a story that leads them to believe that what they're getting is incremental and you're truly tied to the performance of how well those things perform. And I think it couldn't be further from the truth. So I would just say: what gets measured, gets managed, and ask lots of questions. Doubt everything, challenge everything, because I think that's the only way you're going to truly get to the bottom of what works and what doesn't.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Hmm, super, super good advice. For the people that would like to find out more about you, maybe personally or about the business, obviously, we have the links in the description of this episode, as well. So you guys tuning in, you can go and check out directly Clean.io, maybe sign up for a free trial to audit what's going on on your website. But Matt, if somebody wants to discuss with you personally either for business purposes or to pick your brains on some sort of idea that maybe you can work together on, what's the best platform that they can reach out to you?

 

Matt Gillis  

By all means, I'm an active LinkedIn user. So I think anybody ought to connect with me on LinkedIn, I welcome all those connections. And if you've got opportunities that you want to discuss, you can send me a LinkedIn message on thereafter we've connected. Or you can just send me an email. My email is matt@clean.io. So it's super simple. I would say: love to hear from any and all of your listeners, and if there are ways that we can help, and if you've got a problem, we love big meaty problems. Let us know how we can be helpful.

Andrei Tiu 

Awesome. Matt, thanks so much for being on the show. So, guys, we hope actually, that you had a good time here and you learned something new. Everybody that we discussed in terms of companies and add ons and everything they are good for maybe the consumers, but for your business, they might not be so good. Trying to be objective here, but have a look because you might be able to increase your bottom line profits and why not, make 2021 the best year that you've had so far. So, Matt, thanks so much again, for all the insight. It was a real pleasure. Let's follow up on the discussion and you guys if you'd like us to cover something in more depth, or you have questions for Matt or for myself, as always, be comfortable getting in touch. We'll have the details for Matt and for Clean.io in the description of this episode, as well. Best of luck with all the planning and all the fun for 2021. And for Christmas, why not? Because it's just around the corner.

 

Matt Gillis  

Right on. Best of luck to you. Maybe we'll come back once we're out of closed beta. As I said, we got 20 merchants that are experiencing the benefits of it right now on the eCommerce side and I expect it to be a very successful product, that I think we're gonna have a lot of great insights to bring to your marketers and talk about, and ways that they can grow their revenue and really own the user experience that users have on their various websites.

 

Andrei Tiu  

Super. Sounds good. I'm really excited. Let's stay tuned and let's stay connected on LinkedIn, as well. Best of luck with everything. Thanks again for being on the show. And until next time, keep rocking it. Have an awesome one. 

 

Matt Gillis  

Cheers, Andrei!

 

Andrei Tiu  

Thank you.