An Interview with WhatRunsWhere Founder Max Teitelbaum + Exclusive Offer for AdsBridge Users)
WhatRunsWhere is the premium competitive intelligence service for online advertising and media buying. Uncover your competitors’ top traffic sources, preferred networks, and top ads – across Desktop, Mobile & In-App – to benchmark and boost your own campaigns. Get the competitive edge with WhatRunsWhere. We talked to Max Teitelbaum (Founder) who shared his exclusive insights and more details about WhatRunsWhere.
- Can you briefly introduce yourself, how you got to where you are now, how have you found success in affiliate industry?
Hi, I’m Max Teitelbaum. I am the CEO and one of the founders of WhatRunsWhere, the premier competitive intelligence platform for digital advertising. I started working in the performance marketing industry when I was 15 as an affiliate. I successfully ran campaigns and worked with a range of advertisers for over 6 years before we founded WhatRunsWhere.
- Why is competitive intelligence important to affiliates?
Competitive intelligence is important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it reduces your risk. Having access to what your competition is doing, allows you to leverage their existing spend and strategy to create better banners, identify profitable placements and return a higher ROI on your campaigns quickly. Secondly, it provides great inspiration. By looking at what others are doing you can easily find new ideas to advertise your campaign or ways to communicate the product or service you are selling.
- What are three strong affiliate niches that you would consider to be high revenue generators?
I think there is revenue in every niche. Size is based off demand, so if you look at what people want to be or achieve, you find large demands and as a result large amounts of potential revenue. Diet, beauty and wealth related offers all are great examples of this.
- How can affiliates use WhatRunsWhere to optimize campaigns in these niches?
I would start by looking up your direct competitors. By simply using our keyword or top ads search you can find competitors you don’t know about, or if you know your direct competitive set, using our advertiser search you can look them up. Next, spot the similarities. Are they using a single call to action, a specific button style? Noting these types of similarities can help you build better creatives and find better placements by leveraging what results they have already spent money testing.
- Can you briefly discuss a current digital marketing trend that you think affiliates need to adopt in their strategies?
I think with the rise of mobile and native advertising, affiliates have a huge opportunity. These are still relatively new forms of media which affiliates can be first movers. If you’re not looking at the trends and what is performing well on these traffic sources (Shameless plug: WhatRunsWhere has industry leading coverage of both Mobile and Native advertising), I think you’re missing out on a huge opportunity.
- What advice would you offer to affiliates just entering the industry? What’s essential for a successful strategy?
I think looking at the competitive landscape is important. I may be a bit biased, but market research sets up success. When you can understand what others and doing and why they’re doing it, you optimize yourself and your business for success.
- And how about a piece of advice for affiliates who are currently running campaigns but need some tips to revitalize their strategy?
I think a lot of campaigns fail because they aren’t kept “fresh”. Keeping a campaign fresh can be as simple as changing a few elements of a banner or rotating a successful placement out for a few weeks. Ad blindness is a real thing. By changing banners or temporarily pausing traffic to a website, you give visitors a different look or reprieve from your ads. Sometimes this is all that’s needed to turn a previously successful campaign back into a winner.
- The affiliate world is extremely competitive, what would you say is essential for success?
Barriers to entry. As a performance marketer there isn’t much that differentiates us from the other person. Barriers to entry like an exclusive relationship with an advertiser, contracts to lock down placements (direct buys) or other things that aren’t easy to copy. If you spend time to create something unique, you can be successful for a much longer period and have a longer campaign lifecycle.