Growth Newsletter #054

Instead of searching for affiliate partners from scratch, find out what's working for your competitors and start there.

Here's how:

Affiliate platforms often use standardized link structures to track conversions. If you know the specific URL naming convention, you can use a tool like Ahrefs to find out which affiliates are promoting your competitors.

For example, affiliate links for Acuity Scheduling always start with "?kw="

In Ahrefs:

1. Enter a competitor's URL into Site Explorer
2. Filter backlinks that include "?kw="
3. Sort by Traffic and see which affiliates drive the most volume

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And links from the popular podcast hosting platform, Transistor.fm, begin with "?via="

Using this tactic, you can quickly create a list of relevant affiliate partners and backlink opportunities.

Startups that run promotions for big, national holidays are often disappointed by results.

Most brands are running promotions at the same time, and they're crowded out.

Instead of launching promos on major holidays, consider creating a promo around an obscure holiday.

The less popular the holiday, the less competition for customers' attention. So your promotions actually stand out and drive action. Research shows that this approach can lift your promo conversion by as much as 25%.

The key: Identify a holiday that’s relevant to your product and build a story around it.

BarkBox turned an otherwise unknown holiday, National Squirrel Appreciation Day on January 21, into a viral social media campaign.

Half a billion people visit the Apple app store each week. These are highly motivated customers looking for one thing: apps. That means unlike general query search engines like Google, the Apple app store caters to high-intent customers ready to download an app.

But because of the way Apple’s targeting options are structured, many marketers fail to get results. Apps need to get the ad group structure and targeting right to truly capitalize on the potential that Apple Search Ads offers.

Here’s one way to get results from Apple Search Ads.

Make three versions of all ad groups (each containing a specific set of keywords) targeting:

1. New users
2. Returning users
3. All users

You might wonder why you should target all users in a separate ad group since you’re already targeting new and returning users.

That’s due to a little-understood nuance of Apple Search Ads:

If you target ‘new’ users or ‘returning’ users (or if you layer on any targeting parameters like age, gender, or demographics), Apple excludes certain sensitive categories of users, like users under 18, those with accounts from educational institutions, and folks who’ve turned off ads personalization, among others. If you fail to target all users, you’d be missing a considerable audience.

Targeting these users obviously widens your reach. But more importantly, it results in stronger economics—since few advertisers target these users, the competition tends to be lower and the economics much stronger.

By targeting all users in addition to new and returning users, you’ll cast a wider net and likely see much stronger performance and lower costs.

There are two drop-off points in every webinar funnel: registration and attendance.

When you promote a webinar through a partner's email list, you can increase the number of signups by around 40% using a clever one-click registration link: embed all the signup details into the link. You can do this with a third-party tool and by collaborating with your partner.

Here's how:

1. Sign up for One Click from Growth Tools (free)
2. Add your webinar details, partner email service, and success page URL
3. Click Create Link
4. Share the link with your webinar partner to use in promo emails

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