Performance marketers have limited levers to increase scale or tune profitability in affiliate compared to their peers in other digital marketing channels.

It is no accident that affiliate marketing is the last channel to evolve, given how effective of a channel it is: highly profitable, easily associated with the cost of goods sold, and set up to incentivize both sides of a transaction. But inefficiencies have grown, from the days of faxing one contract to a maze of relationships and negotiations amongst networks, publishers, influencers, MMPs, CDPs, and more, with each new actor taking a cut of the profit. This channel is overdue to arm affiliate marketers with the proper tools to optimize their spend.

Digital media channels have evolved to offer marketers visibility and control, through:

1. Data: associating and enriching media bought with first-party brand information - importantly, not through the practice of service providers selling user data egregiously for their own profit. 
2. Scale: ensuring that healthy unit economics translate to meaningful outcomes 
3. Homogeneity, normalizing the goods transacted to ensure the cost of operating the purchase doesn't grow prohibitively large
4. Identity, specifically understanding and acting on a unique identifier, makes scale, homogeneity, and data actionable. Importantly, an identifier does not equate to personally-identifiable information 

This is where Button comes into the equation. We have built upon these foundations and brought this visibility and control to the affiliate world by:

1. Organizing data that spans the customer journey from intent to purchase confirmation, as well as its associated line-item-level products, across Button's two-sided marketplace.
2. Building the marketplace at scale now powering tens of millions of monthly active users.
3. Normalizing the requests of these millions of users at the moment of highest intent, with a single interface that returns our brands' best offers in real time.
4. Navigating increasingly fragmented user identifiers and putting user privacy first, to allow brands to cater to users based on what they do, not who they are. Mapping of emails and IDFAs to publisher IDs are applicable through a variety of means; most importantly, we do not require mobile IDs.

Audiences, the newest product in Button Evolution™, the affiliate industry's first suite of personalization and intelligence products, is a natural evolution to offer additional controls in affiliate marketing. Brands on Audiences have already experienced the following results:

• 41+% increase in GMS per user within the ROAS target
• 100+% increase in app installs

For the first time, affiliate marketers tailor discounts, align messaging, and organize campaigns around their desired outcomes. Audiences is built for the sophisticated needs of leading marketers who demand simplicity and accountability from all their channels. 

1. Simplicity. Define an audience segment once by uploading a custom user list of first-party data, or choosing from Button's behavioral audiences and run campaigns with it across publishers.
2. Accountability: marketers increasingly demand accountability through incrementality tests, where a holdout group is randomly separated from the test audience to measure the lift of a campaign or program that is incremental to the organic results that would have happened without the marketing spend. 

Exclusion Targeting makes creating a holdout group possible for simple campaigns to the most advanced campaigns.

Withholding offers from certain audiences was notably hard if not impossible in affiliate, and is now a breeze with Button's Exclusion Targeting. Want to promote an exclusive offer to your club members who haven't already purchased an Instant Pot? No problem. 

Audiences is now available to marketers through Button. Contact us today to gain visibility and control to drive outcomes for your business.