GeoRiot as Solution for International Affiliate Marketing. Interview

I have recently learned of an interesting solution for affiliate marketers that work with worldwide traffic, and are interested in routing their visitors to country-specific storefronts of the same merchant. This particular tool allows them to do it with a single “globally-aware” affiliate link.

The solution has been invented by a Seattle-based company called GeoRiot. They came up with their idea based on the challenge that affiliates face while working with internationally-minded advertisers who run multiple country-specific online storefronts. So GeoRiot came up with a solution that, basically, (a) determines a shopper’s location, (b) directs him or her to the correct item in their local storefront, and (c) ensures that the affiliate/publisher receives proper commission for the referral.

I’ve reached out to these guys and got a chance to ask the company’s CEO and Co-Founder, Jesse Lakes, a few questions. Today I would like to bring you that interview:

Geno: Jesse, in a nutshell, what problem does GeoRiot solve for affiliates?

Jesse: Two challenges exist within the iTunes and Amazon affiliate programs when marketing to an international audience. These make it cumbersome for affiliate publishers to achieve a good conversion rate and leverage these programs as a meaningful revenue source.

First, because the greater iTunes and Amazon “stores” are in fact geographic-specific “storefronts”, a link to a specific product in a certain storefront isn’t ideal for many international shoppers.  Because the same product in a foreign storefront can have differing product IDs, it’s difficult for publishers to route international users to a specific product in their local storefront with a single link. Correctly sending international users to their local storefront improves the shopper’s experience and is also one of the best ways to increase conversion rates.

Additionally, this “geo-fragmentation” renders it a significant challenge for publishers to earn commissions on sales from multiple regions that use different affiliate parameters, programs, and/or networks. When publishers use the wrong affiliate tracking, they miss out on incremental commissions that can serve as a legitimate source of revenue.

Geno: Would you mind diving a little deeper into the technology behind GeoRiot?

Jesse: GeoRiot uses proprietary, patent pending technology to determine your visitors’ location, then direct him or her to the correct item their local storefront, and the link is affiliated to ensure you receive commissions for any subsequent sales. Further, if the intended item is not available for purchase, or doesn’t use the same ID in their native storefront, GeoRiot’s dynamic decay algorithm seamlessly redirects users to the most relevant item available.

Because the GeoRiot service is utilized during a URL redirect, the service can be implemented anywhere a link can be shared. This makes adoption and integration easy.

GeoRiot’s global infrastructure consists of a mix of cloud and physical servers spread over five regions worldwide, each with it’s own independent sets of redundant load balancers, worker nodes and caches with dynamic fail overs. We use a top-end AnyCast DNS provider to ensure we are always serving clicks from the fastest data center to the end user, and clicks are always routed to the server with the fastest response time at any given moment.

This all adds up to easily implemented, intelligent links that will always resolve quickly and accurately for a global audience.

Geno: I’ve seen you call GeoRiot an affiliate-linking “platform. What other benefits do your clients get, beyond the tool’s obvious attribution and localization capabilities?

Jesse: We’ve put a considerable amount of engineering resources into developing our affiliate tools. We’ve engineered an intuitive experience from start to finish, the end goal of which is to put the affiliate linking essentials at our clients’ fingertips so they don’t have to do additional work to fully leverage Amazon and iTunes’ programs.

Our catalogue of interactive features includes a variety of pop-up tooltips, expert advice on next steps, graphical indicators, an assortment of manipulative charts/graphs to help analyze reporting data, and optimization guidance to help improve your progress as an affiliate publisher.

Geno: Is the solution limited only to Amazon and iTunes? Could GeoRiot support other brands that face the same international marketing challenges?

Jesse: Absolutely! GeoRiot can support any brand with international storefronts and affiliate programs as long as they have an API or data feed for their products. Our current focus is on programs that have challenges with differing catalogues across countries or IDs that change between storefronts. As long as programmatic access (API or data feeds ideally) is available, integration with any global brand and their affiliate program is possible.