Defining the Country of an affiliate site is not as easy as it would appear at first glance. While it may be obvious in some instances – in many others there are a variety of factors that can make that more tricky.
Publisher Discovery (PD) has been working on this issue for a while. That’s partly because it is one of the most requested refinements from existing users of the SaaS affiliate recruitment platform; it’s also a key enabler for drilling down from a broad view to the most relevant potential partnerships.
Applying AI and machine learning
Defining ‘Country’ isn’t always as simple as Germany being defined by .de websites! There are some strange outliers that need to be allowed for that fall outside that narrow definition.
There are some geos such as Australia where a website with a .com.au extension will very likely be owned by an Australian citizen. At the other end of the scale, a .com website can be targeting pretty much anywhere in the world.
Publisher Discovery Head of AI, Sebastian Toke-Nichols describes the issues that had to be solved: “Our new country code filter finds affiliates by territory and country. For UK sites with a .com domain this can be a very difficult challenge, especially when using techniques like entity extraction which typically find entities from multiple countries. Instead Publisher Discovery uses its proprietary technology to give a sorted set of rankings. This shows which countries an affiliate is most likely to operate in.”
How countries are filtered
As an example of how the filter works in the Verticals view in the app, there are around 9,000 websites relevant for the Home/Garden category. When that is focused on the UK market, PD see a shade over 3,000 which are primarily or partially targeting the UK market.
It’s then possible to filter down further to just the sites with higher traffic and highest relevance – to give a list of a few hundred to reach out to – as this screen shot shows:
The Publisher Discovery platform also provides social media and email details where these are available, so users can reach out and engage with potential new affiliates.
Partnerships
This update is part of the ongoing development of the Publisher Discovery platform, adding further refinements and features for the users. Clients include fashion, antivirus and forex advertisers, as well as OPMs and agencies across Europe, the Americas and Australia.
There are also closer partnerships with affiliate networks, including Affiliate Future, TUNE and Linkconnector, who make Publisher Discovery available as part of the advertiser tracking systems.
Watch a live demo
There will be an online demo of this new technology in a live demo session on 23 July at 4:30pm — register here for the demo.
