The Advertiser Endpoint

Written by Brook Schaaf

As part of our stack rebuild last year, we removed open access to our longstanding merchant directory, which led to a few unexpected (albeit in hindsight, unsurprising) conversations. Agencies and networks reached out to ask what had happened, going so far as to share that they had regularly been scraping it as the best source of structured program data. (As you already know, FMTC is excellent with data handling.)

What surprised me most was not that people missed the directory, but the revelation of many workflows quietly depending on it. From this, a product quickly and naturally emerged, and today I am proud to announce our Advertiser Programs API endpoint. If you’d like to learn more, just reply to this email. The endpoint might be valuable to any significant player in the affiliate marketing ecosystem. It provides a normalized view of advertiser programs across the affiliate ecosystem: the advertiser name; the program platform (network) name; the sign-up URL, if available; the primary country; the primary category; and the managing agency, if any. This will make ecosystem awareness, advertiser discovery, and integration much easier. Affiliates can also use our ProgramFlow workflow to select and monitor their status with the various programs.

“Advertiser” is a new word for FMTC. We go back so far (almost 20 years!) that the pair “merchant and affiliate” wasn’t even much of a decision, though CJ had by that point changed to “advertiser and publisher.” Advertiser is a nice umbrella term, and we thought of moving that way a few years ago, but a user survey indicated it wasn’t causing any problems, and merchants’ affinity with retailers was then and remains positive. Ditto publishers, though, as an umbrella term, it has the disadvantage of disassociating from the commission and performance expectation. (I was surprised and delighted to see that the iPX category for next week is “Publisher or Affiliate,” because it was impact.com that years ago launched its accursed “affiliate is dead” campaign, which itself mercifully died.)

With our new endpoint, however, “advertiser” felt very natural, both for where we are and for where we are going. For where we’re at, it’s a clean distinction from our long-existing Merchants endpoint, which our feed subscribers use. To it, we have added the human-readable program platform name (what we call networks) and the managing agency, if any. To our existing list of 17,602 merchants, we intend to add many more advertisers, including, for example, lead-generation programs that don’t have coupons or product feeds. We intend to broaden this into a more complete advertiser graph, one that helps the industry understand itself over time in our ever-changing space. For example, over the years, we’ve integrated a total of 82,934 programs.

Allow me now to share my greater vision for affiliate marketing: that our channel take a more appropriate share of the value we drive. Right now, this seems to be vastly undersized. We get something like 2 to 3% of ad dollars against 10 or 15% of transactional touches, a percentage that is probably higher for lead programs.

One reason, among admittedly many, that this happens is that affiliate is too high-friction. You cannot join or reference a program you do not know exists. My hope with this endpoint is to contribute to actionable awareness of opportunities with advertisers for all major players in the affiliate ecosystem.

This is the true endpoint.