Hello, Welcome to our Publisher Spotlight! Could you please introduce yourself and what you do at Skimlinks?

Hi! I’m Camilla Pacelli and I am the Director of Partner Development, APAC for Skimlinks. I joined the company as a Merchant Development Manager three years ago and have over eight years’ experience in the affiliate space. I grew up in Italy near Rome and love art & also adore my dogs.

Nice to meet you Camilla, could you introduce Skimlinks for us and what are its core business values?

Skimlinks is the world’s leading commerce content platform. We work with 50 affiliate networks, 60,000 publishers and 48,500 merchants around the world to power over a billion dollars of ecommerce transactions each year. Our one stop-shop commerce platform is used by over half of the top 100 US & UK publishers by revenue.

As a business we have four values: We move the needle, We aim for better, We embrace change and We respect each other. Everyone from the CEO to our newest employee lives by those values’ day-in-day-out. In practice they make us dedicated, driven and demanding of one another. But we also know how to have a good time too.

So, what would you say are the biggest benefits for an advertiser working with your company?

The biggest single benefit is our quality network of editorial content publishers. Our dedicated team puts applicant publishers through a rigorous approval process and only 20% of applicants are approved to join the network.

Advertisers can partner with publishers around the world and when we say that we mean it. We have publishers in the US, the UK, Europe and across Asia-Pacific. We also work with everyone from enterprise publishers like Hearst or Yahoo to our vast network of bloggers, news websites and forums. We’re confident we have the right publishers for any merchant’s affiliate program.

Lastly, we have an excellent track record in driving growth for advertisers through partnerships with publishers. We have a decade’s experience helping advertisers’ leverage commerce content as a channel to drive sales. Our top publishers generate hundreds of millions of dollars each year from their commerce content programs.

Sounds great Camilla, so can you tell us about your audience? What types of advertisers do you work best with?

We have always been a global business – Skimlinks’ founders are Australian – but for some time the US and UK have been our major markets. That has changed dramatically in the past year, where we’ve added over 20 enterprise publishers in Asia-Pacific and are seeing really impressive growth in that market.

In terms of advertisers we have publishers that can work for anyone. For technology brands we have a suite of gadget and electronic publishers, for fashion brands think about a major title – Vogue, Elle, Cosmopolitan – and we work with them, and from vertical-to-vertical we’re able to create valuable partnerships for advertisers of all backgrounds.

What makes Skimlinks an exciting company?

One really exciting thing is our fantastic 2019: We grew in every major market, saw excellent results for our enterprise editorial publishers and brought multiple solutions to market that help publishers generate further commerce revenue. That in turn means more sales for merchants, growth of affiliate programs and better results for these partners.

We also worked closely with the major affiliate networks to increase transparency in the affiliate industry. Advertisers can now access domain level data in the network UI of their choice, which enables them to better understand performance at a granular level and as a result better reward the publishers that drive real results for their businesses.

That all sounds amazing,  you definitely had a great 2019! What plans have you got coming up in the next 12 months?

We saw tremendous growth in APAC in 2019 and are keenly focused on maintaining that pace of expansion. I’m also excited because we’re now expanding headcount in the region, hiring for roles in Australia and Malaysia, and with a larger presence in the region we’ll be able to help more publishers scale commerce content. There is also a lot of interest in our Editorial Network in APAC, as many publishers want to scale commerce but don’t have resources, and this is a fresh challenge for Skimlinks to tackle as a business, so I think we have a fantastic 2020 ahead of us.

Where do you think the Affiliate space is heading towards in the next year, and what do you think are the main market disruptions?

For affiliate our belief is that transparency is the future. Platforms that can provide advertisers with granular performance data they can use to reward publishers who drive results will prosper. From our perspective content will very much remain key in the affiliate space. More and more people turn to editorial brands they trust to understand whether they’re making the right purchase when they shop online. Publishers can be a really fantastic source of sales for advertisers and we’re delighted Skimlinks helps publishers’ power $2.9 million of sales every single day.

That’s great Camilla, so what would you say is the most exciting time of year for you as a business?

Q4 is undoubtedly the most exciting time of the year. The Black Friday weekend is massive in the US and UK, but we now also have Singles Day in APAC. These major ecommerce events are a great opportunity for our platform to power fabulous results for advertisers and publishers alike. As the years go by, we have also found that we can alert our publishers to emerging ecommerce events and help them take advantage of them. That covers more well-known events like Valentine’s Day, where consumers spend billions, and up and coming events like International Women’s Day. Black Friday is by far the biggest, but we’re also finding more and more of these periods that can create real value for our publishers and advertisers.

Is there anything else you’d like our customers to know?

In a similar way to publishers, we’re happy to work with merchants of all sizes, and have different options to suit everyone. Many smaller merchants find our Preferred Program beneficial: It helps improve their visibility to top publisher partners

Thanks Camilla, and lastly what is one fun fact about Skimlinks?

I said earlier that we know how to have “fun” and we really do. For our Christmas party last year, we spent three days in Budapest. And for our tenth anniversary we took a trip to Croatia.