Affiliates talks: Ivan Rud «Keitaro>
The guest of our today’s interview is Ivan Rud, ex-head of technical support at Keitaro, currently head of Inbound Marketing.
Ivan has helped a lot of affiliates, has shared a lot of useful features, and listened to a lot of people’s wishes, and later made them come true.
He was happy to tell us about himself, the history of the Keitaro tracker, its special aspects, and a little bit about its development. We’ve got a great interview here!
1. Hello Ivan! Please tell us a little bit about yourself, your path in affiliate marketing, and your experience working at Keitaro.
Hello. In 2016, I fully decided to stop my offline business and sold everything I had, bought my first ever Macbook, sat at home, and decided that I was going to learn how to make money on the Internet. I read different forums, social media public pages. I was even clicking links one day thinking that I could automate that and make a ton of money. And then I stumbled upon affiliate marketing (selling products was very popular back then) and saw that the sphere had a lot of potential and could possibly bring big money. About a month after learning this topic, I knew all the terms and how the market worked. That was also the time I decided to become a content maker for an online resource, writing articles about affiliate marketing and launching my first ad campaigns. A year later, I was working at a large affiliate network as a content manager, driving traffic and using Keitaro. That affiliate network was working on a PR collaboration project with Keitaro and I was ordered to create a video guide for new Keitaro users. I did a good job and got an offer from the owner of Keitaro to join their team as a support employee. This is how I started working there.
2. Are Keitaro looking to hire right now? If so, then who are they looking for and what can they offer?
It’s rare that we have job openings but we are looking for a full-time designer and front-end developer with great React experience. However, we do have a list of candidates and all we have left to do is run interviews and find our guy. I think that when this interview is out, we’ll already have them hired.
3. Please tell us about your experience in affiliate marketing? What was your progress like?
As I’ve already mentioned, I was working with products and dating verticals. Then I also worked with nutra and gambling for a bit. Never had huge success with affiliate marketing: I was getting my profit but without super high ROIs. The highest I ever got was $15k with a team of 4 people. I worked as a media buyer for several affiliate teams, was doing their tech support and even farming accounts at one point. Well, I tried to grow my technical skills in any way I could. As I was getting more and more into Keitaro, I stopped doing affiliate marketing at all. Right now, we’re pushing towards developing partner relationships with affiliate teams that work with our product and can be fast with sending their feedback. Though sometimes we do technical launches of various ad campaigns on our own to conduct some research and get a bit of information about a new traffic source, etc.
4. Your tracker is the ultimate affiliate tool. Tell us, what traffic sources do the majority of affiliates work with? Maybe, there are some sources that a lot of people don’t even know about.
There are tons of sources, starting from old-school approaches – banner websites and so on, and all the way to the fundamentals such as Facebook and TikTok. I’ve noticed that people have been using teaser and context ads way less lately. And, well, they find traffic anywhere, the only thing is to have the right approach. Recently there’s been a case where a client drove offline traffic using Keitaro QR codes.
5. Many trackers provide their pool of ad sources IP bots along with their subscription, does Keitaro offer anything of this sort?
We do have pools of bots that we update once in 2 weeks. They’re utilized through a built-in bot filter. After integrations with cloaking services, we understood that there’s no point for us to try and become the best in this sphere. So, we’re just going to grow the number of our integrations.
6. A tracker is an important tool for anyone who works with ads online. Are your clients mainly affiliates or do you work with many other people from different spheres?
We have different client categories. Beginner solo affiliates and B2B agencies. We also work with a couple of trading companies, network marketing companies, and affiliate networks. We attract clients from different perspectives: we have a great support team, offer affordable prices, and an opportunity to develop one’s own features within our tracker (integrate custom scripts, redirects, filters, etc.)
7. Keitaro is server software, you don’t sell your subscription packages on cloud servers like many other trackers do. How come?
Our business model doesn’t cover this. We’re trying to do what we’re good at – make our tracker better. This is why right now we’re negotiating with several hosts, trying to establish partner relationships so that our users can get priority support and great discounts. And we’re going to promote their resources using our influence. Besides that, they’re going to sell package deals with a tracker already installed or offer installation services. Just like our support team does right now.
8. Please tell us how you price your tracker. Are there any increases awaiting?
Our tracker has been developing since 2008 and has been on the market since 2012. It was a simple traffic-developing system back then. The main criteria for price increases have always been an increase in the resources we spend to develop the product and support it. We were never trying to get more money and we never increased our prices without any reason for it. The last time we did this was in 2018. Since that, all the main market players have increased their prices multiple times.
If we have advances in price in the future, that will be backed up by a significant technical upgrade and a new version - Keitaro 10. But for now, there’s no reason to think about it.
9. Do you provide any recommendations as to what server to pick to install Keitaro?
Yes, our documentation has an interactive table that helps choose a server based on a client’s needs.
10. How many clients does your tracker carry out in a month? Are there any solo affiliates that drive more traffic than some teams? Or do you not obtain this kind of information?
Since we have a self-hosted product and all the trackers are installed on client sides, we don’t have information about all of our clients, we can only tell anything about those that contact our support team. I can’t tell you about a month since everything is measured in days, but as I have witnessed, the maximum was 80 million clicks a day. And there are solo affiliates that drive respectable amounts. But teams, of course, have better results (those teams that don’t consist entirely of beginners). On average, our clients get from 2k to 100k clicks a day.
11. How often does Keitaro crash? Does this happen because users do something wrong? Or, maybe, there are errors on your side? How can a user be prepared for unexpected situations without losing their traffic?
There can be plenty of reasons for this: incompatible computers, hosting-side problems, aggressive use of the tracker (when users try to adjust the code to themselves or work with their server incorrectly), and, of course, bugs on our side occur too. The product is multifunctional. Whenever we make any changes to it, we try our best to consider everything and test new versions very thoroughly but we too can let something slide at times.
We actually have a team that takes care that the tracker works for ages without bothering system administrators. These guys do everything for the tracker to never crash, trying to predict malicious situations. For example, if a client messes with the server and resets all our configurations, we will be able to fix everything with one command. And right now, they’re testing a downgrade that will allow users to downgrade the tracker after they have upgraded it.
Here’s what you need to do to protect yourself from traffic losses:
• back up regularly;
• don’t try to readjust the tracker and the server to those cases they’re initially not meant for;
• use appropriate computers so that the tracker doesn’t crash from overloads;
• and, of course, be quick to contact our support team and don’t try to solve everything on your own or using other “specialists”.
12. What do you think, can Facebook start banning domains that are parked at Keitaro? Maybe they can do this using identifier formats or some other way?
I don’t think so. It’s not a cloud product, so we have the advantage. Each client’s tracker has its own server, its own fingerprint, own IP, etc. I don’t think they’re going to block domains just because they’re parked at private servers.
13. What Keitaro package would you recommend a beginner affiliate to buy so that they have enough features available?
Depends on the job that a beginner is doing. If they’re just starting out, they can use the trial version. They can prolong their trial period if they still have some time to get into the program, they just need to contact our support team to do this. Next, if they need to go deeper into tracker features, they might want to use the Pro package, it’s an ultimate subscription that covers the majority of the needs. They can also start with the basic package, and upgrade it to pro or business anytime in their personal account.
14. Can users assign any roles to their partners in your tracker? Can they grant special access to the analytics?
Yes, there are several access levels. You can assign different levels to your whole team. An administrator can see all the data, media buyers can either be assigned to certain campaigns or those campaigns that they create themselves. You can also create special access for your tech employees, grant them access to ad campaigns, having disabled report access. We do provide many options for our clients here.
15. Does the Keitaro company plan on creating and implementing new features into its tracker? Are you thinking about creating a new product, not related to trackers and Keitaro?
Of course, we’re always working towards implementing new functions. And as for new products, the tracker is always our priority and we put all our strength into its development. We have some tech issues yet to solve since the tracker is already 13 years old.
16. Ivan, please, give some advice to those that have read the whole article.
I can give affiliate advice to those just beginning: if you don’t know where to start and what to do – join a team. There are many teams these days that teach beginners a lot of important aspects. You will learn faster in a team and therefore will understand whether or not you like affiliate marketing and if you can aim to work with bigger budgets.
And, if we’re talking about common advice, I recommend you value your time. Time is the most valuable resource, it’s irretrievable, and you have to understand it. Be effective and good luck in your job!
Thank you for inviting me, have a good day.