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00:00:01
Affiliate Myth
18 Plays2 days ago
In this episode, Rustam Irani challenges the assumption that affiliate partners are low-quality, fraudulent, or ineffective for higher-ed marketing. Drawing from firsthand attribution analysis, he reveals how more than 20% of prospective students engaged with a school through affiliate or directory sites before ever landing on the institution’s website. Rustam breaks down five key factors for evaluating affiliate partnerships—lead quality, compliance, partner selection, performance tracking, and brand reputation—while reframing affiliates not as a risky expense, but as a hidden pipeline and awareness layer that can meaningfully impact enrollment outcomes.
Resources Mentioned
- LeadID (later Jornaya, then Verisk, now acquired by ActiveProspect)
Timestamps
- 00:01 – The Affiliate Myth: Why many higher-ed marketers dismiss affiliates as fraud or low-intent traffic.
- 00:38 – Attribution Discovery: The 20% insight that changed Rustam’s perspective on affiliate value.
- 01:53 – Tracking the Ecosystem: How LeadID/Jornaya enabled cross-site visibility and anonymous user tracking.
- 06:04 – Factor #1: Lead Quality & Qualification: Evaluating intent, demographics, custom questions, and lead scoring.
- 08:06 – Factor #2: Compliance & Ethical Practices: FTC guidelines, traffic sources, and the risks of co-registration.
- 10:35 – Factor #3: Partner Selection: Vetting affiliates through checklists, traffic sources, and longevity.
- 12:03 – Factor #4: Performance Tracking & ROI Models: CPC vs. CPL, cost expectations, and enrollment targets.
- 14:05 – Factor #5: Brand Reputation & Placement Transparency: Protecting brand standards while gaining exposure.
- 17:08 – Reframing the Channel: Why cutting affiliates may shrink your pipeline and assisted conversions.
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Transcript
Introduction to Affiliate Misconceptions
00:00:01
Rustam Irani
Affiliate sites are just fraud. If you worked in higher ed marketing for more than five minutes, you probably heard this line. Maybe you've even said it.
00:00:13
Rustam Irani
We assume that clicks are junk. We assume that leads have low intent. And lot of people assume that the ROI just isn't there. But what if cutting the affiliate partners isn't protecting your budget, it's actually quietly kind of shrinking your pipeline and maybe even having impacts to your overall organic traffic?
00:00:37
Rustam Irani
At one school I worked with, we ran attribution analysis and found some pretty incredible discoveries that really changed the way thought and also the organization thought about affiliate partners.
00:00:54
Rustam Irani
Nearly 20% of visitors that came to our website engaged with us previously on another site. They saw us on a directory listing. They saw us on a publisher site.
00:01:05
Rustam Irani
They saw us out there somewhere else. And we were able to track this. 20%. No junk. No accidental clicks. These were people that were researching, looking for schools and opportunities, and eventually they came to us.
00:01:23
Rustam Irani
Real students looking at real decisions, doing real research.
The Role of Attribution Analysis
00:01:29
Rustam Irani
Welcome back to ROI University, podcast for higher ed marketers and leaders who want to change game and themselves.
00:01:36
Rustam Irani
I'm Rostam Irani. Your host, a recovery engineer and former higher-end CMO. Today, we're breaking down the affiliate myth, a hidden pipeline that some of you may be ignoring.
00:01:50
Rustam Irani
So going back to that story about where we saw the opportunity, we had a tracking tool where we were utilizing, back in the day it was called Lead ID.
00:02:04
Rustam Irani
Some of you have probably seen some of the evolution of this to Jernia and then Verisk. And then most recently actually, it was acquired by Active Prospect.
00:02:16
Rustam Irani
And so basically what this tool did was anybody in the ecosystem that was looking for or coming to any of these websites at these schools, they would have basically a pixel and a tracking link or really a unique ID that they would tag onto somebody's unique profile, all, you know,
00:02:42
Rustam Irani
private, and there was no, it was all decoded. And basically, that ID, we almost called it like a VIN number for your car, right? That's that unique identifier for your car, we call it kind of the VIN number for a prospective student or somebody who is looking.
00:02:59
Rustam Irani
And we were able to track that across multiple different schools across the education lead generation ecosystem because they had built out this huge ecosystem of it.
00:03:10
Rustam Irani
And we were able to track where people were searching, how many times people were looking for a specific program, how many other different sites they saw before they came to our website. There were tons of different data sets that we were able to track.
00:03:31
Rustam Irani
again, anonymously, for these users. And what we realized, which was pretty incredible, was 25%, over 20% of our visitors to our main site at some point saw us on one of these affiliate sites.
00:03:48
Rustam Irani
And that to us was an eye opener because a lot of the conversations were around, hey, affiliate sites just aren't good. Affiliate traffic's not good. Why are we running with affiliates? We shouldn't be running with affiliates.
00:04:01
Rustam Irani
And so we basically, after discovering this, well, one, we knew that affiliates were a good source of potential students for us because, again,
00:04:14
Rustam Irani
These students were looking on a lot of these sites for information. There's a ton of great, great sites out there with very valuable content that's outside of any of the brand pages that you might have, outside of any Google searches these students might be doing, as well as outside of anywhere else they would see you.
00:04:34
Rustam Irani
They're on these sites. And so for us or for an institution to be on there, can be very important. And we found out that it actually was very important. So not only did we consciously know and partner with these, but then that kind of solidified that if we were to completely kill the entire channel, we may not be on those sites.
00:04:58
Rustam Irani
And we may not have that traffic coming to our site from there again.
Evaluating Affiliate Quality
00:05:02
Rustam Irani
So basically what I've done is I wanted to share the top five things to consider when you're looking at affiliate partners. Over the years, I have probably just even myself worked with at least, I'd say, 60 to 70 different companies on this side. and this is over many, many years, but I've worked with literally that many different companies.
00:05:28
Rustam Irani
We also manage affiliates for some schools. And so have firsthand experience with this, the good, the bad, the ugly, and the amazing, right? And I think here the focus is on where can we find those sites that can be relevant, that can provide quality, and what should we be looking at?
00:05:51
Rustam Irani
So here's top five things that I would want to share with you all. One, lead quality and qualification. What is the intent of that site?
00:06:00
Rustam Irani
Look at some of these sites to see what the intent is. Is it to provide valuable information? Is it to just get them to understand that there's this program out there and they could be a good fit? What are the demographics of the site traffic? What are the programs on this?
00:06:21
Rustam Irani
Look at some of the stats behind the site. So there's a lot of things that can be done there to make sure that A, it's a good site that's been around for a while that has the relevant types of students that you're looking for. And so that's one huge thing about it. And then the other side is from a qualification perspective, there's a lot of different things that can be done on these sites. For example, if you're showcasing your school on one of these sites, you can add custom questions. A lot of times are the standard questions, which
00:06:57
Rustam Irani
For the most part, they cover most of what you're looking for, but there are ones that you can ask custom questions that may qualify them a little bit more just for your school or for your program.
00:07:09
Rustam Irani
The other thing is you can also develop out models that look at the data and look at the leads and the people that are coming to the site to see if they could be a good fit.
00:07:23
Rustam Irani
That's considered lead scoring, and we've built models like that, but that's another way to kind of really focus on the lead quality and qualification for your school.
Ethical Practices and Compliance
00:07:32
Rustam Irani
The second thing I would say is compliance and i hate to say it, but ethical practices, right? I got into this industry back in 2008, and I can tell you there was some interesting...
00:07:48
Rustam Irani
practices happening back then. And they were eye-opening for me just to see what was happening with sharing data, with just a lot of different things.
00:07:58
Rustam Irani
I know lot of that has been cleaned up, if not all of it. But there are definitely guidelines and things that you want to look at.
00:08:08
Rustam Irani
You want to make sure it's a site that's been around for a while. You want to make sure that they are complying with FTC advertising guidelines and rules. And then you also want to make sure that the traffic sources, and I'll talk about this at the next point, but where your brand is being showcased, you want to make sure that the people that are getting there are getting there in the right way.
00:08:36
Rustam Irani
I'll give you an example of this. And there are some sites maybe that are relevant here. But back in day, one of the big channels, at least when I started, which was, again, opening to me, was co-registration.
00:08:50
Rustam Irani
And co-registration, all that is, is basically somebody who, and you probably see this, I actually had this happen to me, I think it was last week, we were booking some tickets for spring break.
00:09:02
Rustam Irani
And at the end of the airline ticket, after I booked it, ads popped up and said, hey, would you be interested in this insurance? Would you be interested in this credit card? Would you be interested in this?
00:09:15
Rustam Irani
That is co-registration. So I've already registered, I've already submitted, already purchased, but then afterwards, they're also offering me other offers. That may or may not be the right fit for me. And I think...
00:09:29
Rustam Irani
one of the challenges that I saw very early on were, you know, people who are coming into an offer for going back to school off of something that had no relation to pursuing your education.
00:09:45
Rustam Irani
Right. So that to me was interesting. I think a lot of that has, you know, this was many, many years ago, of changes have happened since then, but, you know, That's just an example of one of those areas where you just want to make sure you understand the source, you understand that it's compliant, and that everything is to your brand standards and guidelines.
00:10:11
Rustam Irani
The third thing I would say is partner selection and making sure that you are doing a bit of research on them. We had I think it was 25, 30 question checklist for any new partner that we would look to bring on, where we would go through and find out about their sources of traffic. We would find out about how long the site's been around,
00:10:37
Rustam Irani
What other clients do they work with? So many different things. What are their target demographics? And what are their traffic sources? So how are they getting people to the site? How are people finding out about him?
00:10:49
Rustam Irani
And so that is something that's huge, right? It could be search traffic that's coming to the site, social, email. They could have built an email list over the years. It could even be display. They could be using native or other types of display campaigns to bring people in to the site. So really understand, you know, A, how long the sites were around, the demographics, B, of the site, and C, kind of what those traffic sources to the site.
00:11:15
Rustam Irani
Those are things that are really, really important when you're looking partner
Metrics and Financial Models
00:11:19
Rustam Irani
selection. The fourth thing I would mention performance tracking. your metrics, and then really what's the return on the investment, just like you would do with any other channel, right?
00:11:31
Rustam Irani
You're looking at what is my budget and what is the expected outcome for my budget, right? What is my target cost per enrollment or cost per student? What are those key metrics?
00:11:42
Rustam Irani
Because the neat thing about affiliate partners is typically it's either a cost per click or a cost per lead type model where You can pay on a cost per click. So somebody comes to one of these sites, they're researching different opportunities, they see your brand, they click on it and come to a landing page, let's say that's hosted by your school, that would be a cost per click.
00:12:07
Rustam Irani
And then the other model is basically if somebody comes there and they host the actual form, so they have your brand there. And then if they're interested, they'll fill out the information and then they post that lead information to you. So that's the host and post. So that's the CPL model. So really just understanding kind of the models there.
00:12:27
Rustam Irani
And then at the end of the day, you're going to have a fixed rate that you're paying for either that click or that lead, which is great because you know what the expectation is. So if you know you're going to be paying $100 a lead, so for $1,000, you're going to get 10 leads.
00:12:44
Rustam Irani
You know that, right? search or social running internal campaigns. We have an idea of our CPCs. We have an idea of our click-through rates and our landing page conversion rates. But We're not 100% sure. So the great thing about this model is you have interested prospects that are coming to a site with relevant information and you only pay for somebody who's actually engaging and clicking on your brand and coming to your landing page or who's filling out information and coming to your CRM.
00:13:17
Rustam Irani
So that's a really, really great thing because it's a lot more manageable. But at the end of the day, you've got to be tracking the metrics on that. And then the fifth thing is brand reputation and trust in the industry.
00:13:31
Rustam Irani
There are some companies that have been around for a long time and done things the right way and haven't done any misrepresentation. They haven't used aggressive tactics and so on with some of the traffic sources and so on.
00:13:46
Rustam Irani
Those are... absolute opportunities for you to make sure analyze these things and do the research find the companies that are being transparent with their sources that are being transparent with placement that you can see what's happening because when you get in the gray area and you're not sure what's happening that's when you know you can kind of let it run and have potentially an area where your brand could show up and it's not relevant. I've seen even some crazy stuff like brands showing up with their apparel, like their
00:14:29
Rustam Irani
branded apparel in sites where it's completely off-brand, but they're just trying to promote them on these sites. I've seen some really interesting things out there. So just making sure that you understand placement, you understand traffic, all of those things. And I'll drop one name because this is one of the first ones that comes to mind. Back when I got into this, it is very memorable because they had a famous actress at the time, Shannon Doherty from 90210. I remember seeing some of their ads. She was in a pajama commercial for them, and it was educationconnection.com.
00:15:07
Rustam Irani
And that site is owned by Education Dynamics. They are an affiliate partner in the education space and have been for a long time. But that is one where I do remember seeing those ads a long, long, long time ago. And, you know, I think things have definitely evolved and changed. don't know if I've seen any pajama commercials lately or commercials at all, really. I think the reality is a lot of these sites still have very good opportunities to showcase your brand, to showcase your schools, to find that traffic that may just even see your brand and not fill out a lead form, not click, but eventually come to your site and come through.
00:15:54
Rustam Irani
There's a lot of value in that and having that exposure. So that is definitely important.
Re-evaluating Affiliate Value
00:16:01
Rustam Irani
Those are kind of the five key factors on my end when you're looking at affiliate partnerships and things to consider. That is really some of the most important things when you're considering looking at the affiliate as channel.
00:16:17
Rustam Irani
So if you're reviewing your channel mix this quarter or even this year, and you've had these conversations and people just continue to shut down affiliate channel, say, we don't want that. It's garbage.
00:16:30
Rustam Irani
You know, they're low quality leads, high volume and so on. I personally think you're doing yourself a disservice, your school a disservice, and then your marketing. a disservice because there opportunities, very, very relevant, good opportunities to showcase your brand in a compliant, ethical way on some of these sites where students are out there searching.
00:16:55
Rustam Irani
And if you're not there, there's going to be another school that's going to be there and they're going get in front of those students. So run the attribution, understand what's happening. Right. Once you do that, bring people on. Look at assisted conversions because it's pretty impressive when you start to see that and look.
00:17:13
Rustam Irani
for some of these hidden opportunities. I think you'd even be surprised if you look at your own Google Analytics data and see where some people are finding you. I think you'd be a little surprised to see what sites they're seeing before they even come to you.
00:17:29
Rustam Irani
Because at the end of the day, that's another... 10, 15, 20% of exposure for your brand that may not be there.
00:17:39
Rustam Irani
And so maybe there's the awareness layer, maybe there's other things there that could be beneficial, but really to kind of focus on the overall outcomes, obviously enrollments, you might need change kind of your perception about this channel.
00:17:55
Rustam Irani
And Let me know if you have any questions or want to reach out about and talk a little bit more about the affiliate channel and why I do believe a lot of people have it wrong when it comes to the affiliate channel.
00:18:10
Rustam Irani
So it's all for ROI University and this week where the biggest ROI is personal.