Welcome to the second part of our “Champions of Performance Marketing” interview with Evan Weber.
Today, we continue our conversation with Evan Weber, a pioneer in affiliate marketing and digital advertising.
In this segment, Evan delves into the intricacies of remarketing across multiple platforms, the effectiveness of LinkedIn for B2B marketing, and his proven strategies for optimizing Google Ads.
He also shares his thoughts on the role of AI tools like ChatGPT in enhancing marketing efforts and provides valuable advice for those just starting in affiliate marketing.
Evan’s insights are practical and actionable, offering a clear path to improving your marketing performance.
Q: Well, as you previously mentioned, you need to follow people around with remarketing. What platforms are you using mostly for remarketing?

Evan Weber: Multiple platforms at once. So, if it’s consumer-based or B2C or D2C, I use Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Google Ads (including YouTube and website targeting), and specific website targeting platforms like Criteo and AdRoll. You could have a small daily budget on each one, maybe $20 on Meta, $20 on web retargeting, $20 on TikTok.
You don’t need to spend much to create a good loop with visitors that didn’t convert.
You can also target old customers, like those who haven’t ordered in a long time or dropped their subscriptions. That’s a retention campaign, which is remarketing to previous customers instead of recent website visitors.
You can run $10 or $20 daily on each platform to that audience. Upload your data into the platform and run specific ads to those people to get them to come back or repurchase.
LinkedIn is a good option for B2B. You can retarget on LinkedIn, even for direct-to-consumer. I haven’t had a ton of success with it myself, but I recommend it if you want to be on every platform following people around. It just depends on the match between the site visitors and the LinkedIn audience. Over time, if you’re driving a lot of traffic to the site, then there will be more people who match up.
Q: So you recommend LinkedIn mainly for B2B, not for D2C?
Evan Weber: Yes, LinkedIn. For B2B or SaaS platforms, I mean new traffic and retargeting. LinkedIn has great targeting and also remarketing. You can do both through LinkedIn with different campaigns. I have clients who target multiple industries simultaneously with different ads and retargeting ads for specific people. You have to be very personalized with this.
Personalization always works best. If you can make it relevant for the person and tap into their emotions somehow, your advertising will have a better result.
Q: And do you think LinkedIn works for affiliates to use it to drive revenue as an affiliate?

Evan Weber: It depends. It can. If it’s like a SaaS, it absolutely can.
It depends on how well they convert and how well the landing page converts for the SaaS or software. The traffic is generally pretty cost-effective, maybe as low as 50 cents a click up to $2 a click, but above a dollar a click, you start getting into the danger zone of losing money and not being profitable. It’s really important to have compelling ads and good targeting.
Every targeting parameter on LinkedIn has a different rate and a different CPM rate. So you have to experiment a lot with where you can get the traffic cheaply enough to make it work.
But, it can work. You can also tap into LinkedIn people or LinkedIn influencers and their organic posting ability.
Getting affiliates that are LinkedIn influencers or have a decent-sized audience is good. They don’t have to be influencers because there aren’t many. There are a lot of medium-sized people you can approach.
For instance, if you have a sales tool for the sales industry, you can get some people with many salespeople following them. A sales industry influencer, bring in 10 or 20 of those, and that could be a great affiliate program source for you.
But it has to convert. They have to make money.
Sometimes, you have to throw money at them, saying “Hey, if you become our affiliate, we’ll give you a $250 bonus plus 20% commission on all the paid upgrades.”
You have to make it almost not sound like an affiliate program because some affiliates don’t want to hear that. Recruiting affiliates is difficult because many people who try it and don’t make money think it’s terrible.
So, if you approach someone who tried to be an affiliate before and didn’t make money, they’ll be skeptical. You must highlight that your program is different: guaranteed money, better conversion rates, better processes, and more money. Recruiting and managing affiliates will be more successful if you do it with a strategy.
Q: What is one of the most useful things you need to pay attention to when optimizing a Google ads campaign, in your opinion?
Evan Weber: I’m glad you asked. First, you need a good tracking platform like CPV Lab or CPV One. Often the ad platform’s tracking is not accurate, or Google Analytics is not accurate.
It’s really important to have a first-party-based tracking platform where you can drop your own cookie and see which channels are converting the leads or sales.
So, you need really good tracking.
It depends on whether it’s B2B or direct to the consumer. Some quick tips are the bidding strategies. If you use the wrong bidding strategy, the cost per click will be too high.
You must experiment with strategies like target CPA, ROAS, or manual cost per click.
I like testing things on manual cost-per-click enhanced for conversions so I can control the CPC. Sometimes, on target ROAS or target CPA, you can get a decent cost per click, but often, you don’t. If the average cost per click is over $2, you’ll have a hard time getting a return on investment.
The goal is to get the traffic around a dollar a click or less, but it can be higher depending on how targeted it is and how well you convert the people.
A lot of people don’t check the search terms report.
You have your keyword list, and you have:
- broad match
- phrase match
- exact match.
You have to experiment with those match types.
Broad match can bring in a lot of irrelevant search terms that need to be weeded out by making them negative. The exact match requires less weeding out but still needs attention.
Checking the search terms report reveals the actual phrases triggering your ads.
You need to mark irrelevant ones as negative and keep the list clean, doing this weekly at least. Otherwise, you could waste money on irrelevant clicks.
Your ad copy is also important. You need compelling ad copy and display ads if you’re running display. For e-commerce, I prefer standard shopping campaigns over pmax because it allows you to control the cost per click. With pmax, the cost per click can get too high, and your shopping feed may not run as you want.

Focus on the products in your shopping catalog that convert the best and minimize those that don’t. Run your budget on the keywords and products that perform best over time for the best return. This allows you to increase the budgets effectively.
Most companies don’t realize all their search volume because they don’t convert well enough or run the account properly. It’s crucial to work on conversion optimization and manage the account properly. There’s a lot of paid search management incompetence out there.
Brands need to watch their agencies and in-house people closely. It’s a very important channel, and if not managed properly, you’re not tapping into its potential. You have to get it right.
Q: So from what I see, you don’t agree with just running a PMax campaign and trusting the automation to do everything?

Evan Weber: No, absolutely not. No, not unless you want your brand serving for your company name most of the time, instead of your shopping feed.
I mean, there are accounts where we run all the individual campaign types and then have a pmax campaign that gets a certain amount of the budget, maybe 10%, 20% of the budget, if that.
But I like to run standard shopping campaigns, standard search campaigns, remarketing campaigns, all in their own campaigns. And then maybe have a pmax campaign as a small percentage of the overall budget. That’s how I do it myself.
I don’t trust the systems. I don’t trust the system. Nope. I’ve been managing Google too long. I know the way I do it works, right?
So, the Pmax thing and just turning it over to them is for people who don’t have a lot of experience running these types of campaigns, in my opinion.
You’ll hit on every property they offer, but the budget won’t go to the right types of campaigns where you have control. Also, you need that control.
You need to be able to control the cost per click if possible. Where you can’t control the cost per click, I don’t like it. I don’t like it because you must get the most relevant traffic for the lowest cost.
That’s the key to getting more traffic with the budget and then driving more revenue. That revenue can be reinvested into increasing the daily budgets if it’s not opened up all the way.
Like I said, most companies can’t even realize all their daily search volume because they don’t convert well enough, and they just don’t budget enough for it.
But you can’t budget enough for it if you’re not converting enough. Effective media buying goes hand in hand with conversion optimization on the website. You have to do both at the same time. You can’t just do one or the other.
Many agencies will say, “Oh yeah, we’re going to do a great job managing your Google account.” But what about the website? I don’t care how good you think you are at managing Google or whatever platform. If the website isn’t being honed for better conversions, it’s never going to do that well. You’ll never realize all the potential.
The return won’t be that good. I don’t care how great of a manager they think they are. You’re always restricted by the website’s effectiveness. So, that’s why you have to always focus on increasing the website’s effectiveness.
Q: What metrics do you pay the most attention to when optimizing campaigns?

Evan Weber: It’s always about the conversion rate and the average cost per click. In my opinion, those are the two most important. I’ve argued with people on LinkedIn about the cost-per-click issue, and they don’t see it the same way, but that doesn’t bother me because they’re just not as savvy.
Really, it’s about getting the most relevant traffic for the cheapest, so the budget stretches as far as possible. You get the most traffic for the money and convert it as well as possible.
The click-through rate is important. It tells you if your bid needs to go higher or if it’s too low. So, the cost per click, click-through rate, and conversion rate are probably the three most important metrics to focus on.
The conversion value will lead to the return on ad spend (ROAS). The conversion value impacts the ROAS, and you do want a good conversion value. That goes to the site’s ability to convert and also upsell and get a good average order value (AOV). So, yeah, all those metrics matter.
Q: You mentioned that you are using ChatGPT. How do you use other AI tools in your work?

Evan Weber: Yes, I do. I use Google’s and Meta’s tools. Sometimes, I’ll go to those other tools and get statistics on the industry.
I’ll ask Google Gemini or Meta Tool to give me ten statistics on the digital marketing industry or whatever. Then I’ll take those statistics and put them into ChatGPT and say, “Now write me an article using these statistics,” because ChatGPT sometimes doesn’t have the latest statistics. You might get better statistics from Google or Meta.
I don’t think those other tools write as well. I’ve used them a lot. Sometimes, I just have a lot of effectiveness with ChatGPT, and I’m comfortable with it. I believe it cranks out the best quality content as far as writing and understanding what you’re asking it to write. But one thing people need to know is you just have to practice with it a lot.
You can have it write ad headlines, ad descriptions, email content, landing page content, and product descriptions—everything needs to run through there to make it more convincing.
For instance, a lot of e-commerce sites have boring product descriptions. You can put those through ChatGPT and make them exciting.
Rewriting all the product descriptions is one very effective thing for e-commerce sites to do. I have clients for whom I made them rewrite all the product descriptions, and it works. It leads to more sales because it sells the product instead of just describing it. ChatGPT articulates it better than human writers, in my opinion. There are some good writers out there, but not all brands have them.
Well, brands don’t have them, and who’s going to rewrite 5,000 product descriptions? But you can put them in a spreadsheet and then connect that to ChatGPT.
You can put all the current product titles and descriptions, take that spreadsheet, upload it to ChatGPT, and say, “Now rewrite the description this way.” And it’ll do them all like that. Then you just have to paste them into the admin.
So yeah, I’m still very excited about ChatGPT and the quality, but you have to work on it. You have to get comfortable with it and practice with it. Otherwise, you may not get the best results.
Sometimes, it doesn’t crank out the greatest thing ever. You have to say, “Now add this, add that, take this out, put this in, rewrite it, make it shorter, make it longer, make it more exciting.” A million different instructions and commands that you could give it to finally get it to the most awesome thing you could possibly imagine.
So a lot of people see, I think that one of the misconceptions is that you ask it to write something and you don’t really like what it writes. So you’re like, “Oh, this sucks,” but it’s never done the first time. You have to keep iterating on that.
Q: If you were to start a new business today, helping the affiliate marketing and partnerships industry, what problem would you like to solve?

Evan Weber: I think SaaS companies need to partner with each other and become each other’s affiliates. I think that’s a very underutilized strategy that works.
For instance, on your platform or mine, you can have a section for partners and include other SaaS platforms for which you’re an affiliate. You put them on a page in the dashboard so some of your traffic will go there. Sign up for the free trial, and if they upgrade, you will make a commission. There’s a lot of opportunity there for SaaS. I tell SaaS companies all the time that their best affiliate will be other SaaS dashboards, but they don’t always listen. Some do, but many don’t want to put it in the dashboard for some reason. I can tell them what to do but can’t make them do it.
In the broader affiliate world, the biggest opportunity right now is with TikTok Shop, as long as it sticks around and TikTok doesn’t go away.
The TikTok affiliate thing is booming, with people selling products through TikTok Shop. Another great type of affiliate is editorial publishers. These can be different types of web publishers, like news sites or large web publishers that do editorial articles about brands.
This is one of the best types of affiliates because it’s all new customers and new traffic. People often find these articles through search, which converts really well because they’re convinced to purchase within the article.
Editorial web publishers are number one in my book regarding quality traffic. D2C brands need to get those. You can get them through platforms like Skimlinks or Linkby, where you pay to get the articles done per click or as straight affiliates. In my opinion, this is the top type of affiliate traffic, followed by TikTok Shop affiliates.
I believe in cultivating all types of affiliates at once—bloggers, influencers, and media buyers. You should always be recruiting and managing or messaging your affiliates. If you’re not messaging enough, they won’t participate enough.
If you’re not trying to get them on the phone or on a video call, you won’t have as much participation and loyalty. If you’re not recruiting constantly, you won’t be adding new people to the program, and you might lose some.
You always need to be gaining new affiliates. That’s really the crux of growing an affiliate program—a lot of outreach, being on the right networks, working with all the affiliates personally, and always trying to get new ones.
You have to make it lucrative for them, like running contests, offering first-sale bonuses, and increasing their commission rates if they drive more sales. It’s not enough to just run the affiliate program; you have to motivate them and convert their traffic well. The goal is to get more producers over time so you have hundreds of producers producing all at once. That’s how you attain a large, productive affiliate program.
Q: Do you have a tip for someone starting now in affiliate marketing? What should they pay attention to or do?
Evan Weber: Yeah. Good. Another good question. Well, I probably recommend trying to partner with big brands, you know, brands that people know. So you have good confidence that it’s going to convert well because people are familiar with the brand. High ticket items, items with a high average order value, like mattresses, jewelry, vacations, travel, things like that, where people are spending a thousand or more per purchase. That way, if you’re getting 10%, you’ll be getting a hundred dollars or more per sale. And that can fund the media buying or whatever you’re putting the money into, especially if they’re trying to do media buying, which, of course, is difficult to do work. You have to have a good commission rate and a good converting offer. Otherwise, you’re losing money. So, I don’t recommend it unless you have some experience managing the ads.
As we talked about earlier, the search terms report, the cost per click average, the media buyer has to be hyper-focused on those things. Otherwise, they’re losing money. They’re spending money on the ads, and the commissions aren’t exceeding. So it’s difficult to be a media buyer. I’m not going to sugarcoat it, but yeah, I would look for high-ticket items. I know you don’t want to hear that, but people need to realize that so they don’t blow their money. So they don’t blow through a thousand dollars and be like, “I didn’t make anything.”
I push people more towards organic content, blogging, content production, trying to grow your TikTok audience. Over the years, I have pushed people more toward an organic content strategy than a paid one. And then, once you have some organic presence, maybe paid to get some more people to the website or blog post and see if you can get some profit going that way.
Recently, we had a talk with Craig Campbell, the SEO expert, he said that focusing only on SEO is not enough anymore. You need to combine it with ads to drive more traffic.
That (combining paid ads with SEO) should always have been the strategy. A lot of my strategies have been around for 20 years. They’ve always been effective. Nothing has changed with effective digital marketing. Now, there are more platforms and more changes, but the core principles remain the same.
Q: Some say SEO is no longer as effective because people use ChatGPT and other AI tools to get answers instead of searching on Google. What do you think about that?

Evan Weber: Well, guess what? That hasn’t happened yet.
People are searching for other tools, but Google hasn’t lost any search volume. They’re still getting about eight billion searches a day. Google’s traffic hasn’t dropped off.
Now, putting generative AI search results at the top and dissuading people from visiting websites is a little more concerning.
But I don’t think Google will stop funneling traffic to organic websites and paid ads because that’s where they make a lot of their money. So, they’re not going to do anything that prevents ads from being clicked. But we’ll see how the organic content stuff plays out. I still think people should do organic content posting because there’s still plenty of organic traffic. It’s not like it disappeared.
People like to talk and jump to conclusions. At first, people said ChatGPT content wouldn’t rank in Google. Now they say organic content isn’t going to get any traffic anymore, which I don’t believe either. You have to watch what you hear on LinkedIn. There are a lot of people who talk a lot on LinkedIn but don’t really know or are just jumping to conclusions.
LinkedIn is a great platform. You can build up SEO traffic from LinkedIn with a newsletter. Each personal profile and company page can have a newsletter and articles posted there. Everyone needs a newsletter. Launching a newsletter asks all your connections to join immediately, so you immediately have a few thousand subscribers.
Even the posts on LinkedIn can rank well in Google organic. When I’m doing an article for my newsletter with ChatGPT, I make sure it’s SEO optimized. Once you publish the article, you have a post that goes along with it that says, “Hey, check out my latest article,” and that can be SEO optimized, too. You have two chances right there to get Google rankings.
Sometimes, LinkedIn articles might rank better than a blog post on your website, depending on how well your website ranks. I publish on multiple platforms like Medium, LinkedIn, and my website. When I go after a topic, I’ll publish five or six articles about the same topic, all rewritten differently on multiple platforms. A couple of weeks later, I’ll see my content ranking in multiple places. That’s a strategy anyone can do.
It’s free traffic.
The thing with B2B and Google is that there just isn’t a lot of search volume for B2B topics compared to e-commerce. The search volume is far less.
People in B2B need to understand that. They might put a lot of effort into their SEO, but there isn’t much search volume, so they’re not going to get much traffic. They’re better off advertising on LinkedIn. There’s not a lot of Google search volume, so paid ads and organic won’t do much. However, on LinkedIn, you can run ads for your content and articles.
I run ads on LinkedIn for my LinkedIn articles. For example, for affiliate management, I’ll target people interested in bringing on an affiliate manager and take them to an article on LinkedIn about how great we are at affiliate management. That article basically sells the service. They never even have to go to my website. The article itself can do the job. It’s like a sales page. You can still link to your website or have a call to action at the bottom, like “contact me for a free quote.” That’s a winning strategy.
Q: Where can people get in touch with you to learn more about affiliate marketing?
Evan Weber: They can find me anywhere. I’m outside. I’m down the street. I’m always on LinkedIn. I’m always on Skype. I’m always online, to be honest. They can email me.
They can connect with me on LinkedIn. I have phone calls with people all the time and with affiliates. I’ve probably spoken to more affiliates than any other person on the planet in the last 20 years.
I don’t think there’s anyone that’s actually spoken to more affiliates than me because we’ve managed at one time I was managing, you know, 30 or 40 affiliate programs at once, and each one had 5,000 plus affiliates in it.
So I’d send out a newsletter or have my team send out a newsletter saying, “Hey, let’s set up a call,” which affiliate managers don’t do, which they should be doing. And then, you know, then I put my phone number in the newsletter, “Call my cell phone,” or “Let’s set up a video call.”
And then some of them will be like, “Yeah, let’s talk about it. Let’s set up a call.”
But if you don’t put it out there in a friendly way, the affiliates won’t ever want to talk to you because they just don’t know that there’s anything to learn.
But, when you offer that, they will take you up on it. Not all of them, a small percentage, you know, I’m always in all the newsletters we send out it’s, you know, “Call me, call me, call me,” or “Let’s set up a call.” And a small amount does, but at least we’re putting it in there where other affiliate managers don’t even say, “Call me.”
They don’t even say, “Let’s set up a call.” They’re just sending a newsletter with things like, “Here’s our coupon. Have a nice day. Hopefully, you make some sales.” Most affiliate management is done inadequately, poorly, and with not enough proactivity. I’ve been talking about this for years, though.
Even their newsletters look like crap, you know, so their newsletters have to look good. They have to sound good. They have to be friendly. They have to convey stuff about the company. Of course, give promotions. Every affiliate likes a promotion or a coupon, but it’s much more.
You have to build a relationship and become besties with your affiliates. That’s the job of the affiliate manager. If they’re not doing that, they’re being a lame affiliate manager, and it’s not gonna work. All their affiliates are going to be the ones that capitalize on their website’s traffic, like the browser extensions the coupon affiliates, and the brand biders. They won’t have any content affiliates. They won’t have any influencers.
They won’t if they don’t really try to bond with people and make them seem like they can make money, give them ideas, and brainstorm with them.
Q: I think an affiliate manager also has to filter the affiliates applying to the program because that’s also a big part of it. How do they start, and how do you help them start?

Evan Weber: Yeah. And that’s why you have to talk to them all. You have to speak to them. Sometimes, you’ll get fraudulent affiliates coming through. You have to screen all the affiliates. That’s where affiliate networks don’t screen their own affiliates. They just let anyone come onto the platform, and then it’s up to the brands to screen, which they don’t do enough. And they get hit with fraud, and they’re like, “What happened?”
So, it’s a whole process for really managing an affiliate program properly. It’s hard to be an affiliate, especially a media buyer, where you’re spending your own money.
It’s possible, but you need to be very savvy. I don’t just encourage anyone to do that because I don’t want to see them lose money.
Maybe you can get a $250 coupon to Google or Bing; if you get like that, spend $250, get $250, spend $500, get $500. Maybe if you’re willing to invest that much, it might help you get closer to profitability if you can get some free clicks out of it. So I give them the coupon and stuff to do that. But it’s tough. There are a lot of people who want to be an affiliate so badly, but it’s just not realistic for most people. It’s just not realistic that they’re actually going to make money like that. That’s just the reality of it.
If they just want to make money overnight and they just try something in one month and they expect to get rich at the end of the month, it’s not really that. It’s a lot of learning and testing.
Learning. I think it’s mostly learning and just trial and error, experimenting with small amounts of money or free content.
But it’s frustrating because there are a lot of people that want to be an affiliate. And then there are a lot of bad systems out there and people saying, “Hey, I’ll teach you how to be an affiliate; sign up for my course. It’s only going to cost you $499.” I don’t recommend to do that. Otherwise, they’ll spend the money, and they won’t make a penny.
Conclusion
Evan Weber’s deep understanding of affiliate marketing and digital advertising shines through in his practical advice and strategies. From multi-platform remarketing to leveraging LinkedIn for B2B success, and optimizing Google Ads, Evan’s expertise covers all bases.
His emphasis on continuous learning, careful tracking, and the effective use of AI tools like ChatGPT underscores the importance of staying adaptive and proactive in the digital marketing landscape. For anyone looking to elevate their marketing efforts, Evan’s guidance is an invaluable resource. Thank you for joining us in this installment of the “Champions of Performance Marketing” series.
Stay tuned for more expert insights in our upcoming interviews.
You can contact Evan Weber here:
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/worldsgreatestmarketer/
- Website: experienceadvertising.com
Here is the full interview with Evan Weber (you should hit subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any other interviews!):

Author: Julia Draghici
Julia is the CEO of CPV Lab and CPV One ad trackers. She has 15+ years experience in the software industry, from development to management. For more than 6 years she is helping marketers get the best out of their marketing campaigns by using a performant ad tracker. Passionate about entrepreneurship, business and performance marketing, Julia loves helping people!