Welcome to the new episode of our interview series, Champion of Performance Marketing, where we delve into the stories and strategies of industry leaders who have made significant impacts in the marketing world. Today, I have the pleasure of introducing you to Anna Gita, the CEO and co-founder of MaxWeb.
Anna’s journey into the world of affiliate marketing is nothing short of inspiring, as she transitioned from a well-earned career break to becoming a driving force in the industry.
In this episode, Anna shares her first encounter with affiliate marketing, the challenges she faced in building MaxWeb, and her unique approach to overcoming these obstacles.
Q: What was your first contact with affiliate marketing?
Anna: My first contact was with one of my best friends and mentors in the industry, Mike.
He had a bunch of companies online, and he was looking for someone to help him run one of these companies.
So, a friend of a friend said: ‘Ana, you have an MBA, right?’
Then I said, ‘I do, but I’m…’ It was the first time in my life when I took a little break for myself when I didn’t want to work because I had worked since I was 19, and I had very, like, powerful jobs.
Long story short, my friend says, ‘Well, talk to Mike for five minutes. I know you’re not looking for a job right now, but he’s looking for someone with an MBA who can help him in business. Just talk to him.’
After a 30-minute call with Mike Peters, I fell in love with the industry. Mike became one of my best friends and mentors, and I helped him run the company for a while. Then, I had the idea of MaxWeb a few years later.
Q: What challenges did you face when creating MaxWeb?
Anna: There are so many challenges because it’s a volatile industry where you could be having thousands of sales on an offer one day and a couple of hundred the next.
You have to be prepared. I was lucky to have a business background, not a marketing one.
Always set money aside for the months when the profit is not as great, know how to grow organically, not get too excited when you’re doing well, and try to be as humble as possible. In business, there are going to be instances where things are really not working out. And I think the challenge was finding the right people. That was probably the hardest part when I created MaxWeb.
Q: How did you manage to find the right people for MaxWeb?
Anna: “It took a lot of me having to work both shifts. I did everything from sending invoices to setting up campaigns, grabbing affiliate links, and anything else. And I think the team respects me more to this day than I still know how.
I probably don’t know how to do them as well as they do day-to-day, but I always try very hard to understand everything they have to deal with so I can be present. But that was the hardest.
I think any successful entrepreneur would tell you that finding self-motivated, quality people is very hard. And we work in a remote environment.
The team is all over the world, so we really need people who are inherently excited to work without me having to remind them, without our VP or our operations manager telling them, without micromanagement. It’s just self-motivation.”
Q: Why did you choose the CPA model for MaxWeb?
Anna: That one was an easy choice because when I was helping Mike with the previous company, I was running a network that mainly did rev share, and rev share was such a pain for affiliates because refunds would come in.
Affiliates are brilliant marketers, but they’re not the best. They don’t enjoy the financial or economic side. They just want to make money. And many affiliates would get so overwhelmed because they would make a bunch of money, and then three months later, refunds would come in, right? They were negative. They didn’t have money to spend.
It was very frustrating for affiliates because most of them didn’t know how to plan ahead, how much to expect, or how to calculate the allowance, the refunds, and the chargebacks. With CPA, it’s very easy. It’s cost per action. You get, let’s say, $100 for every customer you send. Refunds do not impact you.
Q: What are the risks involved with CPA?
Anna: Well, I think it’s a great option because you end up making more money, but it’s incredibly risky. CPA is risky because you carry the risk of it. If you have an affiliate that’s sending low average order value traffic, you’re losing on every sale, right?
We have fraud. We have so much fraud. We always talk about the beautiful sides of our industry. We have to be incredibly careful. Rev share is better for the product owner because it doesn’t carry the risk, and the affiliate is going to be responsible for refunds and chargebacks.
However, in the long term, you will make more money as a product owner from CPA because you only pay $100 if you have brilliant affiliates that send you sales that have, like, a $300 average order value. You’re going to make more money with the CPA model. Affiliates are going to be happy because they know how much money to expect, but trust has to be built.
And with trust, it’s not something you can build with a brand-new affiliate you’ve never met that tells you, ‘Oh, I can do thousands of sales.’
For a brand, I would definitely only encourage them to use CPA if they know the affiliates.
Q: How do you manage payments with CPA in MaxWeb?
Anna: We have an extensive approval process. We have full-time team members. That’s all they do every day: just vet affiliates, ask for interviews, and ask for references because, with CPA, if you pay them out, we pay three times a week.
We have our war stories.
Things happen when we miss it. But I think long-term, it’s better to also make sure the good affiliates get paid right away.
Q: How do you vet affiliates to prevent fraud and ensure security? What steps do you take after vetting affiliates
Anna: It’s huge. I’ve always been so transparent about sharing this, and I don’t know why other networks don’t use it. It is extra work. First, you want to make sure the application is very simple but also grabs the team the information you need.
Never do automatic approvals on any type of network. That just invites trouble. Then you have a team member. Hopefully, you can afford that. If not, if you’re getting started, just do it yourself. Put an extra two hours of work into it. You get to have an interview with them. I think better interviews are written ones because you can ask back and forth, and you have the history.
You have the proof that this affiliate told you. Ask them a bit about how they want to promote. You’ll know immediately if they know what they’re talking about or if it’s like a brand-new affiliate. Then you ask for two references.
We ask other networks like ClickBank or other friends of ours in the industry that we respect, ‘Hey, you’ve worked with this affiliate before. What should we know about it?’ That’s how we do it.
And then we have a quality control team that’s a separate team, but their full-time job every week is to look through the average order value, to look through the refunds and chargebacks, and to make sure that all sub-IDs are sending quality traffic. If they don’t, we ask them to pause or check the search pages for brand bidding. It’s manual work. That’s what it is.
Q: How do you handle the approval process in MaxWeb?
Anna: After they’re approved, they need to upload their ID and a selfie in real-time. Every single one, no exception, even the bigger affiliates.
Then we have that extra step also, and I agree, we probably turn away some good affiliates because of it, but long-term, it’s a no-brainer. I mean, the brand doesn’t suffer from fraud.
Our reputation is intact because we’re not sending bad traffic to any brand, so it’s definitely worth it.
Q: How do you integrate AI into your operations at MaxWeb?
Anna: I’m a huge nerd. I was that in school, and in Eastern Europe, where there are benches, some kids are right up front; I was the kid up front with my hand raised.
Of course, I embraced AI as soon as things became available to the public. We’ve been using it for a couple of years now, and we’re so excited by the development.
First, we started using it at a very basic level. We have a lot of team members who are very smart and have incredibly high IQs, but they have a hard time being bubbly. They have a hard time writing a very shiny email, for example.
Q: How does AI assist in communication within your team?
Anna: The first thing we did, okay, we got ChatGPT, the pro version, for every team member. ChatGPT already had that emotional intelligence, and I know it’s ironic because you would think people have it, but sometimes we lack it, especially high IQ individuals. It’s very, very hard to add the fluff, right?
Q: How does AI enhance media buying and predictive modeling at MaxWeb?
Anna: “We got more into it. We started with the marketing team, right?
The marketing team started using more creatives, just pictures at first. Then we tried a few short videos—fantastic. Then, the media buyers started using it for predictive modeling for media buying.”
Q: How do you see the future of AI in your industry?
Anna: AI is just a tool that provides us with more opportunities. Of course, we’re going to need brilliant humans to navigate them. You still need people to join forces with artificial intelligence.
We just need to adapt now. But I think it would be silly, as a person working in our space, not to utilize easily available stuff like this, especially for copywriting or easy things like banners on Facebook or posts on Instagram.
Conclusion
Anna Gita’s insights into the world of affiliate marketing and her journey with MaxWeb are both enlightening and inspiring. From navigating the challenges of a volatile industry to finding the right people to build a global team, Anna’s experiences offer valuable lessons for anyone looking to succeed in performance marketing.
Follow Anna Gita and get in touch with her:
- Website: MaxWeb
- Linkedin: Anna Gita Linkedin
- Instagram: Anca_an (but you need to mention you are coming from CPV Lab :))
Here is the full interview with Anna Gita (you should hit subscribe to make sure you don’t miss any other interviews!):
Stay tuned for Part 2 of this episode in the Champion of Performance Marketing, where we’ll dive deeper into the strategies that have made MaxWeb a leader in the CPA model and how Anna leverages AI to enhance operations and drive success. You won’t want to miss it!
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 5 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!