Publisher Spotlight: Linkby

Rakuten Advertising had the opportunity to sit down with Linkby’s Agency Growth Manager to chat about the company’s offering and plans for the future. Join us as we dive into all things Linkby.

Tell us about Linkby

Linkby is a market-first ad tech platform allowing brands of all sizes to secure dedicated and listicle-based coverage across the world’s biggest publishers using a CPC model.

Linkby is free to pitch – we have no integration costs, retainers, or subscription fees. Linkby was founded in 2020, and since then, our offices and publisher partners have expanded across the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, and Singapore with plans to expand into Europe.

We see ourselves as “performance PR”, meaning all brands have to do is submit a campaign when interested in coverage. This includes promoting brand awareness pieces, sale periods, celebrity collaborations, publisher reviews, and more. Once they’ve written their campaign (similar to a simplified press release), confirmed their timings, CPC, and budget, and selected their preferred publishers, all they have to do is submit, and the publisher(s) of their choice are notified that they want to partner with them. Our shared goal for the brand is to help drive exposure, create awareness, and inspire potential customers to purchase.

We work with a wide range of DTC industry advertisers within retail and lifestyle categories, including beauty, fashion, food + beverage, home, health + wellness, finance, entertainment, gaming, and tech.

What sets you apart from other publishers?

There are over 300 publisher titles globally on the Linkby platform. Our platform’s easy-to-use nature allows brands to effectively gain content at scale, reach new audiences, and enter new markets when relevant. Unlike other providers, you control your budgets, timings, and publisher selection.

Our payment model for click traffic is strictly on a performance basis, which means our publisher partners are aligned with your brand’s goals by shaping content with that commercial outcome in mind.

How do you help advertisers add value and drive incrementality?

Linkby unlocks incredible value for brands. We allow publishers to speak in their tone of voice that is proven to engage their audience while also shaping content to drive performance. This aligns the publisher with the brand mission, driving new customers directly to the brand’s website. The speed and scale at which a brand can get content out there saves them valuable time with minimal effort involved.

Linkby diversifies the affiliate channel and encourages performance-driven branded content like never before. We provide an additional revenue channel that runs alongside a ‘traditional’ affiliate strategy. This means tapping into high-intent new customers and revenue that wouldn’t otherwise be there.

We are also fully integrated with Rakuten Advertising, which means clients can apply the tracking they’re familiar with to any Linkby campaign, ensuring a centralized dashboard for all their performance activity. This allows brands access to transparent campaign data beyond clicks, conversions, and order value. This reporting means that brands can identify which of our publisher partners delivered the best results, allowing for strategic decisions regarding budget up-weights to effectively drive incrementally.

Some examples of the incrementality we’ve delivered for our brands:

• Our campaign with a huge global streaming service saw a 12.43% conversion rate.
• Our campaigns with a household global beauty brand saw ROAS between 199.5% – 1064% across their Q4 activity.
• Our campaign with a challenger wellness brand helped them tick multiple KPIs, including sessions growing 340%, website users increasing 346%, transactions increasing 198% and one-time purchases increasing 293%.

What excites you about the affiliate marketing industry and its direction? Are there any new innovations we will see from you in the coming months?

What excites us about the affiliate marketing industry is how fast-moving it is, with tech disruptors like Linkby arising to challenge the status quo and give both advertisers and publishers new tools to make their performance marketing more effective than ever.

Linkby is partnered globally with Rakuten Advertising across our key markets (US, UK, Canada, AU & Singapore). It’s been exciting to see the affiliate marketing industry expand globally over the last few years in markets more inclined to spend via traditional channels, meaning there are more partners to work with than ever before.

It’s also an exciting time at Linkby as our company is in growth mode. 2024 will undoubtedly be Linkby’s biggest yet.  We are always considering our customers and publishers’ feedback and iterating that into our product – at a glance:

• Reverse pitching: A new feature allowing interested publishers to pitch directly to you for CPC-powered content.
• Smart Budget Allocation: An opt-in solution to automatically allocate unassigned campaign budgets to your highest-performing publishers to maximize your results with us.
• Market expansion: Going beyond our current reach, with Europe as our next destination.

Why did you choose to partner with Rakuten Advertising?

Rakuten Advertising is a global standard across the world of e-commerce. You only have to attend one affiliate marketing conference to hear about the influence and respect Rakuten Advertsing holds in this industry, so it was a no-brainer for us to partner with the Rakuten team globally to help achieve our combined goal of providing performance-focused content to the world’s best advertisers.

With a market alignment between both companies, Linkby has helped Rakuten Advertising clients, including Burberry, Netflix & Lululemon, to secure highly sought-after editorial coverage across titles, including Daily Mail, Harper’s Bazaar, USA Today and more via our unique CPC model. With more launches than ever planned for Linkby this year, we can’t wait to continue growing our partnership with Rakuten across the globe to maximize the service and innovation we can deliver for our advertisers.