Acceleration Partners’ Partner Spotlight is an ongoing series where members of our Partner Development team shine a light on innovative partners from across the world.
This month, Meghan Hamme, Publisher Development Manager at Acceleration Partners, chatted with Shauna Cortazzo, Business Development Manager and Tim Mueller, Head of Business Development at DealNews.
DealNews has been in business for over 20 years and has established itself as the leading authority on best of web pricing and money saving advice.
Honesty and integrity – we want to succeed, and we want our clients to succeed. We will always provide our best advice and honest feedback on what will be successful or not.
We also consider ourselves a purely top-of-funnel publisher – many clients do not know this, but DealNews is an “OG influencer.” We publish content, people read about the deals we find online and then they are influenced by to make purchases. Our readers are not in the shopping cart already or using browser extensions. We really do influence sales with our content.
A common misconception about DealNews is that we are a coupon site. Coupon sites fulfill the purpose of giving a shopper a coupon code for checkout. At DealNews, however, all of the interest in our site comes from our homepage deal feed, which has 200-300 deals published by our editorial team every day. In actuality, we are a product/brand discovery website.
There are three integral parts to our identity. We are:
We skew slightly male, high household income, and readers from ages 21-55 are most prevalent. All of our readers are in the US.
We were surprised when some long-time partners grew so much that they reduced commissions or stalled their affiliate program altogether because their warehouses were so overloaded, and they could not handle getting any more traffic from publishers, including DealNews. In our long history, we had never seen this before.
Affiliate marketing has definitely grown up. Advertisers are so well-versed in understanding chrome extensions, coupons and cash back that they can really help with a conversion, but are very low funnel and most likely not bringing in new customers.
We’re predicting that advertisers will really look with a critical eye at which partners are doing the type of work that really brings in incremental revenue.
We love our DealBoost campaign and it is growing really well. When an advertiser is given a budget, they want to be sure that the media they are purchasing yields a positive return on investment (ROI). We designed the DealBoost for this exactly. We discuss the goals of the client and have a pragmatic, honest discussion about whether we will be able to reach their ROI. We are also looking at some acquisitions in 2021.
