Interview with the CEO and Head of Affiliate at Cpamatica

From 2013, I worked at a product IT company as an Ad Operations Manager — monetizing users through ad display — and was involved in selling traffic on a CPA model. 

At the end of 2014, partners invited me to Dubai as a promising partner, and the trip inspired me to pursue affiliate marketing specifically. All the guys were around my age (under 30), quite sharp, well-versed in numbers and analytics — just like me, and on top of that, earning very good money. 

All of that motivated me to start my own company focused on selling traffic on a CPA basis. On January 17, 2015, Cpamatica was founded.

Our company consists of several projects that together form a full-cycle digital marketing operation. The core divisions are social media advertising, affiliate network, and comparison websites. Today, the company has over 110 employees. 

That was true back in 2022, when the company had 90 people and we all worked together in the Kyiv office. We had a tradition of gathering in the kitchen in the evenings and playing a game where every employee had to name their colleagues.  

Now I don't know 10–15% of our employees by name, since there are many remote workers spread across different parts of Ukraine — some have come into the office only a handful of times over two years.

Besides the affiliate network, the company's largest divisions are Comparison Websites and Social Media Advertising. 

The Comparison Websites teams produce high-quality digital content — developing rankings, expert reviews, and product comparisons — by building and managing some of the largest comparison websites across various industries. 

On the Social Media Advertising side, we generate leads for our clients through advertising on major social media platforms.

Looking back at 2015, the most important task was simply keeping the company alive. We had to develop the right strategy, understanding where and when we wanted to get to. At that point, everyone was doing everything — we were trying to enter as many different areas as possible and testing whatever we could.

Then we measured the potential of each direction and built a strategy around that. Right now, the most pressing challenges are motivation, hiring, and employee retention.

This year we realized we had outgrown what we'd been associated with over the past few years — including the affiliate network we started with. The company now consists of several large divisions, all of which continue to scale.

Of course, the affiliate network is growing too and exceeding its KPIs, but we already have several new divisions — so the transformation into the new brand expla is a natural continuation of our development.

Together with the agency and the heads of each division, we were involved in every step of the process — all in all, it can be described as 5.5 months of intensive work, 540 slides across presentations, more than 50 name options, and 6 visual concepts. :))

The main goal is to establish a clear perception among partners and candidates that expla is not an affiliate network, but a marketing engineering company. That's how Cpamatica used to be seen — whereas we already have large PPC and SEO teams and are developing our own in-house R&D.

I can't recall any such cases. In my opinion, it's relevant when entering new markets, niches, or verticals where a company faces reputational risks — or, as in our case, when a company has simply outgrown the identity it's been associated with for years.

Honestly, for our affiliates, nothing will change on a global scale — Cpamatica Affiliate Network continues to be the best affiliate network for ambitious affiliates, we're just now powered by expla :)

Overall, 2023 was quite a successful year for us as an affiliate network — we grew in volume by 60% compared to 2022. The past year was also dedicated to developing a strategic R&D project, which is set to become a fully-fledged new product in 2024. 

We're currently in the testing phase. More details about the product will follow later — for now, I'll just say it's related to actively working with partners' traffic: segmentation and distribution, deeper analytics, and improving the monetization of every click our affiliates generate.

And of course, we're growing — this year we were joined by 3 new affiliate managers, a product manager, an analyst, and a brand manager.

We started developing the Cpamatica Affiliate Network brand more actively in the second half of 2023 — working with forums, conferences, and partnerships. We also plan to participate even more actively in international conferences with booths and a full team in 2024. 

Beyond brand-building, we're constantly working on sourcing new advertisers with different monetization models to ensure we have the best offers for our partners.

Absolutely, and it's quite significant. By working with various traffic channel types — both in-house at expla and external (Cpamatica partners' sources) — we can offer advertisers different types of traffic at different price points, and we have broader access to advertisers. 

Additionally, given expla's substantial in-house expertise in working with quality traffic (PPC, SEO, FB), our internal teams share their knowledge with Cpamatica's affiliate managers, who in turn pass it on to partners. This covers approaches, funnels, landing pages, and so on.

The primary niche at Cpamatica Affiliate Network is dating, where we are experts and know approximately 95% of the market. We also have offers in games and sweepstakes. 

We have plans to expand the number of verticals once we gain more expertise and advertiser connections through testing by expla's in-house marketing teams.

1. More active growth of coin-based products* (*products where users purchase coins to interact on the platform, for example to send messages), as opposed to subscription-based or click monetization products. With the growth of the internet, user awareness, and product compliance, advertisers are demanding higher-quality, more targeted traffic. Accordingly, the requirements for affiliates and affiliate managers working with them have also increased. 

2. There have also been shifts in traffic sources. A few years ago, apps (PWA traffic) were a very popular source. The trends of the past year are Telegram and TikTok. Evergreen sources such as display, members areas, and native traffic remain relevant. Additionally, over the past six months we've noticed growing interest in the dating niche from affiliates running Facebook traffic. In my view, the main driver here is the restrictions on working with apps in the iGaming niche (difficulties getting new apps approved and the shorter lifetime of approved ones).

Tier-1 and European Union countries remain consistently relevant and the most profitable. We occasionally see strong results from tier-3, but they tend to be less stable.

Over the past year, we've seen significant growth in the US, France, the Netherlands, and South Africa. At one point Japan grew considerably, but that turned out to be a temporary trend.

The main goal for the coming year is to release a new R&D product and bring it to profitability. At the same time, expla is already actively expanding into new verticals, and going forward we want to offer Cpamatica partners the opportunity to work with it.