Ecommerce organic Click Through Rates (CTRs) are nosediving due to AI Overviews and Google Shopping features dominating SERPs. While this may create a headache for brands still clinging to old playbooks, for those ready to adapt, it could represent a massive opportunity.
New Digital Age spoke to Dorin Boerescu, CEO of 2Performant, who believes that brands need to diversify beyond Google and organic CTRs, and focus on generating demand through alternative channels…
Tell me about your career in marketing.
I started in marketing so long ago that I remember running campaigns on pagers! I got online in 1998 and never looked back. Finally, I’d found a medium where things are measurable and moving at the speed of life.
I founded a couple of agencies in Romania, sold them, and discovered performance marketing in 2004. I was one of the first people in Romania doing Google ad campaigns. I launched a performance agency, sold it in 2009, and bought the first affiliate network in Romania. Back then, it was still a startup with €10,000 turnover. The next year, we hit €100,000, and last year we had €10 million turnover. It’s been 15 years of building this business.
So far, we’ve tracked more than 40 million sales transactions in total. In the last 12 months alone, we handled 2.5 million sales across over 600 e-shops using our platform. The GMV generated last year was over €140 million plus VAT. But what’s more interesting than the size is that everyone in this ecosystem works solely to deliver results.
Do brand marketers need to reframe their thinking on Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate Marketing, especially in an ecommerce setting, is like the Formula One of marketing. You can test everything at high speed and immediately see if you’re right or wrong. If you’re right, you can make a lot of money. If you’re wrong, you can lose a lot. The survivors here are exceptional marketers.
The only marketers who survive in this space are the ones able to generate profitable sales after investing time, money, and competence. It’s not about getting approval from a client – it’s about real results.
Brands are still stuck in old ways of allocating budgets, choosing agencies based on past work and reputation. But they often have no way to truly measure what those agencies delivered for other clients. It’s still a bet, based on trust, and that consumes too much time and money.
Affiliate marketing offers an incredible alternative. You can actually see how well all your potential partners perform across different categories and pay them only as a percentage of sales. That shift is significant.
Why do many marketers avoid Affiliate channels?
The problem is that many brand decision-makers feel they have to know all the answers in marketing. They believe only they understand their customer base and have to control every message. But there are so many micro-tribes and rapid changes happening on platforms like TikTok and Snapchat. A centralized decision process can’t keep up.
Affiliate marketing brings a huge advantage: transparency. You pay only for the results you get. From my perspective, that’s the future of marketing. Here, everything is measurable, and meritocracy rules. If you’re the best, you earn the respect and the most money. It’s like tennis—if you win the Grand Slam, you take the prize money. That’s fair.
Brands should always set aside a distinct budget, resources, and attention for attracting new clients. Otherwise, it’s too easy to just keep retargeting your existing audience and stay in a closed loop.
Testing new channels, products, and marketing messages, even outrageous ideas, is essential. Maybe those sales won’t be profitable right away, but they’ll show you where the market is heading and what new customers are responding to. You should always have at least 10% of your budget dedicated to experimenting. If you play it safe, you’ll go where everyone else has already been.
Does affiliate marketing require a different creative mindset?
In affiliate marketing, the focus is more on capturing demand at the point of purchase. It’s not necessarily creative in the sense of ad visuals but creative in market approach.
Affiliates are incredibly creative in building buying experiences. One affiliate we work with has built a product aggregator focused on a very specific niche and is now developing an AI shopping agent. It can talk to customers in natural language to help them choose the right product, then serve up affiliate links. That’s innovative.
Affiliates are brilliant at using the latest technology or marketing trends to build smooth buying experiences. Often, they’re able to create better buying journeys than e-shops themselves because e-shops are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of products and the reality that the internet has infinite shelves.
Affiliates help connect passionate communities with niche products. They’re incentivized economically to help people find exactly what they’re looking for – sometimes things they wouldn’t have discovered otherwise.
What are your ambitions for 2Performant over the next couple of years?
Over the next 18 months, we want to grow our project, Business League, which is like an ecommerce championship. We’re also planning to launch an influencer section in our platform to serve the growing demand for live shopping campaigns.
With influencers in the platform, brands will be able to launch campaigns that create demand and then continue with the same attribution model through affiliates who capture that demand. It’s a bet for us. We tried a similar idea a couple of years ago, and it didn’t work. But maybe it was ahead of its time. Now, we’re relaunching it with this promise for brands and influencers—and we’ll see how the market reacts.
