Partnership Discovery is part of Rakuten Advertising’s ongoing initiative to spearhead affiliate marketing innovation and harness the power of AI to deliver stronger partnerships with publishers

Rakuten Advertising, the leading global affiliate marketing network, revealed its plans to launch Partnership Discovery, the latest artificial intelligence investment as part of the company’s Affiliate Intelligence platform and vision, at Affiliate Summit West 2024 in Las Vegas. Partnership Discovery leverages AI to help advertisers identify the most effective publisher partners for product-specific affiliate campaigns to drive higher audience engagement and more revenue. Publishers will also benefit from showcasing the strengths of their audiences to the advertisers for which they can deliver the strongest results.

Partnership Discovery can:

• Assign an accurate category tag to the advertiser’s product from one of the 6,000+ Google Product Taxonomy categories.
• Filter through hundreds of millions of annual sales delivered through the Rakuten Advertising network to identify the publishers delivering the best performance for that product category.
• Offer advertisers alternative search terms and categories to find optimal publisher partners to reach audiences at both category and product levels.

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“The launch of Partnership Discovery will bring Rakuten Advertising’s vision for Affiliate Intelligence to life,” says Nick Stamos, CEO of Rakuten Advertising. “By pairing advanced AI with deep insights into the affiliate landscape, we can cultivate stronger strategic collaborations between advertisers and publishers. Not only will AI help advertisers discover new, high-performing publisher partners, but it can help them re-engage with existing partners in new and innovative ways. We will continue to innovate in service of our Affiliate Intelligence initiative to deliver advertiser and publisher solutions that are performance-driven and anchored in meaningful, innovative partnerships.”

To further fine-tune Partnership Discovery search results and ensure an advertiser finds the best publisher partners, users will be able to filter search results by:

• Category Sales Ratio: Understand the percentage of sales driven by a recommended publisher for products in the specified category.
• Classification: Filter results for “top performers” in the Rakuten Advertising publisher network by publisher classification (e.g. Silver, Gold, Platinum, etc.)
• Business Model: From coupon and cash back publishers to content and price comparison sites, filter the type of publishers to best fit an advertiser’s individual needs.
• Partnership: Filter by publisher status to identify new publisher partners, or re-engage existing partners to maximize reach, tap into new audiences, or re-engage with loyal shoppers.

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