Fiverr’s Shift to Performance-Based Marketing w/ Omer Dahan

0:00And what we want to bring and how we want to proceed outside as the brand that could help you with the more complex tasks and not those easy things you could probably, you know, get on any free LLM out there to do for you.

0:23Hey, Omer, welcome to the show. How are you? I'm good. How about you? Can't complain. You know, it's end of Q1. As we know, it's always pretty busy for influencers, right? Between campaigns that started last year and finishing now and new ones and everything. But I'm very excited to have you on today because, you know, I've been on Fiverr for a long time. I was, you know, using that in 2010 when it was a homepage with, you know, a bunch of different$5, right? Type of services. So I've been in the first era of all that. And I got it. I was fascinated by this, you know, gig economy. where people were going out there and it was a lot of different services.

1:01And I do remember using that. And then I saw the evolution and became this massive marketplace and with professionals and all these reviews and everything. So I want to learn, of course, more about also what you see right on your site in terms of evolution. But before we get started, I always want to learn a bit more about our guests. And we use this thing called the map. Basically, it's divided in three main sections. So the mission is, what is your mission, right? A purpose when it comes to your job, achievements, anything that you are proud of in the past years and the purpose. So why you do what you do.

1:34Yeah, I love this. Thank you. So basically a mission, general mission for myself, I always think ahead and think what can be done that we're not doing and how can we do it and how can we do it fast, stay ahead of the curve. So basically that's something I'm waking up in the morning and going to bed thinking about it. And yeah, usually that's what gets me tick actually. And achievements. So I would say I joined Fiverr a year and three months ago. And for me, it was a really kind of interesting thing because I used, like I've been a freelancer myself before joining Fiverr. I started doing something on my own and then the proposal came from Fiverr and I said, yeah, of course, Fiverr, it's a huge brand.

2:23love the platform like you mentioned. I also used it myself and I was happy to join the team. Initially, I started to be just their affiliate team manager. And as time moves and people also changed positions internally and left, a new one came. Actually, there was an opportunity to also become their partnership manager. And after some time, I also became their influencers and creators. team manager so it kind of grew on me uh as as the year progresses and uh yeah that's uh that's a was a huge huge achievement on my behalf to be able to take all those uh activities uh under my wing and uh you know to own it basically so the purpose well and and i kind of mentioned that so it's like me thinking ahead all the time and with such an agile ecosystem we're living and what i just told you about my history at Fiverr, I like solving problems.

3:27So I always kind of having this in mind, especially and specifically when I'm getting new tasks and goals to achieve, and then how I can get that and the right way to do it and to be as experimental as I can. That's what gets me really ticked. That's great to hear, you know, like I also love problem solving. It's when you love it, it's fun, right? Some people see problem and you already like seeing the solution. And And even if you don't see that, it's like how many ways I can solve this and bypass the problem. So I'd love to hear that. And also interesting that you come right from freelancing yourself, right?

4:01Being now on the other side and understanding, I think it's important, right, for you to see how a freelancer thinks, right? And how these days, right, creators also do that as well, because in addition to brand deals, they might have side gigs, right? Where they do like sell services or they do consulting and so on. So that is, I think it's a very important, you know, aspect to know both sides. And you also mentioned affiliate, right? So I would love to start with that because we've been seeing a lot of, right, major shifts towards now performance-based models when it comes to the creator economy.

4:33And, you know, I'm interested to know a bit more, how do you currently looking at affiliate strategy today, right? Because it's performance-driven. Is it a mix of fixed, let's say, you know, a brand deal plus commissions? Are you seeing more creators that are okay instead of working like performance driven only? Tell me maybe like what you're seeing these days. Actually, these days I see a transition from what maybe most of people now is kind of familiar with, with the, you know, upfront payment for any creative that creators are making with no regards to actual performance. They're only looking at the, and there is, I think maybe we should focus on performance.

5:18What is performance in the term itself? So most conversation I had talking about creatives, the performance was the KPI or what to look at at the video level. Like how is the engagement of each video getting? What is the view time? How far away is watching those videos? How's the comments like? That's performance on the video side of things. But for me, coming from affiliates, usually, you know, last touch. So it's all about who drives the buyers or the clients over to us and only then getting commission for those sales. Then for me, it's the bottom line performance, meaning how is the conversion rate?

6:06How's the revenue generated from each and every partner we're working with? So for me, performance is that, and this is what I also try to educate people I'm talking with on this matter. Some are also in the same levels as I am. Some are higher up. And my team, it's something that took us actually when I was inheriting that team of creators that we have internally. then actually I had to do some retraining, not just on the term performance, like in general, how to talk with creators in a performance driven way and not like, yeah, we pay for inserts and we pay for post roles and for a long video.

6:56It's not just that. So performance, it's bottom line and performance with affiliates. It's something that I think maybe people have forgotten about that, but I have a theory. So my theory is until COVID, when I used to work with creators, not surprisingly, they were signing up to affiliate programs and taking links from every program they sign up on and then promoted through their videos. And then COVID came. And what happened during COVID time, I'm sure you'll remember you were stuck at home and then it was boring. A lot of people started to make videos of themselves, you know, what they're doing to pass the time and how would they, you know, their routines and all that.

7:46Then they became, without even maybe planning, they became huge creators and influences of like specific things they did. Like if they have something they made and prepare for themselves for lunch, then they filmed that. And then the company said, oh, maybe you will become our influencer. And that's the exact time. Also, what happened, which I refer as the perfect storm, is a lot of budgets were pouring to marketing departments. And then they had to spend it. So where they spend it, when it's easy and high amounts, with those creators. Yeah, pay me$5 ,000 and make a video, a one-minute video about your product.

8:32Then companies had that money. They spent it with those creators. Those creators grew. Others' creators followed. More companies had more budgets. And it kind of fit itself. And then we ended up with a lot of brands out there that paying upfront payments for videos. When it wasn't the case before that. Not in that extent. Currently, nowadays, I want to say 99 % of creators will ask upfront payment for their work, which I can get that. But in the end, if this is what you do, then you're not so counting on your performance. Maybe the performance will not be as good. Maybe your audience is so mixed and not targeted.

9:20And this is actually what we are here to change at Fiverr. We did this transition. We changed our whole work with the influences from upfront to performance based commissions, at least for the beginning, at least for the first initial creative day making for us. And so you mentioned the importance of certain KPIs that are more on the commercial side. So moving away from so-called vanity metrics, that they do tell a story, but not all the story. right? And you can have, you know, we saw it many times, we can have great, great vanity metrics, but then, you know, few clicks or no commercials at all, right?

10:04And so I'm curious, when you are evaluating creators to work with, what makes someone like a strong candidate? It's, of course, you can see certain metrics at the beginning. But then when it comes to conversions and clicks and so on, it's something that you usually have to ask, right? That data is not public, right? So So is that something that you ask from the beginning or do you wait for a first pull of creators based on, again, the metrics that you can actually see and then only after that, you start working on them and then you see the performance? Or do you ask already from day one, the historical data in terms of performance driven, you know, so that you can understand more or less what to expect from certain creators?

10:38Yeah. So that's a great question. And actually, we're actually doing a combination. So it's a combination of asking, obviously. What we don't know, we don't know. And it's better asking than guessing. So we do ask if they had any experience in the past doing something like that. If they have a video that may be still public and live, we can look at it, see what they made and did there. Which brand they worked with, how was the tracking like, and asking those questions. Not to go to a very deep level of what's your earnings like, but yeah, what's your conversions like. So that's something that we do talk with the influencers before we start.

11:15But I would say another thing will be the authenticity. So basically, we want to see as the audience, is it really kind of, you know, engaging with their videos? What they're writing, the comments is very important. If you see comments that look so natural and, you know, having a discussion about what has been presented to them and not just like watching a video after a video they do. And sometimes you see videos that are either like kind of forced to be created and then uploaded to this channel. Or you see it's like a vanity of so many different brands that those creators were so opportunistic about taking, you know, probably upfront payment from a brand just so they will make a video.

12:08they upload it, even if it's not that relevant to their audience or their past videos, not even having any connections to this new one. So looking at that, so it's a part of, like I mentioned, asking, talking to the creators about past work they did and performance, but also looking at ourselves and gather this data. A good example for that would be for the authenticity of us working with creators is that we work with creators that are actually using Fiverr. So we have like Stephen Botlet and Nasdaily, they started on Fiverr. They got people on Fiverr to help them with their work, with their freelancing, with their channels, with all that.

12:55And then we just reached out to them and started to endorse men on working with us because they are our actual buyers and we want our buyers to see what other buyers did with Fiverr. And I think that tells the whole story. Having this kind of creators that working with us, not just like the big ones, even the small ones that we working with, we let them and we actually fund their tries and their orders on Fiverr. So then in the end of that process, they will create a video for us on how that went because we want to hear you know an honest feedback and for their audience to see those videos not as sponsored uh although they are in in some way and especially if we're not paying up front then then maybe you can set aside the sponsor term because if it will perform well for those creators if it will convert it means that people believed in that and they saw it as an honest review and not a paid one.

14:02So that's our way to wiggle in into those kind of things. Hi, ready to elevate your brand? At the Influencer Marketing Factor, we've got you covered. We manage influencer campaigns from start to finish. So creator sourcing, strategy, legal, shipping, logistics, all of it. We work with Fortune 500 brands and DTC companies worldwide, and our campaigns are backed by real ROI analysis. Check us out at theinfluencermarketingfactory.com. And have you identified, so you mentioned a couple of big creators. You also said that, you know, smaller ones also works well for you. In terms of like verticals, right?

14:39Because on Fiverr, there is a lot of different services, right? You can go from people recording, you know, ASMR videos to, right? SEO services and then passing by graphic design and video editing, there is so much. So in terms of the creators that you work with, Have you identified any category like vertical that works better or it's a mix of kind of everyone because there is a niche for all? That's a good and hard question. Fiverr, I don't know if you know, but Fiverr has over 800 different categories. Yeah. And subcategories for each. So that's actually, it's good and bad because it's allowing us, you know, to almost like work with almost any creator out there.

15:21because we can do almost anything from accounting, SEO, building a website or designing a logo. And anything in between and anything that I haven't mentioned still could work. But I would say that it's also in this time around with AI happening, then I would say that we're now focusing on the tasks, the gigs, the work that could be done on Fiverr, which is not those simple things that AI is taking over. We are focusing on things that present a massive opportunity for us, leverage the talent that we have in our community, in our freelancers community, offering a higher tier, a more complex services like Vibe Coding or AI video creation.

16:13And in many of those that we see actually a more demand for on Fiverr and opposed to the simple tasks like, you know, designing a logo for five dollars. So we're actually navigating between those blooming, well-performing categories on Fiverr and what we want to bring and how we want to proceed outside as the brand that could help you with the more complex tasks and not those things you could probably, you know, get on any free LLM out there to do for you. Yeah, that's something that we mentioned in the past, how you can use AI as a support, as something that can help you without removing you.

17:01At the end of the day, you can see that a lot of AI output, even if they are getting better by the day, you still need the accurate concept behind. You still need the tone of voice of someone that is actually creating that. You need sometimes also the trust that you put in a person because it's not sometimes just about the output, it's also who is creating, right? Can I trust this person when they're telling me a message or if they send me a log or video editor, like top of work? Okay, I know that I can actually talk with someone and ask for an edit that is gonna be on point because it's not just like input output all the time.

17:35So I do understand absolutely what you're saying. And again, we discuss about how our AI creators, freelancers, they can work in a way where they're not replaced, right? But actually they can get support. And something else I wanted to ask you also is about how these days, right? Like 10 years ago, right? Influencer marketing was this thing that was limited budget. You know, let's give it a try. What even is influencer marketing? Is this like a big, you know, just a big buzzword? And then five years ago, right? It started to be like, okay, you know, there is serious budget here, but it's still kind of separated from everything else.

18:10And these days, right? We're trying to avoid this silo stuff of marketing where one department works on affiliate, one works on influencers, one works on paid media, one works on out of home and so on. And then what happens is that every message is different. There is no alignment, different KPIs. And now the consumer is confused, right? Because why there is a message, right? When I see a display ad and then when I work with affiliates, right? I'll see affiliate, it's different. How are you working at Fiverr to, again, avoiding this misalignment between in different departments and branches when it comes to marketing?

18:44And how do you work in the integrated way these days? So on Fiverr side, we actually made a huge process here just in the past six months, to be honest. Since I took the position of managing the creator team, basically with the transition from being paying upfront for any creation, we now moved on paid in performance basis only. we actually added a few more changes. So we are asking all creators to allow us to have commercial rights as a default for any creative descending. And that's, again, without even paying up front for it. We do pay if we deciding on promoting that video, if it looks good.

19:31And if we do some field test and we see that the video is actually performing for us, Then we go and we pay for that creator specifically. And it's actually what brought us together, paid team, the paid acquisition team, and the affiliate and creators team to combine forces. And actually we are now the ones that generating new ads for Fiverr through this channel. But that's what we're doing is with current micro and nano creators. We do have another layer, which is more on the brand side. We have a team that managing all related to brand, PR, media, so on. And they work with top-notch, like influencers and creators.

20:17They're doing productions, not like in a home studio. It's more they do film. They could go to Serbia for a few days to make a video and then come back and edit and all that. So it's like we having that high brand level quality that we put a lot of budgets in to create a campaign which is more robust and has an agenda. And maybe we want to publish it in very strategic areas. And then we have what we call or I call for the masses that we go after those small creators that actually willingly to work with Fiverr. and they're happy to hear that we want to work with them. We're doing the reach out.

21:00We're knocking on their DMs, sending them messages and emails. After we evaluate and like I explained earlier, we ran through their videos and we found that very relevant to us and we want to offer them to collaborate. So we have those kind of layers and the work is, like I said, is combined and then meet in the middle when we then get those creators to be promoted through the paid channels. Yeah, we've been seeing the same importance of combining them together. Right. First of all, because sometimes you, I mean, it's not just because of bigger reach, but it's also for tracking purposes. Because when it comes to organic videos only these days, of course, you can always add a link in bio, but there is also always that extra step in a way, right?

21:49Because you need to go to the LinkedIn bio, click there, maybe there is a redirect. Sometimes it doesn't track properly. While with paid media, you are basically having the same concept, the same messaging, the same video that you already know that works well for organic, but now you can track properly, right? And send people to a specific website. And now you can have an ROI associated to the campaign. And now you can see exactly which influencers of, let's say, 10 people that work at, right? The one that brought the majority. And now you do the Pareto principle, right? 80, 20 and be like, okay, these are the ones that we want to maybe to renew.

22:18And I'm pretty sure that you also might identify some like ambassador, right? That can work with you for one year, because especially with something like Fiverr, right? It's just not a one-off. There are people that use it every day. There are others that have, you know, again, I use it myself. Like, you know, there are ways where you can have like a recurring, right? Atop of hiring, right? With a specific person that every three months, right? And so on. So I understand the importance of, again, you know, being able to send traffic and truly like no track right because if not as you said you know initially these days vanity metrics can can tell just part of the story but you know it's uh it's not everything anymore right every cmo out there is like okay very nice very good videos but what is the revenue right that that is bringing me you know in that sense i i completely uh agree and relate to your uh summary here uh definitely i would add another thing on on tracking it's something quite new that uh we we did here and we developed internally, we got rid of coupon codes.

23:18Oh, okay. Why is that? Yeah. So with me knowing affiliate marketing and how affiliate works and this ecosystem of a lot of issues that comes with coupons, coupon sites, coupon extensions, basically our coupons and every brand coupons are being scraped and they're being shared. around unknowingly, and that's actually causing attribution issues. So until now, if we provided a coupon as a text to a creator, and he mentioned that on his video, and he wrote it in his description, we saw like a huge amount of usage day after those coupons were published. and looking and searching where they are now, we found them on coupon sites that might be working with us through an affiliate link, an affiliate platform that we are a part of.

24:22And they were actually, that's their way to acquire and to get attribution of new buyers they're sending over to Fiverr. But they didn't actually contribute it, nothing. They just piggyback on that intent of that specific user because when he was about to make a purchase, he was running a quick search on, is there a coupon for Fiverr? Finding one, using it, going through that website, actually with us being last touch attribution, we actually commissioning that sale to that coupon site. Although the coupon belongs to that creator that we gave a few days ago. So with that coupon leakage, which is a real world problem, to be honest, in our industry, the decision was to cut it off completely.

25:14And now we transition it to a coupon links. So you need to click on a link to activate your coupon. There is no text anymore. The coupon will be auto-populated on checkout for you. You don't need to memorize it. You don't need to remember which video you saw it and go back to copy it. And with that, we're actually gaining another thing, which is tracking and attribution. Because you clicked a link, and that link is an affiliate link. So we win twice. And the creator also wins full transparency, full coverage of his conversions and commissions, which this is what we promised. We promised him to be paid through commissions.

26:00So we want him to be the one that's collecting those commission and not coupon sites who stole his coupon. It's an interesting point. Yeah. I never thought about that. I mean, I know about all these promo codes website that they, as you said, they scrape everything out there, right? All the video text and they put it out there and they're tricky sometimes to click on a link and redirect you somewhere. it's very shady don't know who is getting the commissions and and are they are they still active and yeah so i understand that so i think it's it's it's definitely a good a good move and yeah always for like why not many you know brands and companies out there do something where you click on on something as you said and automatically apply that because i'm not gonna remember after i saw the video and what was that one was it with a a percentage at the end with the exclamation point uh is only the name of the you know the creator right so applying that For me, it's something, of course, you know, but I noticed that not many do that.

26:59But, Omer, thank you so much for joining me today, for sharing your story, your knowledge, and also what is happening these days in Fiverr, right? Again, it's such a well-known brand for creators, influencers, and a lot of different categories. So I was, again, very curious to know what is going on, and thank you for sharing that with us. Thank you for having me. I actually had a blast sharing everything we just did here on Fiverr. And yeah, we could, you know, circle back this six months from now to see how it went and what we achieved. So I'm open to do some more. Thank you very much for the opportunity.

27:37And yeah, thank you for fantastic. Thank you, Amir. This was the Influence Factor by the Influencer Marketing Factory. And I'll see you in the next episode.