It has been another productive year for the TUNE Product Team as we continue to focus on our mission to help digital marketers build personal relationships and trust. 

2024 Product Updates and Releases

TUNE Marketplace 

2024 started off with a reintroduction of the TUNE Marketplace and a number of improvements to help make relationship building between brands and affiliates even easier through the Marketplace experience. This included the addition of a robust notification system to help keep brands and affiliates in the loop when key events take place, such as initial inquires. The system also sends reminders when a brand or affiliate may be waiting for a response. Relationship building requires timeliness, and these updates aim to keep the process moving in a positive direction.  

Google Ads integration 

A great relationship requires transparency. To help cement that concept from a tracking and compliance perspective, TUNE has become certified as an official Google click tracking partner. Customers utilizing the Google Ads platform can integrate with TUNE for a seamless link generation experience to ensure compliance with Google and industry standards.  

CPC First-Click Attribution 

Building on the transparency theme, TUNE has improved our session tracking tools to ensure cost-per-click (CPC) offers only pay out on the first click. For customers utilizing server-based postback tracking, this greatly reduces the risk of overpaying. Read more to understand how TUNE achieves this process.  

 Advanced Device Detection 

While Chromium has begun limiting the amount of information returned as part of its agent string, there may still be instances where marketers want to target audiences based on the operating system or device model they use. TUNE’s Advanced Device Detection feature gives marketers this additional insight into their audience. Once enabled, this additional data is available in reporting as well as the Advanced Targeting features. 

Microsoft Azure SSO Support 

Last year, TUNE introduced new security and trust features, including support for organizations that manage user access through Okta. In 2024, we expanded single sign-on (SSO) support to include Microsoft Azure. This helps IT staff maintain tighter controls and best practices when managing users and their access to third-party platforms. 

Additional Improvements 

Several smaller feature improvements made their way into the TUNE platform in 2024, including the ability to filter reports by partner status for more granularity when seeking program insights. 

TUNE’s Proactive Click Fraud Prevention system now surfaces deeper insight into the reasons behind potentially fraudulent activity. This includes fraud reasons from bot generated traffic to IP addresses being spoofed via VPN. 

We expanded promo code functionality to allow management via the TUNE API. This provides customers a more programmatic path to managing promo codes when integrating with systems outside of TUNE. 

Looking Ahead to 2025 

For the last several months, the TUNE Product Team has been reevaluating our core feature set and workflows with an eye toward improving the overall experience when interacting with the TUNE platform. We have spent a lot of time prototyping, asking customers for feedback, and getting a deeper sense of how our users operate day-to-day. (Thanks to everyone that has talked with us!)  

As a result, we are close to opening a beta version of a new offer experience that we believe will be more intuitive, and faster to navigate. In the end, we want customers focused more on marketing and less on the vagaries of the tools. Keep an eye out for an opportunity to help test that new experience very soon.  

Cheers to 2024 and here’s to an even better 2025! 

TUNE is excited to announce support for Single Sign-On (SSO) user authentication! If you’re currently taking advantage of Okta’s SSO solution in your organization, that seamless and secure login flow experience can be extended to your users when they access TUNE.

Benefits of Single Sign-On

Single sign-on is a common authentication method that allows a user to utilize a single login to securely access multiple systems or applications. If you’re not currently utilizing an SSO service, we suggest looking at Okta, especially if you want to enable SSO in TUNE. (While we are working to expand to other SSO services, Okta is currently the only provider supported in TUNE).

SSO can help maintain tighter controls among IT systems and staff. In addition to tighter controls, SSO can also help reduce login fatigue and increase productivity because users no longer have to manage multiple sets of login credentials and passwords.

Okta suggests that taking advantage of SSO can reduce login related help desk tickets by 75% and reduce new user onboarding time by up to 50% [1]. With that in mind, the sooner your new users have access to TUNE, the greater potential ROI you’re getting from your affiliate marketing program.

How to Enable SSO in TUNE

For those of you with Okta SSO already implemented, TUNE accounts will support your service provider (SP) initiated version of single-sign on, including direct support for you and any team members utilizing Okta. SP initiated login helps extend a consistent login experience for your users and saves your organization time from having to implement a more custom identity provider (IdP) initiated login.

Setting up SSO through Okta is as simple as filling out four fields and enabling the feature for your users.

For now, TUNE’s SSO implementation will support all Employee level users. Partner and Advertiser users aren’t supported at this time. Does your organization have a good use case for supporting these additional user types? We’d like to hear about it! Log in to your TUNE account at https://feedback.tune.com and let us know.

If you’re interested in enabling SSO support with TUNE for your organization, contact your Customer Success Manager and we’ll get you started.

[1] https://www.okta.com/products/single-sign-on/

This year, the TUNE Product Team had the opportunity to attend Affiliate Summit West in Las Vegas, and wow, what an event! 15 years of marketing experience could not prepare me for the excitement and tenacity of ASW.  

For a fantastic overview of the conference and the Vegas experience, click over to Dan’s Ultimate Guide to the Affiliate Summit West 2023 Recap. 

Attending a conference like Affiliate Summit usually provides two main opportunities from a product perspective: to gain industry insight and to validate ideas. 

For someone relatively new to performance marketing, I have quickly learned that this industry is like no other. As a result, I knew going into ASW that any insight I gained would be invaluable, and that quickly proved to be correct. 

#ASW23 Product Team Takeaways 

Comparing Affiliate Summit West to other marketing conferences, I noticed a significant difference in behavior. Most conferences feature attendees sitting in sessions all day with a few short breaks in between sessions to mingle. Not ASW! Everyone is networking and engaged in conversation 24/7 inside and outside of the conference walls. The networking does not stop. The Meet Market was at capacity for six hours straight and spilled into the city late into the night. The next day we did it all over again between the Exhibit Hall and TUNE’s Topgolf event.  

While this is an interesting observation on the surface, there is a much deeper realization to be had from a product perspective. In many ways, this conference anomaly perfectly summarizes the essence of the affiliate marketing space, and that’s relationship building. Whether you are on the affiliate end or the brand end of the spectrum, the need to connect with new people is the lifeblood of any successful program. 

How does that translate into building great products? Knowing that relationship building is the nucleus of the performance marketing world, it becomes the product team’s charge to ensure that the TUNE platform is facilitating those relationships across the entirety of our users’ journey. From surfacing opportunities in-app through tools like TUNE Connect, to ensuring the day-to-day tasks of managing a program are as frictionless as possible. 

We had a good sense going into ASW that building relationships is core to performance marketing, but how can we validate those assumptions and make sure we are building the right features to support that hypothesis? 

The product team at TUNE has spent the last several months researching and envisioning what the future holds for our product. 2023 will be focused heavily on the affiliate partner experience and how we can better empower them (and the brands they are working with), building on the product updates and features we released in 2022.  

Thanks to the TUNE Partnerships Team, we had access to some of the biggest partners in the industry. Speaking and sharing with them validated our initial plans for 2023, and they were excited to hear more! We are constantly speaking with partners and brands in virtual space, but there is something extra special about getting to talk face-to-face. I’m glad that ASW was able to be the catalyst for those meetings. 

In the end, the product team was able to learn a lot about the unique world of affiliate marketing and we validated one of the most important tenets of the industry. It’s all about building quality relationships! 

Learn how to master relationship management in your own affiliate program with TUNE’s most popular e-book, The Ultimate Guide to Partner Marketing.

The product theme for 2022 can be best described as building a solid foundation for future innovation. What that means in practical terms is new product leadership and a buildup of robust teams ready to move TUNE into its next iteration. Our goal is to help our customers meet the exciting future that partner marketing holds for all of us in 2023.  

A large part of the product initiative of 2022 has been talking with customers, understanding the challenges in front of them, and crafting a vision for TUNE for 2023 and beyond. We’ll be sharing more about this initiative in the coming months.  

While 2022 has been research-heavy with a ton of foundational work happening behind the scenes, we’ve managed to deliver a handful of improvements over the past 12 months that are worth calling out. 

One of the highest-impact changes in 2022 was giving sign-up pages an updated look and feel. In many cases, sign-up pages are the first impression people have of your partner program. Helping potential partners get through the sign-up process quickly and easily reduces drop-off and increases conversions, ultimately increasing program size and conversions. 

In addition to a modern look and feel added to sign-up and login pages, the teams have released a number of incremental improvements to help make the TUNE experience even better. Here are a few additional highlights from 2022: 

Partner and Program Management 

• Partner counts are now visible on the Manage Partner view, giving a summary of pending partners and program size. 
• Pending conversion stats have been surfaced on the partner dashboard, giving partners deeper insight into payout statuses.  
• Partner Managers can approve or deny new partner sign-ups in bulk. 
• Admins have greater insight into creative files being uploaded by partners. 
• Responses to custom sign-up form questions are now included in the Partner Export tool. 
• Displaying your program’s terms and conditions during the sign-up process is now optional for programs that are surfacing terms elsewhere in their onboarding flow. 
• Expired offers are more readily apparent in the UI. 
• Offer access requests from partners now surface the date and time that access was requested. 

Login and Security 

• Cookie and privacy terms acceptance flow has been streamlined, reducing login friction. 
• Login security improvements, including user lockouts after too many failed attempts, have been implemented to bolster overall security. 
• Program Managers can now see a history of when terms and conditions were accepted by partners as well as that version of those terms. 

TUNE Pay 

• Email notification improvements for TUNE Pay, including: 
  • Automated email notifications about important account activities for advertisers. 
  • Automated email notifications about important account activities for partners. 
  • Additional control over email notifications and transparency around which emails have been sent. 
  • The addition of user-level notification settings. 
• See this TUNE Help article for more information and updates. 

Reporting and Analytics 

• TUNE Event ID and updated browser IDs have been added as options in the Conversion Report. 
• A standardization of report options and filters has made the reporting experience more consistent across reports. 
• ROI and Profit Margin calculations have been added to Stats Reports, alleviating the need to calculate those values manually. 
• Additional browser IDs have been added to the Event Tracer report. 
• Conversion Report now shows when a conversion was modified. 
• The conversion upload tool now supports a broader array of character options. 

Conclusion 

With this foundation, we’re excited to bring more innovation and improvements to TUNE this year. Keep an eye on the TUNE blog for announcements about big things coming in 2023!   

To learn more about the TUNE Partner Marketing Platform, request a demo or email us at sales@tune.com.

Apple’s privacy updates shipping with iOS 15 could mean the end of “opens” as a viable email marketing engagement metric. But as anyone who has been paying attention to the email marketing space knows, opens may already be one of the most unreliable engagement metrics. This update from Apple will force many email marketers to rethink the way they measure success — and that’s a good thing.

Changes to Mail in iOS 15

iOS 15 will include what Apple is calling Mail Privacy Protection, which will nullify email tracking pixels. This means email service providers (ESPs) will no longer be able to accurately track email opens. They also won’t be able to track geographic information, which is typically based on the IP address of the user that opened the email.

Worst case? Every email sent to an Apple Mail inbox could be reported as opened.

What This Means for Open Rates

Open rate is the number one email metric used by email marketers to define success. Open rates often drive powerful drip campaigns and are the backbone of list hygiene. Geographic information from IP addresses drives dynamic content widgets in more advanced campaigns. On the surface, with Apple Mail making up almost 50% of email client market share, this sounds like a huge loss.

Open Rates Were Already Suspect

However, open rates have been unreliable for a long time. Gmail has been caching email tracking pixels since at least 2013 as a way to speed up the email viewing experience for the end user. Gmail’s caching practice can take the form of tracking pixels being downloaded at point of delivery, even if the recipient never opens the email. Similar issues exist with geographical tracking based on IP address. If your ESP offers a map of recipients that have opened your email, all recipients using Gmail have been known to be grouped in Mountain View, California.

As of this writing, Gmail makes up almost 30% of email client market share. That means up to 30% of your audience’s open data could be inaccurate today.

There’s Still a Lot to Learn

Until iOS 15 rolls out, we won’t truly know the impact these changes will have on the way we measure engagement with email. It appears users will have the option to opt-in to Apple’s Mail Privacy Protection until users begin updating to iOS 15, we just don’t know how many people will adopt these changes. Keep in mind that changes come quickly, and it’s possible Apple will choose to automatically opt-in users to this service in the future.

Embrace Change: Double Down on More Tangible Metrics

To get ahead of the changes coming with the iOS 15 release, marketers can begin to shift the way they define a successful campaign. Focusing more on click rate will paint a better picture of your most engaged audience members. Personalizing content to individual recipients will drive email engagement higher. Even better, coupling your email campaigns with a platform like TUNE can give you engagement metrics beyond email, all the way to the point of conversion.

Privacy protection is a good thing for all of us. As marketers, it’s up to us to stay ahead of market trends and be the smartest marketers we can be. Start crafting a plan to modify your marketing strategy now to ensure your audience will receive the most relevant information from your brand.