Our pets are there when we all need a little companionship, not to mention a reason to get out of the house. We owe them the best. And when it comes to creating resources that improve the lives of furry and feathered friends and their owners, Pangolia is the top dog.
Pangolia draws on the help of experts, veterinarians, and animal lovers from around the world to offer pet parents comprehensive care guides and innovative products.
Simon Treulle, CEO of Pangolia, spoke with Cris Tan, Partner Development Manager for Southeast Asia (SEA) at impact.com. They uncovered Pangolia’s secrets to success, how the team uses impact.com, and what’s in store for the digital media and commerce company’s future.
Cris Tan: Hello, Simon. Please explain what Pangolia does, where your audience is primarily based, and your role at Pangolia.
Simon: My name is Simon Treulle, and I’m the CEO of Pangolia. We’re a digital media and ecommerce company seeking to improve the lives of pets and their owners. Some of our biggest sites are Hepper, PetKeen, and ExcitedCats. More than nine million readers visit our total site portfolio every month. Most of our readers are from the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, and Australia.
We also have Cait Sweeney, our Affiliate Partnerships Manager. She’s always happy to talk about forming great partnerships with brands that can help our audience.
Cris: Tell us about the history of the partnership channel at Pangolia. How did it start, and how has it evolved?
Simon: We started our media websites to inspire readers and provide the most helpful resources for pet owners. Then we learned that we could work with partners to build relationships that provide a better user experience while helping our brand partners grow.
The extra revenue from partners also allowed us to increase our team’s size. Reinvesting in our team allowed us to produce much more high-quality content that engages our readers.
We recognize the huge value in collaborating with partners, which is also one of the reasons why we brought in Cait Sweeney.
Cris: Could you tell us about Pangolia’s value proposition for both brands and merchants?
Simon: By partnering with Pangolia, a brand can potentially build a connection with millions of pet lovers every month who come to our sites to learn about pet care, dog training, and other topics.
Many of our posts are also written or reviewed by veterinarians.
Cris: How do you use the impact.com platform? Are you primarily using it for finding and connecting with new brand partners, or do you do more?
Simon: We mainly use the impact.com platform to create new partnerships with great brands. We also monitor progress with existing partners. The platform is very intuitive and allows us to see campaign performance easily.
We work with partners on many different types of commerce content. Some of our most popular include:
- How-to guides (e.g., this article where we mention Small Cat Food)
- Listicles (e.g., this list of gift ideas)
- Buyer’s guides (e.g., this article)
- Other types of commercial content, such as this ask-a-vet page where we seamlessly integrated JustAnswer’s chat onto our website
Editorial integrity and objectivity are core values in our company. Opinions, reviews, recommendations, and other aspects of our editorial department are independent of outside influences and strive to remain unbiased.
We’ve learned that forming a great partnership is easier when a brand already has an affiliate program set up through impact.com. This often means that the brand has a designated affiliate program manager, which makes the back-and-forth emails much more effective. It allows us to create a dialogue and suggest improvements that can provide a better reader experience.
Cris: Can you describe some of the challenges you face when managing partnerships and which features of the impact.com platform are most important to your team?
Simon: One of the biggest challenges was managing partnerships at scale. We’re working and managing hundreds of brands simultaneously. As CEO, I used to handle all this communication, which was very time-consuming. The solution was to bring in our talented Affiliate Partnerships Manager.
We also experienced some challenges with affiliate programs hosted on platforms or networks we aren’t familiar with. It’s hard to manage multiple logins and trust unfamiliar networks.
We love that so many pet brands choose to have their affiliate program on impact.com. We trust impact.com, and having many affiliate programs in one place is much easier to manage than if they are spread across many different networks.
Cris: Have you found any unexpected brand or vertical successes with Pangolia? What are some of your big brand success stories?
Simon: I’m truly fascinated by the growth of fresh pet food delivery services in the last five years. The vertical has a lot of great brands and a lot of potential. We work with many of these brands and have actively been publishing content to educate our readers about this new service.
We’re also seeing great success in working with brands such as JustAnswer. We integrated JustAnswer’s Ask a Vet service directly into our website to provide our audience with seamless access to JustAnswer’s experts.
Cris: Do you have any brands in mind that you would love to see on your roster that are a perfect fit for Pangolia? How would you describe the ideal brand partner you would like to work with?
Simon: We love working with brands that want to positively impact pet families.
For us, the ideal partner focuses on improving the lives of pets and their owners. It needs to be a brand pet owners love. It needs positive reviews, amazing customer service, and high-quality products or services. The ideal brand has a dedicated affiliate partnership manager so we can communicate, collaborate, and give each other feedback easily.
Cris: What are some of the newer brand names we can look out for in your program? What makes these partnerships exciting?
Simon: We’ve published a lot of content about dog grooming. We’re currently forming partnerships with dog groomers that have a presence in multiple US states or most of the United Kingdom, Canada, or Australia.
Findings Ia dog grooming service with a big company presence is rare. There’s a lot of potential for collaboration success if impact.com onboards a great dog grooming brand.
Besides apps and software that help pet owners, it would also be great to see brands that provide pet sitting and dog walking services.
Cris: Finally, how do you anticipate Pangolia’s future development? Any big plans on the horizon?
Simon: The future looks bright. We began working in the pet industry in 2019, and we’re just getting started. Our mission is to build the most helpful pet company in the world, and we see many ways we can get closer to achieving that.
An increasing number of brands are realizing the potential of performance marketing, and forming partnerships through impact.com. More and more of these brands are joining the platform, which is super promising for the pet and affiliate industries! In an effort to achieve scale, we currently use impact.com’s APIs. So far, the outcome looks really optimistic.
We’re also very excited about the growth of our team. We’re having much more of our content written or reviewed by veterinarians.
At Pangolia, we think long-term. We love helping pet families, and we love what we do. As the CEO, I expect to continue working at Pangolia for many, many years to come.
Want to connect with paw-fect partners like Pangolia? Contact the Southeast Asia team at growth@impact.com to get started.
