ArcSpan AMS: ​ ​Turning Affiliate Click Data into Premium In-Market Audience Products​

The Challenge

Our Media’s editorial properties generate significant affiliate link traffic from their cycling properties such as bikeradar.com and cyclingplus.com. These clicks represent some of the highest- quality commercial signals available.​

​However, this affiliate click data was entirely siloed from Our Media’s audience and advertising technology stack resulting in:​

• No audience visibility​

  
  

• No advertiser activation​

  
  

• No click vs. view distinction​

The result: a rich, proprietary intent signal that lived exclusively in the affiliate commerce stack — invisible to sales, insights, and programmatic monetisation teams alike.​

The Solution

ArcSpan deployed its lightweight ArcTag across Our Media’s properties, purpose-configured to capture affiliate link click events at the URL level.​

• Affiliate Signal Capture: ArcSpan’s SE team configured custom tagging to collect affiliate link clicks, recording the partner domain, product category URL, and click event against the user’s first-party profile. This required no changes to Our Media’s existing affiliate infrastructure, and no work required by Our Media.​

  
  

• Click vs. View Audience Segmentation: ArcSpan’s Audience Management System (AMS) enabled Our Media to build and analyse separate audience segments for content viewers and affiliate link clickers within the same dashboard. ​

  
  

• Partner Domain Filtering and Category Taxonomy: ArcSpan’s platform allowed Our Media to filter and segment affiliate click audiences by specific partner domain and product category URL, for example, users in-market for bikes, helmets, pumps and other accessories.

Results

ArcSpan’s affiliate signal capture capability was part of the wider integration picture for Our Media. The partnership delivered impact across cost, speed, and commercial performance.​

• Platform cost: ArcSpan replaced Our Media’s Permutive contract at 40% lower cost — delivering greater capability, faster implementation, and a platform genuinely built around publisher commercial needs.​

  
  

• Implementation speed: Custom data points and bespoke audience configurations were integrated within weeks. Our Media’s teams had been working within Permutive for years and had not achieved this.​

  
  

• Audience performance. ArcSpan’s audience segments — encompassing first-party behavioural data, affiliate link click signals, and contextual enrichment — delivered an overall 2.5x CPM uplift when compared to their previous DMP audience segments.​

  
  

• Live in 10 days across 15

  
  

• 2.5x CPM uplift compared to previous CPM segments