In just one year, L’Express has transformed its affiliate strategy with the launch of fully integrated shopping guides via Skimlinks. In this interview, the team shares how a data-driven, SEO-first approach, combined with close collaboration and the use of the Skimlinks Editorial Network, has delivered millions of impressions, strong merchant partnerships, and sustained revenue growth.
Want to know more? Check out the case study where we dive into how L’Express turned editorial excellence into commerce success with Skimlinks.
How long have you focused on affiliate marketing?
We have been working on affiliation programs for about twenty years, constantly adapting to new consumer practices. With L’Express, we have forged strong partnerships with key players. The launch in 2024 of our first shopping guide, fully integrated into our site via Skimlinks, marks a new important step. This project is fully in line with our editorial strategy, with a fluid and qualitative integration into the world of L’Express. And this is just the beginning: we see strong development potential in this format.
How does Skimlinks fit into your workflow?
We have dedicated a project manager within our team to oversee the collaboration with Skimlinks. She communicates weekly with their teams to validate content, monitor its performance, optimize its integration on our site, and improve its accessibility. This close and fluid relationship allows us to align our efforts towards a common goal: editorial and commercial performance.
What are the first results you have obtained with Skimlinks? Have you seen an increase in your revenue? If so, can you give us an idea of the percentage growth?
Since the launch of the shopping guide in August 2024, we have observed continuous growth in our affiliate-related revenues, month after month. This progression is particularly notable during fixed-fee operations, which have been very successful. Even though it’s still a bit early to share consolidated figures, the trend is very encouraging, both in terms of revenue and reader engagement.
What do you love most about Skimlinks?
Their proximity, responsiveness, and especially their advisory role. The Skimlinks team is truly invested alongside us to optimise content, its positioning, and its performance. They understand our editorial challenges and know how to adapt to them, which creates a high-value collaboration.
How do you feel about the state of commerce content at the moment and do you plan on investing more?
Content commerce is becoming an essential lever for brands today. They need to express themselves through editorial formats that provide meaning, value, and recommendations. At L’Express, we are convinced that affiliation and brand content can coexist intelligently within a demanding framework. That’s why we are constantly looking to develop new operations, innovate in formats, and strengthen the effectiveness of these systems.
How do you decide which merchants to feature in SEN?
It depends and varies based on the type of content. For our evergreen buying guides, for example, our merchant and content strategy is based on multiple factors, including SEO, which encompasses questions such as:
- What product keywords are consumers searching for recommendations on?
- Do our writers have experience and expertise in these topics?
- Is there a lot of competition from other high-authority publishers, and do they write good-quality content
Secondly, our strategy for buying guides also depends on the merchants, for which we ask ourselves questions such as:
- Are there any merchants with affiliate programs available on Skimlinks we can promote for the keywords/product categories our SEO team identified?
- Do they have good commission rates/EPCs?
- Do they have a good reputation?
- Do they have the best products for the verticals we write about? (eg: Do they meet the quality standards established by our product testers, and do they have good reviews from customers and experts?)
For other types of content, such as Deals, we use a similar methodology, leveraging SEO keywords data, but we also spend a lot of time looking for the best possible deals on top products within the verticals that we have expertise in.
Thanks to the successful launch of our shopping section in the past year, we have been receiving a significant increase in requests from merchants asking to partner with us. We are quite selective with who we work with but are always open to exploring new opportunities and content verticals.
How do you use data to make decisions about your commerce strategy?
As part of our SEO strategy, we use multiple data points to determine which topics we should write about, such as estimated keyword search volumes, difficulty, traffic potential and value. To analyse and report on the performance of our commerce content, we use the Skimlinks Hub daily to check on our top pages and top merchants reports, which enable us to keep an eye on what’s working to optimise our strategy. We also regularly check the broken links report to see which content needs updating.
What are your plans for peak season?
For peak season, we’ll first make sure all of our evergreen content is up to date and optimised. In addition to this, we plan to cover a few verticals for “deals” content, including Tech products such as smartphones, TVs and laptops. We’ll also keep a close eye on the Skimlinks reports to see if any product links are trending, and if there are any offers that are performing well, we will push them more. Finally, while we do leave some space for flexibility in our plan for last-minute campaigns, we encourage merchants to secure tenancies with us as early as possible in order to secure and guarantee coverage for Q4.
What results have you obtained so far and what are the best performing topics?
The results have been really encouraging and came quite quickly in just the first year, which gave us a lot of confidence that we were on the right track. Numbers have been going up exceptionally fast, and still are growing as we have observed QoQ growth of +60% from Q1 to Q2 this year.
Month after month, revenues have kept growing, and our fixed-fee campaigns in particular have delivered excellent returns. Just as important, we’ve seen readers engaging positively with this content, which proves to us that strong editorial values and affiliate partnerships can absolutely work together.
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