Interviews with Lee Aho, Executive VP of Advertisers at Clickbooth, and Brad Dobbins, Executive VP of Affiliates at Clickbooth
REGARDING ADVERTISERS & MERCHANTS
Imagine a new advertiser coming to you to launch a new product. What’s the process between contract and launch?
LA: The online performance space is extremely fluid. As a result, time is critical and speed matters. Our platform is designed to move efficiently through the launch process. Advertisers can build offers, fund their account, select targeting, upload creatives, grab pixels, and test offers immediately. In the Clickbooth Performance Exchange, competitive offers can be live and receiving traffic within minutes.
With technology in place to expedite the launch process, there are two prospective factors that could prevent an offer from going live in the Exchange. Firstly, due to the highly competitive nature of the Exchange, an offer may be denied because it lacks competitiveness or relevance. To be considered competitive, an offer must be capable of producing quality returns for its affiliates. To be considered relevant, while performance marketing is in large part vertical agnostic, each offer must ensure the product or service being promoted is cohesive with the affiliate marketing space. Once an offer is determined to be competitive and relevant, it is reviewed by Clickbooth’s in-house compliance department to ensure it meets the Exchange requirements.
During that process, how do you evaluate the relative importance of different channels and what proportion of budget you allocate to them?
LA: Performance marketing is measurable. Unfortunately, most traffic outlets don’t allow advertisers to effectively and efficiently use their measurable data to create proper value-alignment. In our proprietary platform, advertisers gain control of their traffic. Our system allows advertisers to set unique pricing based on many factors, including source, traffic channel, device type, geo location, etc. As a result, advertisers are concerned less with allocating budgets toward a specific channel and instead, focused on maximizing traffic opportunities through their most profitable outlets.
This is twofold. In part, allocation is based on which traffic sources can fill the budget, but it is also greatly determined by the performance feedback from the advertiser. We focus on scaling the sources that are most profitable for an advertiser to fulfill their budgets.
How does an advertiser prevent affiliates from competing with and cannibalizing the advertiser’s own search or display campaigns?
LA: The best part about performance marketing, and the internet as a whole, is the vast outlets available. There are so many different traffic sources and outlets that the likelihood of an affiliate cannibalizing an advertiser’s own marketing efforts is extremely rare.
In most cases, the affiliates can market an offer more effectively since this is their area of expertise. Advertisers have many different working parts of their offer/company to segment their resources, whereas an affiliate is solely focused on buying traffic.
Performance based advertising is a full time commitment. The ultra-competitive landscape rewards advertisers who show an ongoing commitment toward optimizations.
REGARDING PUBLISHERS & AFFILIATES
The traditional route into affiliate marketing was always via the creation of a blog, gaining experience in growing and converting an audience, and then perhaps learning how to buy traffic. Does that approach still work?
BD: At this point, amongst the affiliates Clickbooth works with, this traditional model is obsolete. Our affiliates are sophisticated entrepreneurs who specialize in media buying and drive value through content creation. Our native, social, display and contextual affiliates are all taking on the risks of purchasing media up front on a CPM or CPC basis, enabling direct response advertisers to purchase traffic on a CPA basis. Our mailers have developed proprietary platforms and data sets to inbox advertisers’ offers.
What is the best way for a publisher to “get to the next level” where they are offered exclusive offers and improved commission rates?
BD: Clickbooth has a reputation for turning away 9 out of 10 affiliates who apply for the network. We work with an elite group of affiliates and cannot risk mixing unproven partners into our exchange. So, for us, any affiliate who qualifies for Clickbooth is already treated “next level.” In 2014, Clickbooth pioneered “No Haggle Payouts” where all CB affiliates are guaranteed the highest competitive rate, no questions asked. Also, every approved affiliate has access to our one-of-a-kind technology that allows them to run a single exclusive offer, custom build offer groups or run a vertical link. That being said, there are additional perks for our cb:Black clients, our exclusive affiliate partners.
About Clickbooth.com, LLC
Clickbooth is a recognized online performance advertising leader and one-of-a-kind performance marketing exchange focused on Cost-Per-Action and Cost-Per-Click affiliate marketing. Founded in 2002, the company specializes in generating consistent, quality customer acquisitions at high volumes through exclusive affiliate channels on native, mobile, social, email, contextual and search placements. Advertisers can access advanced targeting capabilities through the proprietary, patent-pending platform. The majority of the traffic is exclusive to Clickbooth, which is pioneering a programmatic approach to performance marketing through the use of machine learning and implementation of big data.