The World Leader in Performance Marketing Technologies.

There’s no doubt that if you’re in the affiliate marketing space, you’re familiar with Clickbooth’s industry leading platform exchange technology. They are a company that was founded and built with the belief that a Fortune 500 company and a rising entrepreneur should have the same access to acquiring new customers at scale, and are consistently developing and supporting the technologies to make this possible. We asked their CTO, Dzenis Softic a few questions about how Clickbooth is able to stay ahead of the competition within the performance marketing space.

What makes the Clickbooth platform so unique when compared to other platforms?

Dzenis Softic

A: What’s fantastic about Clickbooth’s proprietary platform is that it’s designed to evolve as our partners’ needs evolve. A partner can approach us with a new feature that might not exist on our platform, we have the capability to design and implement that feature to suit our partners’ needs. We listen and then work hard to develop technologies that enhance and drive efficiencies. Having full control over software development allows us to innovate and test new features long before the competition does.

The affiliate marketing industry hasn’t always been the quickest to adopt new technologies. What has enabled Clickbooth to consistently innovate with such success?

A: I strongly believe innovation is the key to creating real value for our partners.  We encourage our teams to think about what technologies make their lives better. And by creating this internal mindset we encourage them to think like our partners. “What technologies will make our partners’ businesses better?” Those ideas are collected and discussed on an ongoing basis, through intensive meetings on what developmental steps our technologies will take next.

A great example of this is our proprietary “Smartlink Technology” based on “Artificial Intelligence”. It’s a technology that people were skeptical about just a few short years ago. But thanks to the consistent analysis of our partners’ needs, we had the foresight to integrate this technology into our platform well before the rest of the industry. The Performance Marketing industry is now adopting “AI” as a critical feature. And we’re proud to have helped spur that innovation. Foresight however has provided us with a critical headstart and we intend to consistently innovate and never relinquish that edge.

I think it’s also very important to recognize our amazing development team. The team is 30 strong and always looking to innovate that next industry changing feature. With the support of a team this talented, we’re able to avoid bottlenecks and continuously address all of our partners platform needs in real time.

I know a huge advantage of having a proprietary platform has been your ability to bring custom AI-enabled optimization to publishers and advertisers. What are some of your most notable AI benefits?

A: Our original platform design was written with AI in mind. While some competitors’ platforms have used AI as an add-on or after thought, our entire platform is built on top of an advanced AI algorithm. It’s a testament to how important we knew this technology would be for the performance marketing industry. A primary benefit of our AI optimization is the ability to look at historical performance records and then recognize data trends among different branches of high performance traffic.This process analyzes terabytes of data in real time. AI then takes that data and makes real-time decisions on which traffic is sent to what offers.

This is not to say that the platform will send all traffic to the highest performing offer. Rather, it will make decisions for each unique user on which offer this particular user is most likely to convert on. This AI analysis is what allows us to create a “Clickbooth Blend” – a specific mix of offers that will create overall higher EPC than if the user had sent all of their traffic to just the highest performing offer. Our proprietary AI Technology can provide up to 25% increased EPC for our affiliate partners

The Clickbooth platform was one of the first to truly benefit both affiliates and advertisers. From both the advertiser and affiliate viewpoints, what would you say are some of the most valued optimizations Clickbooth offers?  

A: When we design new features, our driving question is “How do we make life easier for affiliate and advertising partners?” Sometimes that new innovation will be designed to increase revenue, add new opportunities or just automate an existing process so that affiliates and advertisers can focus more time on generating revenue for their business.

One of the most popular features for affiliates is what we call MLOP – “Multi Level Offer Priorities”. This allows affiliates to select one or more offers in a Priority Group, then select other “backup” offers in a Secondary Group. These secondary offers will be used only if the primary offers become unavailable.

What affiliates will often do is place multiple offers in the same Priority Group and allow our system decide which one to use based on availability and performance. This is especially useful in a vertical such as Auto Insurance, where some offers target specific states at a specific time of day, while others target different states at different times. By adding all these auto insurance offers to their main Priority Group, affiliates get a blend of offers that cover 24/7 under just one link. They don’t have to worry about replacing offers overnight, on weekends, or when the offer reaches its budget cap. Our system does it all for them, in real time.

Another popular feature for affiliates is what we call Image and Brand Rotation. This allows affiliates to choose a particular vertical, let’s say Auto Insurance, and the Image and Brand Rotation feature will then choose the product image and name that has the highest chance of converting the unique visitor that is visiting the landing page at that time.

Advertisers with Clickbooth have the option of either allowing us to optimize their traffic for them, or they can choose to optimize their traffic manually. If they choose the manual option, our performance exchange platform gives them full visibility in traffic performance from each individual affiliate, so if an Advertiser chooses, they can manage budgets, payouts, schedules and campaigns all from the Web UI on their own. This allows them to increase/decrease payouts and define custom budgets for each campaign an affiliate runs, based on the performance of the traffic from that affiliate.

It’s clear that you already have a powerful set of features on the performance exchange platform, and that Clickbooth is anything but complacent.  From your standpoint as CTO, what do you believe it takes to build the next great feature?

A: It takes a great team! And I can say that we certainly have one. Over the years, our team of Developers, Project managers, Designers and Quality Assurance specialists have gained deep insights on not just big data, machine learning and AI, but also the industry itself. This combination of tech + industry knowledge is what allows us to move faster and build features that are impactful for partners.

I believe the starting point for the development of practically every great feature is identifying a problem. It could be a potential problem identified by our partner. Or, something we’ve identified internally. From there, it takes a systematized workflow, and a strong team, to bring the next great feature to fruition. In Clickbooth’s case, after issues are identified, we prioritize and develop a plan to tackle the problem. We then start creating business requirements, wireframes and outlining the technical specifications. Once all the details are clear and development starts, the tasks move quickly through the workflow, from coding, to infrastructure, to QA tests and completed with final deployment. Our team is instructed to pay special attention to efficiency and optimization.This is very important due to the sheer volume of traffic that our platform provides, we need to be sure that new feature performance will hold up to the extreme levels of clicks. Our team can simulate billions of clicks to stress test our infrastructure to ensure maximum efficiency.

About Clickbooth

Clickbooth is a technology company that takes a programmatic approach to traditional performance marketing resulting in zero risk and higher returns for clients. The company’s proprietary performance exchange provides advertisers looking for new customer acquisitions access to the largest distribution network of online marketing experts, specializing in display, social, native, search, email and contextual traffic. Affiliates using the platform see 30% higher EPCs and let the platform handle optimization, cap management and offer testing for them, allowing them to aggressively scale their businesses. Visit us at www.clickbooth.com.