Erin Cigich
CEO, Clickbooth

Your proprietary platform, the Clickbooth Performance Exchange, seems to be getting a lot of attention right now. Why do you think that is?

We’ve heard from clients – affiliates and advertisers alike – that the industry is ready for a change. Everyone has been operating off of the same old model for a decade plus. As an industry we’re inherently the innovators and the risk takers, we’re at the forefront of every single marketing trend, but that hasn’t applied to our technology – until now.

What differentiates the Exchange from other network platforms?

We’re not the first network to be powered by a proprietary platform, but our technology is one-of-a-kind. Not only do we have all the same functionality as networks using Cake, we put a lot of thought into how to make our clients’ lives easier and empower them to improve their returns and grow their businesses. For affiliates, they can run a single offer, or run a group of offers or our vertical link and leverage our social learning algorithm to serve the best offer – resulting in higher EPCs and little to no time spent on offer testing or cap management. For advertisers, it’s about control and targeting – device type, geo, traffic type, time of day – you name it, if it impacts their Customer Lifetime Values (CLV) they can select for it.

How does the Exchange functionality operate? Is it based on real-time bidding? Talk me through how it works.

In the simplest sense, the Exchange is designed to match the highest performing offer for your traffic on a per click basis, yielding superior EPCs.

As an affiliate, you know that there are “rockstar” offers. Traditionally, you’d find the top Skin Care offer, for instance, and run that until it caps out for the day or the week. What we’ve seen, that is very interesting, is that really no one offer is the “rockstar” for mobile AND desktop AND tablet – for example. By using the Exchange to build an offer group, you let our sophisticated algorithm serve the best offer to each individual user – meaning you may have three rockstar offers, 1 for mobile, 1 for desktop and 1 for tablet – and this really increases your returns in a powerful way. This applies to all nutra verticals. For lead gen, time of day, day of week and geo have massive implications on offer performance. Layer on our LP Offer Rotation technology and now, as an affiliate, you’re dominating your traffic sources. Guys simply can’t compete with these EPCs.

What are the real benefits that an advertiser will see?  And a publisher?

Value alignment has been a driving concept for our company for years. When we align the goals of our affiliates and advertisers we build campaigns not only with lucrative performance, but with longevity too. The Exchange takes what we’ve been doing toward that end in a manual way and implements it automatically.

Advertiser Benefits:

  • Quality – target the traffic that results in higher CLVs
  • Consistency through control
  • Scale smarter and faster

Affiliate Benefits:

  • Truly Exclusive Offers
  • Increased EPCs and eCPMs = Higher returns
  • Run multiple top performing offers at once
  • Removes the need to swap pages or links as caps are hit or to test in new offers

Programmatic advertising is seen by many as having driven down the rates that publishers get paid for their inventory. Is there a risk that something similar might happen with performance-based media?

If anything, we’ve seen the opposite – fierce competition for top affiliate traffic, creating high CLVs for advertisers, again this goes back to our philosophy of value alignment.

You are clearly investing a great deal in technology. Do you feel it is strategically important for Clickbooth? Why?

Absolutely. It’s an added value for our clients. Our technology is extremely flexible – we can take (and have) a client request and implement it platform wide within days. Any network sitting on a 3rd party tracker is lucky to even have a request reviewed by their trackers’ developers. “Innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower” – Steve Jobs.

Who do you see as your competition? Is it simply other affiliate networks? Or other advertising networks generally? How do you think about your market positioning?

In performance marketing there are a few brand names, but for the most part there are hundreds or thousands of networks with no real differentiators. In the next 12-18 months we expect to see, and be a driver of, major market consolidation.

I saw that Dzenis Softic described this a version 1.0 of the Exchange. What’s coming in version 2.0?

Right now, we’re most excited about our LP Offer Rotation – currently available for affiliates. It’s perfect for high volume media buyers. Affiliates select a group of offers to run on their pre-sell page, place one link and allows the Exchange’s machine learning algorithm to serve the best offer and corresponding product image and offer name.

We’re on a weekly release schedule and cater heavily toward client feedback and requests.

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.