• How-To

    5 Best Practices for Onboarding New Advertisers

    Onboarding is a critical step in establishing a long-term relationship with new advertisers. You’re still working on earning their trust, business, and even potentially exclusivity at some point down the road. So put your best foot forward: show what you’re capable of, minimize potential hiccups, and create a positive onboarding experience that will set the
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  • How-To

    5 CAKE Features to Streamline the Onboarding of New Affiliates

    Let’s be real here: recruiting and onboarding new affiliates to your performance marketing program involves a lot of moving parts. You need to take care of paperwork, billing, training them on the program requirements, communicating expectations, and getting them access to the campaign assets they need so they can start right away—and the list goes
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  • How-To

    iOS 14: What this Means for Mobile Campaign Tracking in CAKE

    Apple’s release of their new mobile operating system, iOS 14, includes a new consumer privacy setting that will change the future of mobile advertising. The new setting requires that all apps adhere to the AppTracking Transparency framework and require consumers to opt-in to the IDFA (Identifier for Advertisers). When a consumer opens an app for
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  • How-To

    Using CAKE Features to Find and Stop Affiliate Fraud

    For anyone running affiliate marketing programs, combating affiliate fraud is a top priority. As of August 2020, affiliate marketing had already generated $15 billion in revenue, but at least 9% of those transactions were affected by fraud, according to CHEQ. On their blog, the company writes that this is a highly conservative estimate and that
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  • How-To

    Using Lead Statuses in CAKE for Closed-Loop Reporting

    What happens to leads after they’re sold? What was the quality of the leads? How can you provide better leads to your buyers?  If you’re like many lead generation marketers, the answers to these questions are a big unknown. You spend time on acquiring the leads (optimizing the landing page experience and form fill, for
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  • How-To

    3 CAKE Features to Easily Manage Affiliate Commissions

      To maintain a competitive advantage as a network, you need to keep your affiliate partners happy. And one way to do that is to incentivize them with increased affiliate commissions for high-quality, high-volume traffic. However, when you’re managing a large number of affiliates and campaigns, it can be difficult to keep up with all
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  • Insights

    CAKE Best Practices for Accurate Measurement (without Cookie Tracking) 

    Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in November 2019 and was revised on September 23, 2020. Performance marketers are navigating a new world of privacy regulations that are making them rethink how to maintain accurate measurement across their campaigns. The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) has created a tidal wave of changes with browsers
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  • How-To

    5 CAKE Features to Simplify Communication with Affiliate Partners

    If you’re an affiliate network or advertiser, you know firsthand the challenge of working with a large number of affiliate partners and campaigns. With so many moving parts, it can be difficult to communicate efficiently and consistently with every partner. In some cases, you may be sending duplicate information; in others, you’re not sharing enough,
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  • How-To

    Using CAKE’s Voucher Codes for Clickless Tracking

    As an affiliate marketer, the best way to accurately track and measure your campaign performance is to use tracking links and postback URLs. By leveraging these tracking capabilities, the CAKE platform enables you to track a consumer’s click and conversion on a digital marketing campaign and attribute it back to the traffic source. But what
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  • How-To

    Using Campaign Targeting to Increase Conversion Rates

    As a performance marketer, one of your main priorities is to increase conversion rates to boost revenue. One of the primary ways you can optimize conversion rates is to use campaign targeting. Targeting ensures that the right people receive the offer and that they are directed to the landing page that is best suited for
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  • How-To

    CAKE Security Settings to Protect Your Platform

    The recent launch of the CAKE Idea Portal has provided our customers with a direct line of communication to share with us the challenges they’re facing and their proposed solutions to overcome those challenges. Based on our community’s recent input, we have moved forward in expanding the CAKE security settings to help further safeguard our
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  • How-To

    How to Attribute Conversions Using CAKE Fingerprint Tracking

    First-party cookies and cookieless tracking (server-to-server tracking) are the go-to approaches for the majority of your campaign measurement tactics. But what happens when those approaches fail? Or when cookie-based tracking isn’t available — such as with mobile install campaigns (CPI), social media campaigns, and influencer marketing? As an affiliate network, fingerprint tracking is an ideal
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  • How-To

    How to Customize Sub ID Payouts to Reward Partners  

    Optimizing campaign performance depends on properly identifying which campaigns and partners are performing well. CAKE enables affiliate marketers to track and measure granular data points about partner performance using Sub ID click tracking parameters. With this knowledge, you’ll be in a position to do more of what is working best, reward your partners with higher payouts
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  • How-To

    Using CAKE’s Direct Linking to Measure Google and Facebook Ad Performance

    The best way to accurately track and measure your campaign performance is to use tracking links. Measurement platforms, like CAKE, leverage tracking links in order to track a consumer’s click and conversion on a digital marketing campaign and attribute it back to a traffic source to measure campaign performance. However, as the industry changes, there
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  • How-To

    How to Run a Successful Lead Generation Program on CAKE

    During today’s shifting ecosystem, many marketers are taking the time to pause: Where do they want to focus efforts today? And equally important: How should they plan for the long-term? We’ve been talking with our customers about how they can best leverage the CAKE platform that they already have in place. For many, that means
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  • Insights

    What is Performance Marketing and How Has it Evolved?

    What is performance marketing? What is the goal of performance marketing? How has it evolved over the years and how can it help my organization? Today’s blog answers these questions and more.   What is performance marketing? Two decades ago, performance marketing emerged when brands were getting increasingly concerned about the amount of money they were
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  • How-To

    Vlog: How to Control and Improve Lead Quality

    As a performance marketer, you need to make sure the leads you sell to buyers aren’t returned because of fraudulent data or low lead quality. So the constant challenge is: How do you control and improve your lead quality?? That’s the topic of our latest conversation between Garth Harris, CAKE’s VP of Product Innovation, and
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  • Insights

    Google Chrome 80: Everything You Need to Know as a Performance Marketer

    Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in January 2020 and was revised on February 4, 2020, to include updated information from Google Chrome 80 release notes. For performance marketers, figuring out how to accurately measure campaign performance amidst ongoing privacy regulations remains a challenge. The wave of privacy initiatives kicked off in 2018 with
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