The Client

Adleadr is a UK-based performance marketing agency that ensures its clients’ online campaigns are successfully delivered through email, social media, search, mobile, display, and affiliate marketing. The agency focuses on generating and distributing qualified leads for real estate developers and agents, and affiliate marketing for the finance vertical.

The Business Challenge

Prior to leveraging CAKE, Adleadr was using two different platforms to manage its clients’ campaigns — one for lead distribution and another for affiliate marketing.

Affiliate tracking on Adleadr’s prior, custom tracking platform was extremely limited, so the agency was unable to effectively manage offers across its affiliates. For example, they could not set one affiliate inactive for an offer, set caps, or redirect traffic.

The agency’s lead distribution solution also posed limitations, such as the agency could not review leads prior to sending them to lead buyers and lead buyers unable to return leads themselves. This resulted in:

• Lost revenue: Adleadr ran offers with a flat scrub, delivering lead buyers an additional 15 percent of leads at no charge, to cover invalid leads instead of generating returns.
• Poor leads: The inability to easily identify the original traffic sources led to abuse from affiliates and poor lead quality. They could not review leads before sending them to buyers, so every lead was sent, including obviously problematic ones.
• Inefficiencies: When lead buyers received a spike in invalid leads beyond the 15 percent flat scrub, the agency had to deal with complaints and process returns on spreadsheets. This was very time-consuming, particularly when trying to attribute returned leads back to the relevant affiliates.

The agency was looking for a new solution to address these issues, while improving flexibility and efficiency.

INDUSTRY

Lead distribution, affiliate marketing

Visit website:

https://adleadr.com

BUSINESS IMPACT

• Increased profitability
• Boosted client satisfaction with delivery of improved lead quality
• More efficient, saving valuable resources and time

WHY CAKE

• One platform to manage, measure, and optimize lead distribution and affiliate campaign performance
• Greater transparency into lead generation traffic sources
• Industry-leading features that resulted in significantly improved lead quality

Enter CAKE

Adleadr evaluated several affiliate software and lead distribution providers and selected CAKE. With CAKE, Adleadr unified its affiliate marketing and lead distribution solutions on a single platform. This provides a holistic view into the management and optimization of lead buyers, traffic sources, and lead quality, resulting in higher partner satisfaction and more revenue opportunities for the agency.

In particular, CAKE allows Adleadr to close off specific affiliates, set caps, and more. For lead distribution, the agency can now review leads before sending to buyers, buyers can make returns which are automatically attributed back to specific affiliates, and they have a complete history of all leads, including returns. This has not only saved the organization administration time, but significantly improved overall lead quality. They no longer need to use flat scrubs and affiliate quality has subsequently improved, meaning more satisfied lead buyers and more revenue.

Below highlights benefits including:

• Boosted partner satisfaction: Lead buyers are more satisfied with lead delivery, management and quality, as well as access to the buyer portal showing all lead details so they purchase more leads from the agency. Likewise, their affiliates are satisfied with access to their affiliate portal to view offers, access campaign assets, view reports, and more.
• Lower fraud rates: Adleadr isn’t integrated with an anti-fraud platform at this stage, but fraud rates have declined due to now using CAKE and being able to easily attribute lead returns to individual affiliate sources. By having a clearer idea of this information, they’ve been able to block affiliates and/or their sub-affiliates from driving poor traffic.
• Improved lead quality: The ability to review leads before sending them to buyers is a huge bonus and weeds out bogus data before it reaches their clients. This has not only improved lead quality but also buyers’ overall satisfaction with their agency.
• Increased efficiencies: In particular, the agency finds the “Email Template” function very helpful to send affiliates emails to update them on their campaigns directly from CAKE and has created a number of custom email templates (e.g. campaign paused, new budget, etc.). The agency also streamlined tasks through automation. For example, accounting functions were more of a manual task for Adleadr before using CAKE.