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 example), but chances are you’re not receiving enough valuable insight back from the lead buyers to perform closed-loop reporting.

CAKE lead statuses bridge this gap, delivering closed-loop reporting that helps you drive higher quality leads for buyers.

What is Closed-loop Reporting?

Closed-loop reporting enables your buyers to inform you of how the leads they’ve purchased from you are processing through their sales funnel.

It answers questions such as:

• Did the lead go dark?
• Could the buyer not get a hold of the consumer even though the contact info was valid?
• Was the consumer not as qualified as the form fill made it seem?
• Did they end up becoming a customer?

Closed-loop Reporting with CAKE

CAKE’s integrated performance marketing platform has the ability to handle both affiliate marketing and lead generation campaigns. Because it manages both supply and demand partners and combines all data points in one platform, it excels at closed-loop measurement.

CAKE delivers an end-to-end view into the lead acquisition funnel, including:

• Where/who the lead was acquired from
• Where the lead was sold to
• How much it was sold for
• If it was later returned for a certain reason
• If the lead buyer sent any additional information about the lead post-sale

All of these insights are essential in shaping and refining your lead acquisition strategy. When you know what’s happening at each step of the funnel, you can figure out what’s working well (and what’s not!), and optimize your acquisition strategy for increased ROI.

CAKE’s Lead Status Reporting

To take advantage of closed-loop reporting and get detailed insights into lead quality, you can use CAKE’s Lead Status feature to create custom lead statuses specific to the vertical you are generating leads for.

For example, let’s look at the mortgage sector of financial services. Once you sell a lead to a buyer, such as a first-time homebuyer to a mortgage lender, the buyer will be able to use CAKE’s Lead Update API to provide you with real-time updates on leads, such as the status of the loan application and when it’s in underwriting.

This information will help you assess the quality of your leads. Certain leads may not be qualified to buy based on the type of loan they were looking for. Others may move through the funnel more quickly and be more likely to fund, making them more profitable leads to focus on.

You may also learn that your high volume affiliate sources aren’t the ones generating the highest revenue for your lead buyers, maybe it’s the lower volume niche affiliates and publishers.

With closed-loop reporting and insight into the entire process—from traffic sources to campaign messaging to form fills—you’re in a better position to optimize the complete funnel.

CAKE also gives you the flexibility to create additional lead statuses so you can more easily work with whatever systems and processes your buyer has in place.

To learn more about how to enable lead status tracking and reporting in CAKE, check out the knowledge base article or reach out to your Account Manager.