An innovator in the financial publishing industry for over 25 years, Agora Financial provides independent economic commentary through print and online publications, e-books, films and international conferences. Forecasts by is editors have been recognised by numerous media sources, including The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, CNBC, Fox Business News, Reuters, Bloomberg, U.S. News & World Report, Financial Times, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, RT, Los Angeles Times, The Daily Telegraph and many more.
The challenge
Agora Financial engages in affiliate marketing to attract audiences for its publications. With a growing affiliate programme, the company wanted to be able to manage payouts more efficiently as well as track both real-time and historic campaign performance on an ongoing basis.
The legacy system Agora Financial was using could not scale quickly enough to accommodate the growth of its programme and it didn’t provide the detailed analytics the company wanted so that it could both track performance over time and make adjustments to campaigns as they were running to maximise results.
CAKE’s solution
Agora Financial selected CAKE to manage its affiliate programme because of the solution’s ability to track campaign performance at a very granular level. For example, the company can look at how various offers are performing in real time and use the information to quickly make adjustments so that affiliates have access to offers that are more likely to convert.
“With CAKE, we’re able to A/B test two different versions of the same promotion,” said Meghan Damico, digital marketing specialist at Agora Financial. “We can then analyse the data to make decisions about the best approach.”
CAKE’s analytics also enable Agora Financial to identify problems and troubleshoot issues that might require attention, such as the need to redirect traffic based on the user’s device. The feature, as explained by Damico, is used to mobile optimise its campaigns.
CAKE enables Agora Financial to efficiently manage administrative tasks like payouts to affiliate partners, keeping track of each affiliate’s preferred method of payment and payment status. The company can also make links and creative assets available to affiliates on a self-serve basis through CAKE, freeing up the company’s digital marketing team to work on higher-value tasks, such as campaign strategy and programme growth.
The business impact of the collaboration has resulted in:
- One-stop platform for campaign tracking and affiliate management
- Automated management of administrative tasks such as affiliate payments
- Enhanced decision-making supported by real-time analytics and reporting
The company chose CAKE for its real-time performance marketing insights to optimise affiliate relationships and granular metrics that measure, among others, payout status, conversions and type of device used. CAKE also provided Agora Financial with quality support from its customer service team.
