Online ecosystem providing e-commerce, travel, housing, classified and other types of services to consumers in Africa, Jumia was founded in 2012. The company’s mission is to improve people’s lives by connecting entrepreneurs with potential customers via the Internet. Over 500,000 local African companies are conducting business on features Jumia every day and helping people fulfil their daily needs across the continent.

With an existing affiliate marketing programme already in place, Jumia needed to launch an updated programme to drive more traffic and increase revenue for the hundreds of thousands of companies that do business on its online ecosystem.

Because affiliate marketing is a relatively new concept in Africa, the company’s goal was to make it as simple as possible for potential partners to join the programme, and the company also required an easy, reliable way to track and manage affiliates located in different countries, with different financial requirements and objectives.

Tracking performance

Jumia selected CAKE because of the diversity of features the platform offers, including the ability to easily onboard new affiliate partners, manage campaigns, automate payouts and track performance.

“We currently have more than 25,000 affiliates, and manually managing and measuring the performance of each one would have been impossible,” said Jumia’s head of affiliation, Yomna Hawas. “CAKE allows us to track the performance of campaigns and affiliates at a very granular level, and also gives our team the ability to automate management details like ongoing communications with partners about current program activities, updating banner ads and processing monthly payments.”

Jumia also chose CAKE as it provides “an API for everything.” Its powerful and simple-to-use APIs have enabled Jumia to quickly build and scale its affiliate programme, including the creation of a customised portal where affiliates can go to sign up for the programme and access offers applicable to their region. Jumia could also smoothly migrate thousands of affiliates from its previous system, a process that was simple and easy. “With CAKE, our technology team doesn’t have to spend a lot of time on tasks like maintaining our affiliate portal, integrating with third-party applications or building new tools that our affiliates can use,” added Hawas.

CAKE APIs are additionally used to run automated reports that assess campaign and affiliate performance against Jumia’s pre-defined KPIs. This reporting includes real-time alerts that notify affiliate managers right away if there is anything that requires immediate attention. It also provides a high degree of control and allows managers to set caps on clicks and conversions, identify fraudulent traffic and make campaign decisions based on the most up-to-date performance data.

Thanks to the insights that Jumia is gathering through CAKE, the company has been able to improve performance by more than 150%, multiplying both its traffic and revenue.