belboon's journey to future-proof their business with Ingenious Partner Marketing Platform
Case StudyAt a glance
- For the first time, a major performance marketing network replaced its entire self-built technology stack with a SaaS platform.
- The intention of the migration was to create a platform with which belboon is able to meet the demands of the market, to further expand its position as the first choice in performance marketing and to provide features that are necessary for smart and successful performance marketing.
- The unique collaboration with Ingenious puts belboon technologically at the top of the industry, and allows them to focus on value creation with its account management expertise – all with unparalleled speed and at economically viable costs.
- In May 2020 the two year long journey of custom development and migration of belboon’s entire affiliate business, with more than 1,800 advertisers and 80,000 publishers onto Ingenious’ technology, was successfully completed.
About belboon GmbH
Founded 2002 in Berlin, the belboon GmbH is one of the leading performance networks in the D-A-CH market and in Spain, Italy, France, UK and the Nordics, with around 1,800 partner programs and 80,000 publishers from around 50 nations. Every year belboon generates more than 2,5 million transactions.
Customer Type: Performance Network
Their challenges
The classic decision: Make or Buy?
belboon operates in a very dynamic market environment with constantly changing requirements, market and general conditions. This situation leads to equally dynamically changing customer needs, which are becoming more and more individual.
Since belboon’s own platform of 15 years could no longer meet these needs and was struggling with an outdated technological system with high maintenance costs and lack of agility and innovation. For example the outdated tracking was not privacy compliant and lacked the accuracy and flexibility to be competitive in the market.
So in 2018, they were faced with the classic decision: make or buy? Giving up the technology sovereignty is a huge step, but nevertheless belboon decided to outsource and chose Ingenious, due to their extensive experience and platform approach, in order to stay competitive on the market.
advertisers and 80,000 publishers were migrated from the old belboon platform onto Ingenious’ technology next to belboon’s daily business and without negatively affecting existing customers
“The main drivers for the project with Ingenious were that we wanted to ensure that as a network we would not only be able to meet the market conditions now, but also in the future, and that we would also be able to offer future-proof and competitive solutions.”
Christian Bünder / Director Business Development at belboon
tracked events (clicks and commercial conversions) each month, with up to 50% seasonal variation
The implementation
Migrating belboon’s entire affiliate business
Due to the extent of the data migration while maintaining daily business the decision was made to carry out the move from one platform to the other step by step rather than all at once. This meant working on two platforms – which ran completely in sync. All data, such as master data, all conversions, ads, commissions, partnerships, on two platforms over a relatively long period of time were running in parallel and were exactly the same. Thanks to the unique tracking forwarding capabilities of the Ingenious application, this data transfer ran without losing any information.
“For the strategic reorientation of belboon, from a classic affiliate marketing network to an international performance marketing network, an upgrade to a future-proof and smart technology was necessary. This way we can continue to live up to our claim of “Leading in Performance Marketing” and comprehensively serve all of our customers’ individual needs in the future.“
Manuel Panzhirsch / CEO at belboon
The results
Leading in Performance Marketing
True First-Party-Tracking
By bravely deciding to stop developing its 15-year-old in-house technology stack and choosing to outsource, belboon instantly got a scalable marketing technology with one of the most versatile and accurate tracking systems in the market. Gaining true first-party tracking with flexible conversion targets, customer journey tracking and analyses, as well as attribution customizable to their advertisers’ needs.
Data Warehouse as a Service
In addition to the Ingenious platform report, which already provides extensive insights, belboon has now the possibility to understand their data much better with the help of a Data Warehouse solution using Google BigQuery.
Individuality, Flexibility and Agility
However, the platform migration project does not represent a simple change of systems, but rather the perfect base for belboon to reposition itself as a performance marketing network.
Customers are now no longer developed based on fixed, static platform features. Instead, the platform is modeled for the customer in an agile and dynamic way based on their individual needs, in order to cover a wide variety of use cases and serve unique customer interests.
Leading in Performance Marketing
This agility is reflected, for example, in individual commissions: different commissions can now be applied to different cases and partner groups. The old system did not offer this possibility. In addition, thanks to multi-channel tracking and basket freeze, all partners involved in the customer journey can be rewarded. An important sign against silo thinking and an essential step for belboon to live up to its claim “Leading in Performance Marketing”.
growth rate in the number of new partnerships recorded within the belboon platform by becoming a part of an ecosystem within the Ingenious platform which supports partnerships within the customer portfolio.
Looking ahead
Expanding new horizonts
The trend of separating technology and service has now reached affiliate and partner marketing networks and this move has the potential to instill new energy and drive into a conservative and slow-moving market.
The unique collaboration with Ingenious puts belboon technologically at the top of the industry, and allows belboon to focus on value creation through its account management expertise – all with unparalleled speed and at economically viable costs. The strategic partnership enables belboon to expand its horizons and enter new technology worlds comfortably and guided.
In addition, the two companies have been working closely together and continue to do so in the future, giving belboon the flexibility to expand the platform’s features according to new market demands.
increase in belboon’s monthly revenue. This incline is on one hand due to the above mentioned partnership network and the growing number of partnerships. On the other hand, the improved tracking quality contributes to the increasing sales.
Further information:
- https://belboon.com/en/belboon-and-ingenious-technologies-set-new-standards-in-the-affiliate-marketing-industry/
- https://www.pressebox.de/pressemitteilung/belboon-gmbh/belboon-und-Ingenious-Technologies-setzen-neue-Massstaebe-in-der-Affiliate-Marketing-Branche/boxid/1014993
- https://www.pr.com/press-release/752587
- https://www.affiliateblog.de/hot-news-belboon-und-ingenious-technologies-starten-strategische-kooperation/
- https://blog.ingenioustechnologies.de/podcast-christian-buender-belboon/