Case Study
At a glance
- For the first time, a large performance marketing network replaced its entire in-house developed technology with a SaaS platform.
- The aim of the migration was to create a platform with which belboon can meet the requirements of the market, further expand its position as the number one in performance marketing and provide features that are necessary for intelligent and successful performance marketing.
- The unique collaboration with Ingenious puts belboon at the forefront of the industry technologically and allows the company to focus its account management expertise on delivering value - all with unparalleled speed and at a commercially viable cost.
- In May 2020, the two-year development and migration of belboon's entire affiliate business with more than 1,800 advertisers and 80,000 publishers to Ingenious' technology was successfully completed.
About belboon GmbH
Founded in Berlin in 2002, belboon GmbH is one of the leading performance networks in the D-A-CH market as well as in Spain, Italy, France, the UK and the Nordics with around 1,800 partner programs and 80,000 publishers from around 50 nations. More than 2.5 million transactions are carried out at belboon every year.
Customer type: Performance network
Your 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 increasingly individualized.
The 15-year-old belboon platform could no longer meet these requirements and struggled with an outdated technological system with high maintenance costs and a lack of flexibility and innovation. For example, the outdated tracking was not privacy compliant and did not offer the accuracy and flexibility to be competitive in the market.
In 2018, belboon was faced with the classic decision: Make or buy? Giving up technology sovereignty is a big step, but belboon still decided to outsource and chose Ingenious because of its extensive experience and platform approach to remain competitive in the market.
The implementation
The migration of belboon's entire affiliate business
Due to the scope of the data migration while maintaining day-to-day operations, the decision was made to move from one platform to the other in stages rather than all at once. This meant working on two platforms that ran completely synchronously. All data, such as master data, all conversions, advertising media, commissions, partnerships, ran in parallel on two platforms over a relatively long period of time and were or had to be exactly the same. Thanks to the unique tracking forwarding functions of the Ingenious application, this data transfer took place without complications or loss of information.
Leading in performance marketing
True first-party tracking
By taking the bold decision to stop developing their 15-year-old in-house technology stack and opting to outsource, belboon immediately gained a new highly scalable marketing technology with one of the most versatile and accurate tracking systems on the market. True first-party tracking with flexible C
onversion targets, customer journey tracking and analysis as well as attribution that can be adapted to the needs of advertisers.
Data Warehouse as a Service
In addition to the Ingenious platform report, which already provides extensive insights, belboon now has the opportunity to understand the data even better with the help of a data warehouse solution with Google BigQuery.
Individuality, flexibility and agility
However, the platform migration project is not a mere system change, but creates the perfect basis for the repositioning of belboon as a performance marketing network.
Customers are no longer developed on the basis of fixed, static platform features. Instead, the platform is designed for the customer in an agile and dynamic way based on their individual needs in order to cover a variety of use cases and serve individual customer interests.
Leading in performance marketing
This flexibility is reflected, for example, in the individual commissions: different commissions can now be applied to different cases and partner groups. The old system did not offer this option. 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 of "Leading in Performance Marketing".
The outlook
Opening up new horizons
The trend towards separating technology and service has now reached affiliate and partner marketing networks, and this move has the potential to bring new energy and dynamism to a conservative and slowly evolving market. The unique collaboration with Ingenious puts belboon at the forefront of the industry technologically and allows belboon to focus on creating value through its expertise in account management - all at an unprecedented speed and at a commercially viable cost. The strategic partnership will allow belboon to expand its horizons and enter new technology worlds with ease and guidance. In addition, the two companies will continue to work closely together in the future to give belboon the flexibility to expand the platform's functions in line with new market requirements.