Accelerize and its digital marketing software division CAKE yesterday announced a partnership and technology integration with DialogTech, a provider of end-to-end call attribution and conversion platforms for marketing and customer service.
This integration brings together DialogTech's real-time call attribution and phone lead routing technology and CAKE's platform for measuring, analyzing, and attributing digital marketing spend by tracking online behavior and digital conversions in real time. The integration brings offline phone activity into the mix, enabling marketers to tie incoming customer calls to specific ads or marketing campaigns.
With the combined solution, marketers will be able to route, attribute, and monetize calls generated by multichannel digital marketing campaigns and capitalize on pay-per-call revenue opportunities. The solution provides automated collection, validation, and distribution tools to deliver leads to the right buyers, at the right time.
"The smartphone is causing a huge shift in affiliate marketing,” says Irv Shapiro, CEO of DialogTech (formerly Ifbyphone). He notes that customer calls to inside sales teams have increased by 114 percent in the past two years alone.
"An ever-increasing number of consumers are not filling in Web forms on their mobile phones but dialing directly to brands" Shapiro says. "With our CAKE integration, we’re giving brands the ability to connect those calls back to specific ads so that the marketers can be compensated for those leads.
"Every time someone plays a mobile ad, [the solution] includes the call it generates as a conversion," he adds.
"In today's mobile world, performance marketers that aren't monetizing phone leads from digital marketing are missing an incredible revenue opportunity," said Jeff Deisner, senior vice president of business development at CAKE, in a statement."CAKE's integration with DialogTech is an extremely streamlined way for marketers to drive new revenue streams from pay-per-call."
F5 Media, a full-service digital advertising and performance-based network provider, was one of the first companies to try out the integration.
"Using CAKE and DialogTech together, F5 Media offers innovative online and pay-per-call campaigns that drive significant value for both our affiliates and our advertisers," said Henry Whitfield, senior affiliate manager at F5 Media, in a statement. "We use DialogTech to view the up-to-the-second performance of pay-per-call campaigns in CAKE alongside our other online lead generation programs and make immediate optimization decisions that improve performance."
Shapiro says other companies will need to do the same in today's mobile world. "The smartphone will be key for affiliate marketing," he says. "There's a general revolution happening where consumers see an ad and want to use their phone as a phone."
That, Shapiro says, goes against the traditional way most companies have operated. "For the past 15 years, the world of e-commerce has attempted to corral consumers and put everything they do into a shopping cart, but humans have started to rally against this. They want to talk to people," he asserts.
With the CAKE integration, "we're giving consumers the option to use their mobile phones to reach out to brands, and brands the ability to track that," Shapiro says. "It's all being driven by the movement to smartphones."