“Companies are, first and foremost, people” – Anton Voystrikov

Anton Voystrikov, Founder & CEO of CLICKLEAD, joins the latest series of affiliate interviews on Affiliate Grand Slam

Anton Voystrikov, Founder & CEO of CLICKLEAD, speaks about building a company based on principles and complete work transparency, tech solutions for iGaming, and skydiving as the start of a successful conference – follow his story below.

Tell us a bit more about your own CPA platform.

CLICKLEAD is actually not just a platform in the usual sense, but technologies that specifically help advertisers to be certain of the particular maximum effect of interaction with their customers. We deliver personalised promotions to each user (we can send a push to each player who has made at least one deposit), segment the audience, help optimise both working with retention and buying ads, without introducing pixels on advertisers’ sites. Most of the time we have achieved full detalisation so that each participant in the chain who is working with us can be as efficient and profitable as possible, which is quite significant.

We have a great experience and today hundreds of advertisers are working with our platform, trusting us to attract players to their products, knowing that the profit from these players is pretty much higher than many usual traffic sources. We have made it possible for advertisers to get traffic from Facebook and Google, in the maximum possible version of its retention and optimisation.

By which KPIs do you measure your success?

The key indicators that definitely help us succeed are in-depth analysis, segmentation and audience research, the volume of traffic attracted in the form of end players on customer products.

We really track a lot of metrics, because in our business there are two clients who should earn — affiliates and advertisers. We help affiliates attract quality traffic as conveniently as possible, we help advertisers analyse it as conveniently as possible.

CLICKLEAD also has some unspoken but basic working principles that help the team to work together and achieve a high result. First, it is a high quality product as such. We are in constant contact with representatives of related companies and try to incorporate their experience into our decisions. CLICKLEAD also follows the principle of maximum transparency when all our partners know the main economic aspects and prices. By working with large companies that are our strategic partners, we can offer truly exclusive conditions. I think it is wrong to pass the bones of the business to the partners. They should be able to run advertising campaigns comfortably and profitably, and we take care of everything else. In situations where a mistake occurs and we are to blame, we compensate the partners for the losses, improve ourselves and reduced such cases to zero in 5 years of work.

By maintaining transparency of deals for all parties, we come to success and lead hundreds of our clients and tens of thousands of affiliates to one goal — all parties have the opportunity to earn well.

What is your approach in the initial stages of a new partnership?

We guide new clients through onboarding and show them the benefits of our platform from a technical perspective. After onboarding, we help set up product analytics, and the affiliate -— to set up proper analytics on their traffic.

Then we make a concrete proposal: advertisers’ products get to the most relevant affiliates. Affiliates get the most relevant offers for their traffic. This way, everyone can be sure that the proposed solution is the most optimal and profitable option for working here and now. We launch the traffic, analyse, verify, perform financial settlements between all parties, and scale the result.

This approach allows you to earn many times more than if the participants in this chain worked directly with each other without our involvement.

How can affiliate marketing help someone’s business? How does CLICKLEAD achieve this?

We help advertisers get hundreds of first deposits every day in the markets where the advertiser has the most to gain. Today, there are more than 40 countries.

Our company helps attract hundreds of players to the client’s product in a matter of days. And in addition to the players themselves, we help analyse the retention and decide to scale into buying new users, watching the KPI product. In five years of work, we have learned to collect and analyse large amounts of analytical data that help to work not on the basis of development, but on the basis of understandable and logical steps.

What incremental value do you provide?

An affiliate gets a higher ROI with our products buying ads on Facebook and Google. Our solutions help make traffic more attractive to the advertiser. For example, in order for an affiliate to be able to target the right audience, they need to spend a noticeable amount of budget on what is called audience training. So that our affiliates do not have to spend time on this, we provide them with apps for promotion on Facebook and Google with an already developed audience, where each new app is already deployed after going through artificial training in all the previously attracted audiences of our other apps. Over the years, CLICKLEAD has deployed more than a few thousand applications.

The advertiser receives a higher ROI, with the same solutions for retention and optimisation, in a short time increasing the return of players to their products and as a result — a greater number of deposits from one player.

For example, a new bonus system was released on the product of the provider, we bring it to a certain category of users. No need to shoot sparrows from a gun, we provide the opportunity to work with needed audiences. So we get indicators of player returns and their value is on average 30% higher than usual, as a result — a higher NGR for advertisers.

At the intersection of only these two solutions, both sides are already starting to earn more, in addition to attraction and retention, on board of our platform you will also find automatic generation of deep links, and automatic connection of applications for hundreds and thousands of advertising spaces in a matter of seconds, and many other solutions that simplify the work of all participants in the process.

How do affiliate networks make money?

An average affiliate program is the meeting point between the advertiser and the affiliate. Our deal not only helps them meet within our platform but also increases revenue if the affiliate and advertiser used to work without our technologies.

For this, we take a commission from each first deposit, we work mainly on CPA, which adds value to the advertiser, get higher rates, share them with the affiliate. For many markets and products, advertisers pay us more than within their internal network affiliates, often giving us higher rates than the advertiser offers directly. Everyone is left with a lot of final money earned.

Can you explain briefly what, in your view, is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing is high velocity marketing exclusively for a specific end result. The advertiser gets specific traffic at a specific price and with a clear payback period, the affiliate has the opportunity to sell their traffic for profit. Affiliate networks combine products and traffic and allow you to transparently evaluate the result and be sure of the final profit. In our case, we try to close a little more than the standard and generally accepted features of affiliate programs.

What are the advantages and the disadvantages of this type of marketing?

The benefits are obvious — scaling ads quickly for a specific, measurable result. This is one of the few businesses where there is a high scaling speed, calculated literally in days. Getting hundreds and thousands of new players per product in a few days — may even be quite easy. In other areas of marketing, I have not achieved such precise targeting and scaling at such a rapid rate of customer acquisition.

Cons — at high speed you have to have your hand on the pulse and see the entire path of traffic, the better the analyst the more accurate the target. Cons — when the product and traffic become opaque, the price of error without analytics is very high.

Affiliate marketing is one of the most in-demand skills. Why in your view?

Affiliate marketing is now a full-fledged business and is becoming more and more of a corporate business every year. I learned about affiliate marketing in 2014 and back then it was very different: multiple offers on the market, several sources of traffic, one manager helping and you single-handedly triggering traffic. And almost complete lack of competition.

Today, these are full-fledged businesses with full-fledged cultures, processes, values, and benefits. I am glad the core value has remained the same — partnership and relationships between all business stakeholders.

But now there’s Bigdata, deep analytics, different types of traffic estimates and robust KPIs. You can not just enter the market and make a lot of money with one click. The game has been given clear rules and the market is moving in an understandable direction.

Affiliate marketing today is one of the best channels to generate traffic for advertisers, where hundreds and thousands of agencies can start working on your product in a short time.

How can affiliate marketing improve?

If the issue is not the field as a whole, but individual companies, I would recommend several steps. First, choose proven, reliable partners who will not disappear one fine sunny day.

Next, I would advise you to choose the right top affiliates. Since the advertiser usually does not always have direct access to proven affiliate teams, this is where affiliate programs that know exactly who they are working with come to the rescue and can help form an ideal tandem that is beneficial to both the advertiser and affiliate and therefore the affiliate program itself.

And the most important thing is to be honest and follow the principles. Do not change and let others be convinced of you as a partner and your business. I applied this principle to the entire company and found many like-minded people who are now an integral part of the CLICKLED team. Companies are, first and foremost, people in whose hands the success of the implementation of tasks is placed.

In our time, people are helped by technology, in our example — we automate everything that can accelerate the achievement of the result: attribution of advertising campaigns, automated payback analytics, and making it as easy as possible to launch the ads themselves. And we invest a significant amount of our investment in developing our enterprise technologies to improve the CLICKLED platform.

How does technology play a part in your day-to-day life?

We live in a time when technology literally permeates every aspect of life. I have created a sort of ecosystem that allows me to stay in touch almost continuously, while still having time for my personal life. The automation of work and the introduction of new technologies into my life somehow flow into work, and the methods from business — into the optimisation of personal processes.

I enjoy watching the evolution of technologies, including the improvement of targeted advertising, which is being personalised more and more every year. My favorite joke on the subject: the hardest thing in our time is the ability to distinguish signs of fate from targeted advertising. There’s something to that.

Have you ever been to SiGMA? Did you attend SiGMA Affiliate Grand Slam Expo in Dubai?

SiGMA is quite a well-known event among my acquaintances and good friends. AGS in Dubai in May 2021 was the first conference CLICKLEAD attended as an exhibitor, and generally the first foreign conference for the team after the update. SiGMA is the ideal platform to start a new partnership. We were happy to meet old partners with whom we have been working for more than 5 years, but we were also very happy to meet new acquaintances, as we were once again convinced of the super power of conferences. Without thinking twice, we decided to go to Malta with the whole team. I am sure it’s pretty reckless for anyone involved in the iGaming industry to miss out on something like this. We believe in SiGMA and the power of networking and look forward to seeing everyone again in November.

Tell us a bit about yourself – after all, business is done with people, not just companies! Your hobbies, favourite book, favourite quote, etc.

My greatest hobby is life. I like absolutely everything that happens to me. Mountains, sun, rain, the laughter and smiles of my loved ones, running, going to the movies, reading books — I like everything there is to enjoy in this life.

In a way, I can call myself both an entrepreneur, a digital nomad, and a hedonist. And I like to combine all three roles.

For example, before a successful exhibition in Dubai, I gladly parachuted in Skydive Dubai in the morning, met with our team at the airport at lunchtime, and had a meeting with company executives in the evening to discuss plans for the conference. Something like this.

SiGMA Americas Virtual 2021:

The SiGMA Americas Virtual show will run from the 13th to the 14th of September, 2021. Features include a fully interactive expo floor, networking chat rooms, and a high profile line up of panelists. Explore the agenda or check out who’s on the floor plan.