So what do you think about CAKE?

You’d be surprised how often I am asked this question; both by performance marketers, and more recently, increasingly advertisers looking to enhance their online presence. I’ve been a CAKE client across three different companies over the past 4 years, and every one of them showed (shows) tremendous promise and were built from the ground up using CAKE as one of the operating foundations. Without sounding like a Southwest Airlines tagline, "there are many options out there..."  for marketers to choose as their affiliate management and tracking platform -- but I’d like to talk about what I think about CAKE Marketing's solution specifically.

When one thinks about the likes of Has Offers, Direct Track, Link Trust or Hit Path, deciding on how to compare each option can seem daunting. Now I’ll be the first to say that I'm no subject matter expert on their systems, but I will say I’ve watched CAKE evolve considerably over the years from a quiet market upstart, to quickly scaling to be a major contender. Ever a fan of the underdog businesses, I think it’s interesting to watch competition enact; either through innovation, brute force, or both.

So here we go…this is my unsolicited (and unpaid) opinion of CAKE Marketing.

What CAKE does well… REALLY well.

1. Great Steering Wheel:  I’ve been working with technologists of many flavors over the last decade as I’ve moved between international payment processing companies, banks, e-commerce companies and Internet startups; and so have a fairly credible amount of experience in knowing what I like in technology. In my opinion, great technology can be grabbed 'off the shelf', has a user interface that a business person can learn & use quickly, and has a common sense workflow. Case in point, there are rocket science-grade software developers that can architect one hell of an engine, but cannot design a steering wheel to save their life. CAKE has seemingly been able to do both fairly well. Anyone who has run an affiliate marketing, performance based business, knows how important this balance is to achieve speed to market. That being said, this is where I think CAKE really demonstrates it's strength; I really, really like CAKE’s user interface. It’s customizable, intuitive, and the dashboard affiliate-level reporting and drill downs offer detailed statistics that make managing the business from an executive level a breeze.

1. User Depth:  One attractive feature of the platform is the ability to populate nearly endless windows as you drill into campaigns, offers, contracts or even myopic lead data. It’s a well thought out system that does a lot more than just push offers and traffic.
2. Feature Roll-outs:  CAKE is constantly surprising me as our team innovates new concepts of how to structure affiliate strategy and we discover with a little consultation by the companies client success team, that we can do just about anything we can think of. It isn’t always smooth or available right way, but it’s usually possible. That’s pretty cool. The API’s are solid, ability to set up new verticals easy to execute, and the token replacement technology is just plain smart.

In short, CAKE has some intelligent thinkers that have baked the system.

What CAKE can improve upon.

1. Not a graceful “One size fits all”:  CAKE is an affiliate management tracking platform with a lot of mouths to feed. It’s not the answer to all of your needs and should not be thought of that way. It’s not well suited to provide custom developments for its client base quickly, or cost-efficiently – although the company is making strides to improve upon those issues. The software business is a tough one. Margins can be slim and the larger one gets, the harder it is to rack and stack important client requests or make everyone happy. I think CAKE is approaching a level where their size can cloud visibility into the uniqueness of their clients. Continuing to invest in best of breed account managers that have a deep understanding of their client portfolio will only help the maturing giant navigate hiccups and drive viral business through referrals.  Understanding at the front door that CAKE CANNOT and WILL NOT meet all your needs is important. It’s strong enough to become organic to your business needs, but it does have its limits. Thankfully, the API’s and hooks into the system do allow for black box adaptation when the needs call for it.
2. Tough to Scale: Capacity and scalability can be a challenge. Our business in particular drives a tremendous amount of traffic. Understanding that CAKE serves as the underpinnings of some of the most successful affiliate marketing companies in our space can be somewhat shocking when we find that basic features such as traffic processing, report access or key features of the system simply stop working. Again, this goes back to back-planning your business. It’s important that when you use this system that you consider how dependent you will be on its ability to easily scale or evolve. Chances are, if you suddenly soar beyond inadequately planned projections, you might encounter some pain points.

Where I see CAKE going…

I’ve noticed a lot of custom shops looking at what CAKE is doing and licking their chops saying they can do it better.

I think it’s interesting when I hear this, because 99% of the time it is obvious these shooters have never tried to run a business end-to-end using CAKE. There is a whole lot more to the system than meets the eye. It is by NO means perfect, but I don’t think their successes are easily replicated.

What do I credit this to? Well, first my considerable experience using the system, second, they have some very smart people working across all areas of the business and the foundation (aside from scalability) is very well thought out.

So if someone asked me if I was a CAKE fan and if I recommended them, I’d say, "Yes." If you are considering using CAKE but already have a proprietary platform that you are considering scraping for an enterprise-level system, I’d caution you to evaluate the gaps between both and see if there’s a medium where you can bridge your own secret sauce, while letting the folks at CAKE do the mainstream heavy lifting.

It’s a great system and frankly I’ve enjoyed success many times over working through the imperfections and leveraging the systems strengths.

I'd freely tell anyone in the affiliate marketing space to give it close look and I think you might be pleasantly surprised by what you find.