Lemonbox AB, a company peddling a breakthrough exit traffic technology program, inked a deal with a key partner this week upon signing an exclusive agreement with Casino.com.
Casino.com has more than 30 affiliated casino and content sites and will start using Lemonbox's product, ClusterTraffic, to manage and trade exit traffic between Casino.com, the affiliated sites and selected partners.
With the ClusterTraffic solution, Casino.com will have an "afterburner" to all other marketing efforts. In addition, ClusterTraffic will enable Casino.com to partner with other Web properties in a fair and reliable one-to-one exchange of exit traffic through a reliable third party, ensuring balance and performance.
The agreement makes sense for each company and was a decision that was thoroughly researched by both parties.
"We reviewed the market and compared different alternatives before choosing ClusterTraffic," says Patrick Ekelius, General Manager of Casino.com. "Lemonbox solutions was the only one to meet and beat our requirements for a robust, effective and user friendly system."
Jonas Hollander, president and CEO of Lemonbox, says the ClusterTraffic solution is a one-of-a-kind program which focuses more on getting buyers to the site, instead of just hits.
"As far as we know ClusterTraffic is the first attempt to manage exit-traffic in an intelligent way," Hollander said. "We've built in a whole range of features to maintain the quality of traffic traded through the system. The sites we work with don't want traffic, they want customers. Getting reasonable conversion rates is what counts in the end of the day."
A very in-depth system had to be set up by Lemonbox to ensure the right traffic was sent to the right site.
"We've built in filtering tools in order to exclude crap traffic right away," Hollander said. "We have a whole set of rules to determine what site to display when the time comes, such as looking at the users' history and always trying to display a new site when possible."
Getting the affiliates to believe in the system was also a major task for the firm.
"Besides efficiency trust is a major concern," Hollander said. "Trading exit traffic with a stranger isn't easy, we solve the practical problems but we also add another level of trust since every participating site can follow exactly what's happening through our real time statistics. We like to think of ClusterTraffic as the DART for exit-traffic." (DART is Doubleclicks technology for serving banners in mass.)
The way the system works is by trading traffic as it leaves one site where no money was spent and steering it to a site where the user may spend some money.
"The idea is to trade 'dead customers' for potential live ones in a secure, efficient and reliable way," Hollander said. "This is all based on the assumption that the often ignored 98 percent who leaves a site without any purchase, or whatever conversion, may be an interesting target group for other sites."
Hollander uses an example most surfers can relate to in detailing how the system works:
"Take a bookstore example," he said. "I want to buy a specific book and go to a bookstore. Unfortunately they don't have the book I'm looking for. When I leave the store without converting, and not until then, ClusterTraffic suggest another bookstore that hopefully can solve my problem."
The user sees an alternative site option where the book may be located, but a lot of action is happening behind the scenes that the user doesn’t see.
"Behind the scenes, a whole range of things happen in the ClusterTraffic system," Hollander said. "The user who received a suggestion is automatically excluded from all suggestions the next 30 minutes; the system will make sure that the first bookstore is being suggested elsewhere in the cluster; and everything is being logged and can be reviewed in the statistics provided."
Hollander is not a new player to the Internet gaming business. He was the vice president of marketing at Bossmedia, one of the largest software developers for the online gaming industry. He left Boss in the spring of 2000 and opened up a limited number of "test pilots" by the fall of last year. The deal with Casino.com marks the start of an era in which Lemonbox can start targeting other portal sectors, but
the response for e-businesses has been mixed.
"Some say 'you can't just pop up another window,' and our response to that is 'why not?'" said Hollander. "Some say 'oh, that's smart why didn't I think of that first.' Our response is to blush. Some say 'that's a good idea but we want to keep the traffic within our own group of sites,' our response is that we can handle that too."
Lemonbox will continue to scour the Web for new partners, and rest assured they will not extend their services to just anyone.
"Our first priority is to sign up good sites that can work as good examples for others and to find business partners who can help us with that within different countries and areas of interest," Hollander said. "Specific knowledge about a certain cluster or topic is important since the connection between the sites in a cluster must make sense to the casual surfer. You can't just suggest anything or conversion rates will drop."
Hollander said he hopes the deal with Casino.com is the start of some big things for Lemonbox.