iGaming Affiliate Management

Part 1

Manage Affiliate List

To gain better control, segment your affiliates into groups. Segmentation enables you to run targeted initiatives and automations, helping you reach your goals faster.

New Affiliates

This is often the most exciting group. Whether through outreach or direct sign-up, new affiliates can rapidly boost traffic. However, it’s crucial to validate each new application—don’t rush!

Check list: Approve or disapprove new affiliates

Keep your portfolio clean and healthy. Reject any affiliate if:

• The information provided is irrelevant, fake, or dummy.

• The affiliate does not respond via any listed communication channel.

Before entering negotiations, understand their business by asking.

GEO: Find out from which markets they can deliver traffic

Traffic Source: It’s important to know this in order to set the best deal

Expected volume

Their Properties: What websites/streaming channel/app and so on, does he own

As soon as you have all the information needed, you can proceed further with the decision, should you approve or not the given partner.

How to protect your business from the start

It’s tempting to launch every new affiliate quickly, but proceed with caution. Partnerships can turn sour if you’re unprepared. Set boundaries early.

🚧 Common Risks

• Traffic overload you’re not ready to pay for.

• Affiliate scams.

• Poor traffic quality or misaligned expectations.

In order to mitigate that risk, we advise you to set some rules or boundaries depending on the deal with the affiliate. The traffic source he is using or the exposure you may receive. Here are few ideas on how to protect yourself based on different situations and demands.

Protect overspending with CPA: Set a cap on FTD’s

CPA from unknown sources: Put some rules protecting you from overpaying CPAs if the quality of the customers is under X deposits.

Fix Fees: Split the payment on 2 settlements, one in advance and another after the affiliate delivers X amount of FTD’s. Best will be if the whole amount is post-paid.

Streamers & Real Money play: Always insist on testing streamers with non withdrawal terms at the beginning. Provide cashable bonuses only to proven streamers and with max cash out terms.

Streamers as Players: Personal choice here, but we prefer to never allow streamers to play as real customers in the casino. Business is business, we don’t mix pleasure with it.

Note:

It’s good to have your General T&C follow some of your basic criterias. In case your team misses to set boundaries or gets fooled by the affiliate.

Segmentation of Existing Affiliates

Segmentation is key to scaling. It helps with targeted communication and smarter campaigns!

Top 20%: The most universal rule, 20% brings 80% of your revenue!

Dormant Affiliates: Affiliates that used to bring traffic but no longer

New Affiliates: New to you

Declining Affiliates: Affiliates with negative trend in terms of volumes

VIP: Explicit enough!

GEO: Tag the GEO’s they have and/or bring traffic from

Part 2

Focus on your Existing Affiliates

Yes, you need new affiliates—but your current partners are your biggest asset. Up to 80% of your time should focus on them.

Active Affiliates

These are your FTD-generating affiliates. Prioritize them! Keep communication strong and ensure both sides are benefitting.

Weekly & Monthly Comparison

Track performance using:

• Week-over-week reports – Timely catch a significant diviations of FTDs.

• Month-over-month reports – Compare equivalent periods for accuracy

Measures should be taken always on time! This is the optimal way to keep your affiliates stay active.

Dormant Affiliates

These were once active, now silent. It’s worth trying to reactivate them, but first, segment further. This will be your biggest segment and you need to be precise with it.

• Dormant (Recently Active) – Try to win them back ASAP.

• Dormant (Closed) – Business is shut down. Don’t waste time.

• Dormant (Lost Partner) – They’re still active but no longer promoting your brand.

Market driven approach

It’s good to always tag the country on which your affiliates operate. That way you can easily launch campaigns based on the strongest GEO’s of the relevant affiliates. On top of that, in case you open a new market, you will already have some Database of affiliates you already know that operate on this market.

Part 3

Ways to optimize your traffic for free

There are always ways to make more for less. Let us guide towards the best practices to achieve some extra FTD’s for free. On top of that, those tips may also influence your conversions positively.

Inner pages

Yes, 90% of the traffic is always coming from the home page of the website. Especially for SEO websites, that’s a great way to achieve better branding and to increase your traffic. To do so, make sure you have researched all the inner pages of the website and that you are well exposed there. If not listed on an inner page, do speak with your affiliate to fix that.

Different tools for leverage

Here are some other additional tools you can use to negotiate, either better position, additional exposure or some other benefits.

Exclusive Bonuses: Better welcome bonus or additional free spins to it will do the job 

Activation Campaign: Align with your CRM team to execute a campaign targeting registrations from a given affiliate without deposit to boost your conversions.

Ad-hoc campaigns for retention: For affiliates on RS%, it’s a good tool to bring some extra value in exchange.

Giveaways: A great tool to engage customers and assist the partner to gain some extra trust from his audience. Ideal for streamers.

Everything is Negotiable

A missing piece in most of the affiliate managers. You should understand that everything is negotiable, just think outside of the box. You can add different KPI’s, you can even increase the fees but to include better protection for quality. Imagine, the top 3 are booked for the next 5 months, you can’t just wait and hope that they won’t re-book. Push your affiliate, figure out something, a banner, sticky nav, think of something to get the exposure you need. And keep in mind that the negotiation ends the moment you pay! Before that, you can still negotiate, if you are not happy with the performance you can demand a discount.

Acquisition is the biggest cost in every brand’s P&L and that’s where you can make the most impact. Affiliate managers must be on top of your game!