iGaming Affiliate Management

Part 1

Manage Affiliate List

In order to have better control, you should separate and segment in different groups your affiliates. That way, through different initiatives and automations you can achieve your goals much quicker. Here are some key aspects of it.

New Affiliates

Probably the most exciting list of affiliates is the newly registered one. Either through your prospects outreach or simply on themselves, new affiliates are the easiest way to boost your traffic. However, it’s very important to not rush it and to validate every new application.

Check list: Approve or disapprove new affiliates

It’s important to keep your portfolio clean and healthy. To achieve that, you should carefully select with whom you would like to work with. Don’t hesitate to reject the affiliate application if:

• The provided information by the affiliate is irrelevant or fake or dummy.
• Affiliate do not respond to you on any of the provided by him channels 

Additionally to approve an affiliate it’s good to understand as well as possible his business, intentions and capabilities. Here are some important topics to discuss with the affiliate before even entering into negotiations.

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 on the start

If you are ready to approve the affiliate, then it’s time to negotiate with him. We understand how tempting it is to launch a new affiliate and bring new customers to your brand but stay patient. Sometimes, things can turn against you. Due to this we advise you to put some boundaries with new affiliates. There are many ways how one partnership can turn into a disaster. For example:

• You are not prepared to onboard that much traffic, especially if you are not ready to pay for it.
• Affiliates may attempt to scam you
• Your expectations about the traffic value may be slightly higher
• And many more

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

Automations are the way to scale! In order to properly target your affiliates it’s good to segment them. This will make it easier to run campaigns with better success rates. Here are some basic groups every portfolio of affiliates should have.

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

You do need to always look for new affiliates. However, that’s not a full time job and your existing data base is in fact the best way to market your brand. This is why 80% of your time will be related to your existing affiliates.

Active Affiliates

The ones that are active require your time in order to keep the traffic going. Active affiliates for us are those who are bringing you FTD’s. You should always prioritise them and to try maximising your performance in order for the partnership to be fruitful.

Weekly & Monthly Comparison

The most important report to manage your Active affiliates. By comparing their performance on weekly or monthly periods, you can see if the results are increasing or not. Importantly, if you compare month over month, you must always select equal periods. The specifics of the weekly reports is by far the seasonality. Some weeks are always weaker than others, like the middle weeks driving less traffic then the 1st and last of the month. Best metric to monitor here is the count of FTD’s.

Dormant Affiliates

In this category, we would classify only those affiliates that used to bring traffic in the past but no longer. Here you should focus your attention on reactivating them. Note that, some businesses may seak to exist, while other affiliates may have decided to push other brands. To not waste time on dead business we suggest additional segmentation as following:

• Dormant (Recently Active): Freshly lost affiliates you need to reactivate while still fresh
• Dormant (Closed): Affiliate that has no longer traffic and is out of business
• Dormant (Lost Partner): Partner with traffic that does not want to promote your brand anymore

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!