iGaming Affiliation: The Beginner’s Guide

Part 1

Basics of Affiliate Marketing in the iGaming

Let’s explore why Affiliate Marketing in iGaming is so crucial, why it exists and why it is so popular.

The need for Affiliation

Due to the industry specification it drives a lot of regulations and limitations making it very hard for a brand to market itself directly. Due to this, many companies find a way to drive customers by 3rd parties called Affiliates. Especially in the dot com world, where regulations are very unclear and brands can not run directly Google ads or social campaigns they must rely on affiliates to do that for them. As for organic search, how can you find a brand that you don’t know even exists? Here comes the review websites that can act as a billboard on the street. Following that, affiliate marketing has become crucial for the industry.

Infrastructure

Knowing the end to end process of signing a customer with your brand is crucial for optimizing your overall performance.

Let’s break it down:

Advertise your brand

There are many ways for the affiliate to advertise your brand, but let’s take the most common one offering a list of casinos ranked by a trusted website.

Based on this selection the majority of the visitors may choose one or more brands to sign with. To do so they are pushed on clicking the bright button next to the brand and the welcome offer. Here is when the magic of the tracking happens.

Tracking

The one thing that is critical for the affiliation is the tracking. This is the way through which the affiliate can prove that he referred the client to the operator. The tracking is achieved by a special link which is unique for him. This link contains information about the customer and the affiliate. Most commonly we are using cookies to store this information. The information is either contain within the tracking link directly through different and unique ID’s or by token which can store much more information about the user. Following that, based on the condition of the referral the affiliate will receive a commission.

Affiliate Commissions

The real games start with the money flow. As the whole point of affiliate marketing is to be based on performance, the purpose of the commission plays a significant role. Different affiliates have different preferences. This is why you need to be flexible with the commissioning plan offering wide varieties of different combinations. The most popular are the revenue share and CPA models or the combination of both called Hybrid deals.

Revenue share (RS%)

As the name suggests it represents a percentage of another value. Usually it is based on the affiliate NGR for a given period of time. This type of deal is ideal for the startup operators as it doesn’t require investment upfront. The revenue share is post paid after the period has been closed. Meaning if the brand is positive of this cooperation the affiliate will be rewarded.

CPA

It stents for Cost per Action, where in our industry the action is referred to the deposit and wager of the customer. A fixed amount that will be awarded to the affiliate if the customer has met all the criteria for it. Those criteria may be related to the deposit amount, the wager or both of them for each referred customer.

Did you know?

About 94% of the dot com business is based on Affiliate Marketing, making it the number 1 stream of customers by far.

Part 2

iGaming Affiliate Softwares

Since you now understand how affiliate marketing works, here is how this is brought to you from a technical perspective.

Affiliate Software Coverage

The Affiliate Software ensures the tracking initiation and commission calculation for the affiliates. This serves as a mediator between the affiliates and the operator. It enables affiliates to generate unique tracking links through which the operator can understand to which affiliate to assign the newly registered customer. Following that, the software receives gameplay data for each customer and translates it to the affiliates.

Commission Plans

Here the operator can create different deal templates that he can reuse between the affiliates. Based on the performance and the deal template of each affiliate a commission is calculated. Further, this commission stands for the profit that the affiliate generated over a given period and serves as the proof of their contribution.

The importance of the Affiliate Software

The fact that over 90% of the traffic is generated by affiliates, makes this software one of the most important ones for your iGaming business. Due this it’s important to wisely choose your provider as it will play a key role to your success. One of the most important things is to select a software that is tailored for our industry. Try to avoid at any cost global solutions that target all types of verticals as they are not a good match for iGaming.

Part 3

The most important things for Affiliates

After understanding the infrastructure and the technical part of the business, it’s time to learn what is important for your affiliates. What they are looking for and how to make sure you are always prepared.

Conversions are the KING

The high competition in the industry nowadays applies for both Affiliates and Operators. The implication to the affiliates affects mostly the cost per click. Making one successful referral much more expensive than it was before. Following that, the most important thing for them is the conversions of the brand. The better the brand converts, the lower the cost per click for the affiliate. This is why it’s important your conversions from click to deposit to be as good as possible. Operators should always strive for improving their CRO.

Insightful

iGsuite is the only affiliate software offering A/B split of traffic between two different landings. An ideal tool to constantly optimize and work towards the conversions of your brand.

Postback and API

Since the affiliates are working with numerous different brands that also have different affiliate softwares, it’s mandatory for them to be able to easily obtain data from them. This can happen either through Postback or API, where still Postback is the most popular method. Based on that, operators should make sure that their affiliate software covers both of them and that it’s easy to set and work with them.

Conclusion

There are many important aspects for the affiliate and for one profitable partnership. Here we have listed only the two key things without which the partnership can not exist. Follow us in the other articles in order to understand better how affiliate marketing operates in the iGaming industry.