Allan Petrilli, VP of Sales and Growth at Intelitics, says that operators must use a modern, powerful platform to run their affiliate programs or risk stagnating growth and dwindling profitability.
Affiliates have long been a part of the marketing mix for online gambling operators, offering a cost-effective channel for driving new customer sign-ups at scale. But affiliates are changing, with many moving away from being purely SEO to spending money on paid media including social, search and display ads as they too look to grow their business and engage even bigger audiences.
This has seen operator affiliate programs develop and grow – today, they account for a significant chunk of a brand’s marketing spend but with heavier competition and tightening regulation, margins are increasingly being squeezed. To overcome this, operators must leverage cutting-edge platforms and technologies that allow them to be smarter with spend, and who they partner with.
Additionally, affiliates need proper tools from their operator partners in order to effectively track their spend and earnings at a granular level, allowing them to optimize their spend for profitability and quality.
Technology should be seen as the foundation for any affiliate program and will include the following core features as a minimum.
Tracking – Seems obvious right? But we aren’t talking about simply having the ability to track from impression through to conversion and lifetime value. Firstly, in a mobile first world, link redirect speeds need to be lightning fast (under 200ms). With cookie deprecation quickly becoming a challenge, cookie-less tracking is more important than ever – something that is available out of the box with Intelitics. Operators and their partners alike also need access to meta-data and ability to utilise dynamic Sub-Ids to ensure they are able to make informed campaign decisions.
Data – real-time data is absolutely crucial. Platforms must be able to ingest data in multiple formats amalgamate it and then make it available in reporting and analytics. But it can’t stop there. Technology today needs to have the ability to prepare data-drive actionable insights that allow operators and their partners to action campaign optimizations seamlessly. Which leads into the next point…
Tools – Some of these are obvious and important, and include built in ad-serving, flexible commission structures, and segmentation. But in 2023, technology needs to go further than what has been relatively standard for a few years. Affiliate managers need access to a box of tools that they can share with their partners that allows for quick optimisation and provides actional insights. These include Sub ID reporting, Cohort reporting to spot trends quickly, and the ability to build your own reporting on the fly to understand your traffic at an incredibly granular level.
When launching a new brand, there are many moving parts, and traditionally choosing the right tracking platform has been at the lower end of priority for many. In the interest of getting live quickly, brands will choose whichever solution their gaming platforms already has integrated or is available, without taking the time to evaluate what is best for them. This has led to brands being inefficient with spend in early days and causing them extra work to move platforms down the line when they realize the benefits of having best-in-class tracking
This leads to my next point: yes, migrations are work, but there are significant benefits to adopting the right platform, even if it’s not from the start. Migrations can be smooth and seamless if undertaken with the right platform, where there is a proper technical and communication plan in place. The added efficiency of choosing the right tracking platform as discussed above is well worth the short-term work of a migration.
Running a large, efficient, profitable affiliate program takes the proper mix of a great team, proper technology, the right partners, and transparency and alignment of goals across everyone.
Ultimately, proper technology will unify the operator from affiliate manager all the way up to CEO, making day-to-day reporting and alignment on player acquisition much easier and far more effective.
