Filling an online casino with players is no easy feat. You need a dependable source of not just traffic, but the kind of traffic that will convert into long-term, loyal players. Affiliate marketing is far and away the most common — and most effective — method of bringing them in.
Alanbase provides the Saas platforms that help us offer partner programs for our clients. Partnergrator is a solution enabling the creation and management of partner programs for online casinos and sportsbooks.
In this article, we’ll discuss affiliate program management, useful features, and data analysis. We also provided comments from Alanbase to give you concrete examples of exactly how their software works.
Let’s dive in.
What are affiliate programs?
In the context of iGaming, affiliates are partners responsible for bringing traffic to online casinos or sportsbook platforms.
These are usually external websites or social media profiles of bloggers, streamers, and other content creators which have an audience that overlaps with the gambling community. Affiliate programs let you manage this kind of marketing by tracking and analyzing how much traffic you’re receiving, how much you’re paying for it, and how appropriate that traffic is for your online casino project.
Why are affiliates important for iGaming projects?
Affiliate marketing is one of the major sources of players for online casinos and betting sites. The way the affiliate partnership is managed can massively affect your business, making cooperation with partners that bring you your specific target audience the key to success.
This is how Alanbase answered this question:
We should look at this issue more broadly. Generally, traffic has been getting more and more expensive every year. This is due to the increasing number of competitors: new online projects, the transition from traditional offline businesses to online, and so on. We see the same trend in the iGaming industry, but perhaps it is particularly important in this field because gaming in general works due to a large number of new users. Therefore, cheap traffic from affiliates (because payment is based on high-quality traffic according to the specified qualifications) is a great way out for casinos, bettors, developers, and other advertisers.
Affiliate programs can be the difference between a hugely successful project and one that goes under in a few months — which is why they have to be managed properly. This includes several crucial aspects:
● Promos
● Statistics
● Payments
Having a partner manager in your team is important. However, normally, it’s not enough: humans just aren’t capable of processing the vast amount of data involved. That’s why partner managers need special partner software that helps them analyze these partnerships’ performance quickly and efficiently. Having the right software to process data frees the manager up to focus on strategic thinking, instead of getting bogged down in work better left to AI.
Some casino operators believe that all they need is a simple traffic tracker to gauge how many players they’re getting from the partnership, but Alanbase provides a platform that offers a range of functions beyond a simple traffic tracker. Access to such a wide variety of data is essential for calculating your costs, because little details are usually where you spend more.
Here’s Alanbase’s overview of how their platform compares to simple traffic trackers:
We would divide the special software for affiliate programs into three modules:
- Managing participants (in Alanbase these are administrators, advertisers, partners, partner's managers).
- Statistics.
- Payment management.
Trackers, in fact, offer only one statistics module with truncated functionality:
- You cannot set your goals and events (Alanbase enables smart goals that can be set using your own formulas, events are not pre-configured — you do not need to choose from what the statistics software offers, you can set your own).
- There is no division by partner managers.
- There is no division by sources and landing pages and other parameters.
In order to keep track of separate landing pages, different promos, geo, etc., operators need to set up multi-step guides on traffic markup, and any mistake will lead to long hours of work for reconciliation managers.
On the other hand, special software for creating affiliate programs eliminates the human factor (those same mistakes and extra man-hours) and greatly simplifies the work of partners. In Alanbase, you can create a tracking link in 2 clicks, and the statistics themselves are based not on the usual markup, but on postbacks and click_id.
More importantly, a regular tracker does not provide cohort analysis capabilities, and in iGaming, where the main results come from reports, this feature is a must-have.
Cohort analysis is an opportunity to evaluate the quality of traffic over time. For example, you can divide the payment statistics for each reporting period into payments from new registrations and registrations for past periods:
For example, let’s say there were 1,000 payments made on a platform in the month of February. Of these, 200 were from registration in February, another 300 were from registration between November and January inclusive, and the remaining 500 were from registration between August and October.
Affiliate software data analysis
Since operators’ payments to affiliates are based on the amount of traffic they deliver, it’s necessary to evaluate this traffic to know how much and for what you're paying. It’s also important to follow the statistics of your partner programs to track results and be able to adjust the campaigns based on your performance or according to your new goals.
Alanbase offers a wide range of data which is updated in real time. This is what you can expect from your partner management software:
Our statistics module is divided into several sections:
- A shared page with all the data
- Conversions
- Events
- Cohort Analysis
- Logi
Now, let's learn more about each section.
There are many settings available for displaying general statistics data:
- Data display period
- Time zone
- Country (i.e., geolocation of the traffic source)
- Partner (i.e, traffic from a specific partner)
- The partner's manager (i.e., traffic from a particular partner's target audience
- Advertiser (if you work with internal and third-party offers)
- Product
- Offer
- Offer tags (your custom tags for grouping offers based on any attribute)
- Partner tags (same principle as offer tags)
- Traffic source (clicks, promo codes, and leads are available by default)
- Source link (offer and landing links are available by default)
- Landing (you can create any number of landing pages for one offer)
- Operating System
- Sub ID (similar to the usual UTM tags)
You can display data by several parameters, such as by day or other desired period, offers, advertisers, products, partners, sub id, and other parameters we have listed above.
In the "Conversions" and "Events" sections, you will see your conversions and events respectively. You can filter the data using the same parameters as in the "General statistics" section. What's great about this? The following additional parameters have been added to the filter options:
- Click ID (to track a conversion for a specific click)
- Conversion ID (to view the data for a specific conversion)
- Conversion Status (processing, confirmed, on hold, or rejected)
- Transaction ID
- Goal Key (goal id)
- Browser
- Device Type
- Payment Model (CPA, revshare, and any hybrid accesses in AlanBase)
- Payment for the Webmaster
The Cohort Analysis section, as we mentioned above, is one of Alanbase's key advantages, and an essential feature for any iGaming product. With its help, you can see how traffic has behaved over time, or, more specifically, divide the results for a particular period by the number of registrations in the same month or earlier. Cohort analysis is available for periods of up to 180 days in Alanbase.
Cohort analysis allows users to calculate their real return on investment, real profits, and even the appropriate percentage for partners when working on a revshare model.
The Logi section is a space where you can see detailed information about each postback and click for a selected period:
- Date
- Time
- Click source
The section is divided into “Received postbacks", “Sent postbacks" and “Clicks". It can be used to detect suspicious traffic or identify the source of clicks/postbacks if you cannot identify the source.
About Alanbase
Alanbase was founded in 2020 and has over 60 clients at the moment, including online casinos and betting sites.
Most importantly, the Alanbase team has extensive experience working with iGaming projects. This means they understand exactly what operators need, and this is a crucial aspect for Slotegrator. Alanbase focuses on operators’ needs and provides them with solutions that can help them grow.
Alanbase software
Alanbase is SaaS software for creating affiliate programs and tracking affiliate traffic. The solution’s specialized modules cater to any vertical, with pre-built presets for some of them, including betting and gambling.
Software features include:
- Partner Management with flexible access settings
- Offer management (with landing page setup, promotional materials, and qualifications)
- Statistics management (with the option to establish goals based on formulas and events, and access to cohort analyses and dashboards to quickly assess the traffic situation)
- Payment management (with currency conversion and automatic account generation)
- Real-time data updating
- Flexible setting of goals, events, and qualifications
- 24/7 support
- Customized improvements and solutions
- Branding settings
There is a unique feature — private statistics. Operators can create several working zones and give access to them to particular partners or administrators. It can be useful for holdings where several projects have different teams or companies that work with outsourced specialists.
About Partnergrator
Partnergrator is an affiliate service integrated right into an online casino or sportsbook platform’s backend. It grants access to several affiliate networks and provides all necessary analytical tools for more efficient affiliate program management. With Partnergrator, you can develop affiliate campaigns, create payment plans, choose an affiliate system, create banners and customize the interface — all from your gambling platform’s backend.
Is it actually necessary to purchase special software? Can’t we keep records using our team?
Working on affiliate program software is similar to starting an IT project — there has to be a qualified team, detailed research, competitor analysis, and more. This might take several months, in addition to the time and resources you already have to devote to the main gambling project. Simple trackers often don’t cut it for good quality analysis and strategy, which is why most companies need special software.
What statistics reflect the performance of online casinos?
GGR, NGR, Average Revenue Per User, NGR-to-Deposits, Bets-to-Deposits, Lifetime Value, and Churn Rate are the most important KPIs that you need to track to see how your business is developing. Read more about essential online casino KPIs here.
How do I keep the player on the platform after I receive the traffic?
You can read this article about player retention to learn how to keep players coming back. However, common wisdom dictates that you offer them a great variety of games based on regional demand, let them play on their mobile phones, provide 24/7 availability with Telegram Casino, and integrate payment methods that are convenient for them.
How can Slotegrator help you?
Slotegrator provides a powerful, flexible, and easy-to-use turnkey solution for online casinos and betting platforms. You can use its modules to create a stylish frontend and simple site navigation, create and adjust bonuses, prevent fraud and comply with KYC policies, and collect and analyze data from your platform and compare them with your competitors’ performance.
Click the link below to learn more about what features our turnkey platform can be helpful for you or how Partnergrator can supercharge your traffic.