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A daily podcast delving into the biggest stories of the day throughout the sports betting and igaming sector.
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For today's episode of iGaming Daily, supported by OptiMove, we will be looking back at a scaled down version of a panel from this year's Casino Beat Summit titled, Is Tech Changing the Way Affiliates Work? Moderated by SBC's affiliate relationships manager, Brandon Spiteri, executives from White Label, Media Troopers, and Start Stroad, explored how innovations are satisfying the changing appetites of audiences and players alike, as well as how these changes in player behavior and preferences are shaping the adoption of new technology in the casino affiliate industry. This panel is just a taste of what SPC has to offer in the affiliate industry. Tomorrow, September the 4th, SPC is hosting its Affiliate Marketing Digital Day. Speakers from across the industry will be offering their insights on topics such as influencer marketing, SEO, data, AI, and much more. If that's not enough, SPC Summit Lisbon is just weeks away, and it will be hosting a two-day Affiliate Leader Summit on the 25th. and 26th of September. Links for both events will be left in the description below. Hello guys, thank you for joining the panel. As I said, Brendan from SBC, and I'll let the panelists introduce themselves. Good afternoon, thank you for joining us. After lunch on the last day, I'm sure everyone's a bit tired, so we'll try and make it as interesting and fun as possible. My name is Sasha, I am from White Label Casinos. I'm head of casinos and head of affiliates. My name is John Wright. I've been in the iGaming industry for 23 years. I'm an iGaming dinosaur. I've been a bonus hunter, affiliate manager, set up affiliate sites and now I'm building tech for affiliates. So hopefully I've got a couple things to share. Good afternoon everyone. So my name is Clinton. I'm CTO at Media Troopers. Been in DS3 for I think the past 15 years now. Mainly started as an operator, switched to affiliates, big affiliates, Katiana, Highlight. Now with Media Troopers on mostly on paid media. Okay so we can start. The first question is how has technology transformed the landscape of affiliate marketing in recent years? I'll jump in first to say I personally think the iGaming space is a bit behind when it comes to tech and affiliate marketing. I like going to conferences on SEO, some on AI and some in the affiliate marketing space outside of iGaming and the conversations happening there I believe are very different than what's happening here. My personal take is that the industry has been so wealthy that everyone has an opinion that everything they do is amazing and I think it's only a matter of time before other people come into the space that they're gonna come in with a hungrier attitude. And I think if people here don't look at the tech to advance, get to that next level, I think it's gonna be these other people that come in with this hungry attitude and maybe they're more tech savvy. With regards to the affiliate world, let's say, it's a bit fragmented in terms of software. There are different kinds of software. revenue aggregators, tracking softwares and other plugins. So it's about fragmented everywhere. To merge data, there needs a lot of BI and normalization of data. So the most important thing, I think in affiliation, now it's tracking, make sure that you're tracking everything and obviously have all that data under one panel because once you start getting into fragmented software, it will take time to optimize your campaign, especially for media buying. from an operator point of view, obviously with our affiliate tracking platforms, it really surprises me how much we are having to teach the affiliate software providers of what they need to be doing and what they need to be developing to keep up. For example, the new thing is guarantees. And that take isn't in place, and they're like, oh, we'll think about it. But it's the new thing that's come up in the last six months that's on demand. So we having to do manual adjustments, manual calculations, which leaves room for a lot of error. And this is just a small example. There's constantly new demands coming from affiliates that aren't being heard of or aren't being spoken to with the software providers, and they aren't keeping up with the demands and what's changing. So I think there's a big gap that needs to be filled. And mostly also with regards to attribution of events. So let's say a lead registration or the install or the actual FTD. We are not seeing real-time analysis. So... To optimize a campaign, we need either to be one day late. Obviously, if a campaign is not working, that means loss of money for who's getting paid media. And however, there are some operators who are now sending some real-time traffic. Although they are not sending the actual FTD because it can switch to a VIP program or it can be a fraud FTD. They are sending real-time, let's say, registrations and installs, which at least guides the campaign manager like, look. this campaign it's converting or this campaign it's not. So they can shift the budget from one side to the other. Okay, since we are discussing real time data, what role does data analytics and real time tracking tools play in success of affiliate marketers today? I think we don't have a lot of real time data in affiliate marketing and in the iGaming space, but I think that's gonna come. I think that's gonna make things better for affiliates where there's a big gap in trust from affiliates and operators. So I think that's something that has to happen. And what do you think? You know how I feel about this one, we've been joking about it. Hot potato. Yeah, so as you're saying, I'm just carrying on from the trust between affiliates. I think the reason why operators are hesitant to give real live data is because of the behaviors of operators behind the scenes. So... there is delays for various reasons, which I'm not gonna get into. And I think that does need to change because you want to know if your traffic that you're sending is optimal. We need to know if it's going to fit our ERI model. And there also needs to be complete transparency. So I think it does need to move that way. We need to stop building trust and credibility between the affiliate and the operator. And I definitely think we do need to see that going forward. It complicates also if there are middle mobile measurement platforms like CapsSlayer. When you start seeing conversions, let's say 50 conversions, 50 FTDs, for a particular day, you go on the operator, you see 10. Like what's happening, why Epsilon doesn't consider per se the, let's say, the qualified threshold to convert an FTD. As soon as there is a deposit, even a $1, they just mark it as an FTD. On the operator side, however, it requires certain threshold. Let's say you need to deposit at $10, you need to bet. So these are some thresholds that needs to be also clarified. And ideally there is the single source of truth, which is the source of truth to get the attribution from. Let's say if it's Entain, the source of truth is from their dashboard, but there are other new apps which are coming up, which then their source of truth is from Epsilon because they haven't built an attribution platform like Entain has themselves or income access or something. So I've been having this conversation, as you were saying, where there's a discrepancy where you'll see 50 players, but the operator's dashboard is only seeing 10. And I pitched this and posted this to a couple of affiliates and I get in trouble because I'm very pro-affiliate. And I said to them, well, okay, well, you're the kings of the castle, the operators need your traffic. So why don't you start sending the tracking link to the affiliates? So you've got the power. And if they don't like your numbers and if they want to do things like, while your baseline only works if it's 20 on the first deposit and not 20 cumulative and all these weird things that us as operators like to put in, which is very frustrating for the failure. They don't want to concentrate in your teas and season how you changing it every two seconds. They just want to do a good job and build really good site and send good quality traffic. I mean, it's something to think about, you know, or do we just become more transparent as operators and more upfront and more simple? And just to add to what both of you are saying, I think we're going to be in a space where There's some affiliates that are saying, we won't give you any traffic unless we have a post-pack or dynamic variable, which might not always be real time, but it's gonna be by the hour. And they say, look, we just can't do this unless you have it. So I think we are gonna move towards something that has better transparency. And one thing that's not happening that I hope starts happening soon, and we're trying to do something about it is, no one's really going to the operator saying, with what you said, when you've got like 40 FTDS, but it's really 50 or vice versa, or whatever it is. No one's really going back and giving them a report card saying, Hey, uh, who's really checking this? Who's holding the software or the operators accountable to say there's actually errors in data. And it sounds simple. Like, yeah, just get the data from the operator. Right. And it's like, no, it's unfortunate. It's more complicated than that. And it's really going to come down to just feedback, the industry, giving the feedback to the platforms and the operators saying, we need to change this. And all you have to do is dig and find something. And over the years as well, tracking has improved a lot. Before it was just fire, forget, and then rely also on the operator. Just, you did 10 FTDs, that's it. At least nowadays, attribution software, and come access, and analytics, et cetera. They're allowing to add dynamic parameters, so the C parameter or the var parameter, et cetera, that you can relay your tracking code, their tracking ID, click ID, and when there is the attribution, at least they can tell you, look, this click ID actually converted. This comes especially when you're relying on publishers and sub publishers. If you're the sole, getting the sole attribution, the sole benefit, that's not a problem because the operator can tell you the 10 FTDs, but I have 10 FTDs. But if you're relying on sub publishers where you need to attribute correctly from where it's coming, then it becomes like a more of a gamble, a location like. well, let me allocate two FTDS for this guy because he sent one million clicks and 10 for this one because he sent 10 million. Which might be if the one sending one million clicks, they were more optimal, they were more converting, it might be that he got all the conversion, all the FTDS after all, rather than the one sending 10, 15 million. So that click ID attribution from the operators, it's very important. Okay, so how can operators and affiliates help each other to develop new tech and solutions in this case? I'll jump in and say, we're not really having a lot of these conversations, and I'm glad to see panels like this happen where I've been a part of a few of them. And yeah, that's really, it's a weird thing. Like we have, I think affiliates are the ones that should be asked, like which software should we use for our affiliate platform? And these conversations do happen, but... Simply put, there's not enough, there's not enough any organizations putting together these panels. I think you guys are doing a great job of doing it. It's really talking about it and going, what are the problems on both sides? Like literally, there's so many affiliate managers that don't really even understand what it's like to be an affiliate. And I'd love for them to set up an account and get spammed to death and say, okay, you know, this is what we're gonna do to a big, how do we get to position number one? It's a... When you have affiliate managers like that, I think this is actually one of the bottlenecks of the industry where they're the ones deciding what software to use, and if this is how they're trained, they're trained with the sales-first mindset, not relationship, and it's like, we're not gonna have any conversations with affiliates and operators when this is the way things are. Also, as an operator, to have conversations with affiliates that go deeper than what GE owes and how much traffic do you have in your sources, you need to have deeper conversations, and I've even learned about a couple of affiliate software where affiliates go, oh, no, we don't work with operators that have X, Y, and Z software because we know it's really easy to shave players on those. So that kind of reputation is pretty immense for software providers as well. You don't want to be labeled with that. And as an operator, you want to make sure that you're not using tools that have a bad reputation as well. I held the mix that we found very much working for us as well is that the affiliate is included even before the actual app has been launched to market. What do you need? What do you require? What parameters do I need to send you? What events? So the whole stakeholders involved, because the affiliate is a very much important stakeholder in driving traffic, is included in the cycle. We have found they launch an app. What's the tracking? Well, then we'll see. That's a problematic because people are not going to send you traffic if they're not going to receive the attribution. No one's going to work for free. they will redirect the traffic to what's actually converting. So the more important that everyone is involved, we have also, thanks to let's say media troopers name that there is in the US, we have found collaboration equal from even from software providers, like income access, we speak to them, look, we're seeing this data, we're not seeing. So they help us troubleshoot, we help them as well with the operator to solve the problem. Okay. And can you name specific technology advancements that have most significant impact on affiliate on how affiliates operate today? I'll jump in first so I don't want to talk about my software company but I'll talk about a few of my competitors. Routy.app and Voonix are tech that is available in the market and it does business intelligence and full funnel attribution. What I believe to be true is that if you look at the top 25 or top affiliates in the industry, they either have in-house stats or they're using one of our platforms. And if you look at the rest of the industry, which is maybe 99% of the space, they're not really using these tools. So I believe affiliates are problem aware but not solution aware. And I think, you know, as much as they, if they start using some of these tools, it's getting them in the door to go, okay, we're not just using Google Analytics. We're using other analytics tools. which is a compartment of business intelligence. And if you look at the companies that are really growing, they really look at data in this way. And it's really this intersection of business intelligence and affiliate marketing. And I know like the more I get exposed to some of these larger companies and see what they've built in their backends, it's like, if I was a small affiliate, I'd be a little intimidated because I know what they have in their platforms. Like, at one day I'd like to see what MediaTroopers has built. I know they've got a pretty advanced tech stack. And I think what might happen in the next year is that this tech is going to be available and affordable to affiliates. So it's going to be something that, yes, you can be intimidated today, but, you know, we're all working towards making this accessible. So people don't have to be, you know, just saying, hey, I give up better collective owns everything. You need to look also at your manpower, at your resources. It's used as go up with the being a small team, three people, four people, affiliate. I want to build my own tech stack. I want to build my own tracker. I want to build my review aggregator. It's a killer. Don't go that way. I saw companies going that part. They didn't succeed. Software built once, twice, three times, nothing. Waste of money. If you're a small company, go for a ready off the shelf product, start from there and then switch. If you grow, let's say exponentially to 100, 150 people to something that it actually fits. It might be that Stasram, Voonix or Routy fit your size. So it doesn't need to, let's say, spin up something of your own. You can dedicate your money, your resources on marketing or on media buying or something. However, building your own tech stack helps you also to customize the way you need it. So you can be quick to market, especially when it's dealing with your own profits, with your own money. If we need an extra parameter, if we're seeing that traffic is getting blocked, or if we're seeing that revenue is not coming in correctly, we are quickly adaptable, we deploy, and we're out. So that's something that, as a company of our size, helps us having our own custom. But once you're small, you need to see what's out there, what's available on the market, start with them. It might be that your operations don't succeed. So first, you see that you're making revenue accounts. you're getting revenue from those and then you can go for your own tech stack. Okay, and how can an affiliate leverage new technology to segment or maintain their client data accurately? I think if you wanna get down to player level data, that's something that I think a lot of affiliates aren't. quite using in terms of the reports you can get. So more of the software companies are providing this. It's post back, dynamic variable, player ID. I think it's just a matter of affiliates kind of knowing that one, it's available and two, how they can get it. And I think there's actually even a few things you can take as a step further. This is not very common, but I've asked small, midsize and large affiliates going, have you ever asked your affiliate manager for a very detailed report? Like what players are my... like what games are my players playing? And no one's really asking this, but you think that it's only the top affiliates that do this and it's everything. So I don't know, maybe Sasha, you might've experienced this, but every time we do it, you're not gonna get a unified report, but there's a lot of data available there, but some of it's out of the box, ready to go. And I think just, I don't know what the research is, but we're working on it. There's a lot of affiliates that just don't even know where to start and they're not using it, but the advanced affiliates are. I mean, we're talking a lot about software tracking and affiliate software, but there's a lot of tech that we're not talking about. We're not talking about HumbleAI, for example, which is really helping with the Black Hat PPC space, the competitors, what keywords they're doing, where they're hiding their content. They are providing updates all the time. It's an amazing tool to be watching. We're also not talking about AI. I know an affiliate who's one of our top affiliates has created 150 sites. with diverse content and has managed to survive the Google update because of using chat GBT. So there are a lot of tools besides software tools that are very well used by affiliates and some are proving quite successful as well. We've seen lately also there were other panels discussing the Parasite algorithm and how certain affiliates that have been relying on riding on the original website like CNN.com and they add a sub domain. So coupons.cnn.com or CNN.com slash coupons or slash betting. And there has been a lot of investment from the side of the operator which has been a great hit in the past months but Google decided like it's enough. So something that is important as well for affiliates is that they diversify their sources of traffic. SEO or other website, paid media traffic, email marketing. At least if one of them gets hit, then there is a way from where revenue can keep on coming in. With regards to tracking, like before even the CPA, for you, it was bigger, 350, 400 euro, et cetera. So for some companies, even big one we're saying, where there were quite some resources available to build their own stack. No tracking, no click IDs, they just fire traffic, SEO traffic, it converts, yay, and let's make money. However, nowadays, the CPA value has went down drastically. So for you, you have like 60, 70, 80 CPA, there was also rev share involved. So now it's like squeezing the lemon of what's remaining for the market and trying to get the most and tracking everything that every dime there is around. Okay, so how important is for an affiliate to diversify his lead generation channels in today's marketing strategy? I think I just covered that one slightly with what I've seen, as I said, an affiliate who has diversified their content a great deal and created quite a safety net for themselves doing that. And they used that, one of their tools was using ChatGBT to create, I said, 150 sites in six months. I don't know the complete technical details of what else they used. But his comment was that's what saved him from the Google update. So it's really important as an affiliate to keep your eye on what's happening and use the tools around you as a safety net and diversify. I'll go next and say that I think affiliates need to look at what they do and create more of a product than it is an affiliate site. If your site's just information, I think that's what we're seeing right now is Google kind of slamming these sites going. if you are one of a thousand doing the same thing, it's like, why am I gonna give you the top 10 position? And if you look at some of the affiliates that have actually not been affected as bad, like some of the top of the food chain, they really have had a product mindset from day one. So I think that's very important. Like I know we're talking about channels. Another channel to think about is that I think Google wants to kind of look at products and websites as more people or people driven. So I think if you can look at, What do people buy from today? People wanna buy from people. And I think this is why video and streamers are doing as well as they are today. I think it's a way that people need to diversify from content and being more than just an information portal. You can have the best brand. You can have the best page and you can have the best content. If you don't have traffic coming in from Google, you're nothing. So it's very important to engage people, people coming in from Google, from the SERP. staying on the page, reading the page, actually spending time on the page. What's good with us gamblers? Us gamblers is a total different monster than the normal websites. They are a community. So people go there, people claim their problems and after they say that we have been defrauded by the operator, et cetera, because they didn't cover our payout. When us gamblers... goes in and assist as a middleman and they manage to get something back, then obviously that's a benefit for the user. So there is a community, the user is getting something back. It's not like a traditional affiliate website, you go in, you have a top list, click and that's it. So there is a community, there is a brand, there are people involved, there is forum. So that's something that I think it's very important is also to have in an SEO product, as John mentioned, a brand. We have another question in terms of affiliate business opportunity for 2024-25. Which market is your best bet and which is the market to avoid? I guess I'll go first. I'm gonna answer this in maybe a not conventional way, which is I'm not gonna say, you know, we know which markets are kind of on fire and everyone's putting more attention to like Latin America and things like that. But for me, when I've had the chance to interview a lot of SEO experts and go, if you had to be in affiliate marketing today, what would you do? Would you be intimidated by going into the English markets and they just say, no, you just have to work harder. So they have no problem looking at existing affiliate sites and go, how can it be better than this? And I think there's always a way. I think everyone's always used to going, let's find the easy markets where we can be first in. But if you just have this long-term vision or long-term mindset, you can actually say, well, what do I want? Try to create something unique. And if you're passionate about sports, then stick in sports. Don't go for bingo and say, okay, I wanna be number two at bingo. Go for, maybe you're not gonna be number one sports, but it might be worth more being the 14th best affiliate in that space than. Number two, at bingo, when you're miserable. I'd say everyone wants to chase the untapped territories, but I'd say, you know, look at your existing territories and go, how can I, how can it be better? I don't think a lot of people ask themselves that question. From an SEO point of view, Netherlands used to work very well, Germany used to work very well, but after the new legislation, the markets are dying. So that I think something it's not worth investing money at the moment. We know Netherlands used to convert a lot before it wasn't legalized. When it started getting legal, everything was dying. As John said, LATAM is like very much coming. Obviously, we are licensed in all states that are legal in the US, being sports and casino. So those are our core markets. For us, as soon as there is a market, a state that's going to get legal, for us like a country, that's going to open. And then there are the other new states, let's say, rather than states, countries like Romania and all the region over there that's, let's say, prone to open as well. Obviously based on a legal perspective, there are also the gray, gray states done that ideally as media troopers will stay away. But we are more on the legal basis. So from my perspective, coming from South Africa and having a lot of exposure to the African market, which I know is a hot topic for a lot of affiliates. I can say for a fact that there is a lack in South Africa for sports book affiliates, and that is legal to advertise sports book affiliates. And I know that from a very, very reliable source in South Africa, who's an expert in these fields, I can vouch for that insight. I also know in Kenya, Nigeria, where the populations are huge, we're talking about 50, 40 million, there's a big space for affiliates that focusing on games. So instead of talking about your casinos, There's a big content demand for talking about games and crash games and a different sort of marketing, which is different for Europeans who are coming with our normal content that we're so used to building. So with that, I wanna say get to know your market that you're going into. And my don't will be like, do not go into market unless you're willing to invest and taking time to learn about your market. So whatever worked for Europe or Canada, it's not going to work in your emerging markets. You need to spend time, you know, to have feet on the ground and do your research about what works, what the nuances, and what are the players looking for. So we ran out of time. Thank you for attending. Hope you found it. Thanks for having us. Thank you.