Nowadays affiliate marketing is one of the most effective tools for growing a business. It can be used in various fields, including for the promotion of gaming operators. On European markets it is used for online casino platforms; on the territory of the Russian Federation – for licensed betting operators.
Why is affiliate marketing so popular? Mainly because it allows gambling sites to avoid spendings for empty clicks and simulated activity around the product. Gambling promotion is always closely related with online advertising. Gambling sites’ owners start an affiliate program to optimize their own advertising campaigns, diversify the traffic channels, and reduce advertising budgets.
Affiliate marketing and its implementation in the gambling industry
Gambling operators use affiliate programs to promote the full range of online services for a number of reasons:
- Payment only upon the final result
A key aspect of affiliate marketing is the mutual benefit of all parties involved. Thus, the company delegates a part of marketing tasks to partners who get paid once they attract new customers. In other words, the company pays for the measurable results: for customers acquisition or for a certain performed action on the site: registration or deposit.
- Higher chance of reaching out the target audience
The affiliate program can improve targeting and hence interaction with the target audience. In other words, it helps to set the audience in the way that ads will reach the audience corresponding to a certain age, region, gender, marital status, and a number of specific interests. The promotion will be more effective if you test ad campaigns and the target audiences first.
- Increase in marketing efforts
When a team works on product promotion, they can implement a certain volumes of work and consequently predict the results based on this work. But when the team expands and more people start working on the product promotion, the results naturally multiply. And this being emphasized in the previous paragraphs, you do not pay extra if there is no result. That is a win-win situation.
- Management transparency
When you create an affiliate program on a reliable platform you get access to the affiliate module for program management, which allows you to evaluate the results of each partner. You and your partners can use this information to analyze the effectiveness of advertising campaigns and make appropriate adjustments.
However, you need to keep in mind that this is true only if you use a proven platform where you are the absolute owner of your affiliate program. If you run an affiliate program with the help of an advertising network, this can be a problem, since you will not have an access to all analytics.
For beginners this business model may seem very complicated. Majority will have doubts around the high costs of maintaining an affiliate program. However, don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Different industries around the world actively use affiliate programs as one of the proven marketing tools that bring decent profits. Thus, you can choose from existing ready-made solutions that will save you the trouble of developing software from scratch.
How to promote an affiliate program – learn from Affise
The success of a gambling affiliate program largely depends on software or an affiliate platform you choose.
You may wonder, what are the key features that an affiliate program must provide? Those will be the possibility to diversify traffic, target the right audience, analyze campaign indicators, adjust settings during advertising campaigns, accurately calculate advertising budgets and fit into it.
According to the Affise representatives, first and foremost the platform must provide the following services:
- Flexible data transfer (tool for data transfer) that allows to migrate easily from one platform to another;
- Full control over the budget. At Affise, you can work under the Pay-per-Conversion scheme and stay within the approved budget;
- Round-the-clock technical support;
- Free trial. You can start with Affise for free first 30 days. Majority of other platforms provide only 7 – 15 free days. During 30 days you will have enough time to get used to the platform, see how things work and decide which pricing plan will be optimal for your company;
- High download speed and detailed targeting.
As an advertiser (program owner), you can create your affiliate program and have a full control over all processes. Through the control panel, you can set your own rules and manage advertising campaigns following these rules. Affise functionality involves the customizable dashboard, advanced targeting, cap system and budget limits, as well as the possibility to select currency. Besides, as the creator of the program, you can control user access by granting or removing access to the program in accordance with users’ roles in the affiliate program.
Thus, the Affise control panel allows configuring advertising campaigns for various geo, specify the currency and maximum advertising budget that you are willing to spend, and choose a payment scheme.
Affise offers flexible payment terms. The platform supports all popular payment schemes:
- Pay per action. These are well-known CPA payment schemes, according to which you pay based on the performance – purchase, registration, deposit, lead, etc.
- Revenue Share. This is quite a popular payout model in gambling. This scheme involves paying partners a certain percentage of the casino’s revenue received from the acquired players.
- Hybrid scheme. A mixture of RevShare and CPA models. It is about a flexible scheme, according to which an advertiser can pay a certain CPA amount for each player, as well as a long-term percentage of revenue. The more flexible the terms of payments in the affiliate program are, the easier it is to attract new partners to your network.
Additionally, Affise enables you to create a loyalty program for your partner under which they can receive additional bonuses for their performance. Loyalty program module tracks all partner sales, which mean that you do not need to keep a separate record and make these payouts apart from the regular ones.
An integral part of any affiliate program is analytics. And the more detailed the analytics is, the better. Data collection and transparency help advertisers to draw conclusions based on the results of advertising campaigns, test various hypotheses, find strengths and weaknesses, and as a result find the most profitable strategies. If you do not have enough data, you have nothing to back up your hypotheses with and adapt the settings respectively. Unlike creating an affiliate program inside an ad network, at affiliate management platform you have full access to the data, and therefore to all statistics.
Thus, it is important that the platform provides extensive analytics with the ability to optimize ad settings in real time.
Affise offers extensive analytics, with more than 50 statistical sections, comparative reports, and so on. Owing to the statistics design, you can sort the criteria, select only the metrics you need, organize their order according to the importance, and configure the necessary formulas. For the convenience of analysis, you can utilize comparative reports and compare indicators in one window, without the need to switch between pages.
In addition, Affise has its own integration service with BI tools, which allow collecting and transferring data for further processing to Google and AWS tools.
In recent years, Affise has been actively working on integrating artificial intelligence technologies into the platform. Thanks to this, users can optimize the work on the platform in every possible way. Optimization means the availability of SmartLinks, protection against online fraud, CR-optimization, as well as automatic redirection of remnant traffic to other offers.
The platform, among the other things, must be flexible in its settings so that you can fully personalize it for yourself. For example, at the Affise platform, you can implement your interface design, configure certain widgets for the convenience of partners and employees, integrate third-party services through Affise Marketplace or using the feature-rich Affise API.
You can try the Affise platform for free: Affise offers a trial version for the first 30 days. Intrigued? To gain access to the platform leave a request on the site and shortly Affise product representative will contact you to tell more about the platform. They will also demonstrate the whole process of work, help you set up an account for the business tasks, and after that, you will be able to start launching advertising campaigns.
Read more: Top Affiliate Networks in Nordic Countries
