In my years working as an affiliate manager and also as an affiliate, I found it surprising how many affiliates don’t pay attention to the market as well as their stats.

Surely everyone does check their stats to see how much money they make, but are they using this data for business intelligence? I think many out there are not, and it will be only a matter of time before people realize they are leaving money on the table.

So what do affiliates really want? I think many of them don’t know that because they don’t know which affiliate programs they should be working with. They should be focusing on KPIs (as in Key Performance Indicators), and also watching their competitors.

Which affiliate program would you rather work with? One that offers 20% revenue share which delivers 5000 Eur/month in commissions with 10,000 clicks and 5 FTDs or another program offering 45% rev share delivering 1000 Eur/month with 100,000 clicks and 25 FTDs?

This should be a no-brainer, but it isn’t, there are a lot more factors to consider.

You see, not all affiliate programs are the same. As an affiliate, you shouldn’t be too focused on the highest rev share. There are some programs that might convert better, but they might be poor at player retention.

I mean wouldn’t you want to send more traffic to that brand that delivered you 5000 Eur over 10,000 clicks? That is 0.50 Eur per click, compared with program B at 0.01 per click.

Most affiliate programs out there are just not good when it comes to both converting and retaining players.

Why you should always research who your competitor’s promote

Do you know which affiliate programs your competitors are working with? Do you know where they send the most traffic to?

The answer to that is not as clear-cut as it used to be, but a good chance is because they are earning more money with those programs. Now, taking aside sponsored spots on a homepage, it helps to see which programs your competitors consistently promote.

If you assume they are smart and pay attention to their own KPIs, then you can assume, as well, the brands they promote either earn them the most money or deliver more revenue per click.

Diversification in iGaming

Since we are talking about mostly iGaming affiliate programs, I think it is worth looking into diversifying the programs you work with.

Assuming you are working mainly on a revenue share basis where winning players can put your month into a negative, then this is one reason to mix things up.

If you focus on sending most of your traffic to one program, and you have a big winner at that program, you could be getting no commission that month. If you spread out your traffic through 10 good affiliate programs, that one big winner might wipe out commissions earned at one program. This of course would be better than having all your eggs in one basket and that winner turning a big month into a bad one.

Why you shouldn’t just join every affiliate program

As tempting as it is to join every program thinking you could be earning money at all of them. The reality is it won’t always be worth the effort. I know a few casino affiliate sites that join every program and despite having over 1000 affiliate accounts, only 80 generated at least one FTD and about 85% of their revenue came from 15 affiliate programs.

Joining more programs is just more logistics to deal with. Besides, you'll end up dealing with pushy affiliate managers wanting your top positions, and they won’t deliver conversions.

I mean you could always find out the hard way.

How StatsDrone can help with your KPIs

You should check out your competitors to see if there is a program they promote that you don’t.

With the StatsDrone app, you can of course view programs that deliver the most revenue, and nothing wrong with doing that. You should compare your data to create KPIs that focus on the traffic you do send, which are clicks.

It is important to understand your rations for clicks to revenue as well as clicks to FTD.

To blindly increase traffic to your top earner would be very careless, especially if your #5 earning program has the best KPIs. You could be making more money when you take a bit of time to look at your data.

StatsDrone will organize that data across all affiliate programs you work with and make it easy to determine which programs deserve more of your traffic, and which ones deserve less.