How can StatsDrone help affiliate agencies with data aggregation, CRM and optimizing your business?
StatsDrone is currently being used by a number of affiliate agencies and I’ll share all the ways in which we can help your agency.
As an agency working on behalf of affiliates, you’re working like affiliate networks but a little bit more bespoke service you provide.
In this article, I’ll cover the following features with a few examples.
- Data aggregation
- Managing affiliates: accounts vs campaigns
- Affiliate dashboard & seats
- Deal CRM
- Invoice generator
- BI notifications
- Our API to export data
The top way in how StatsDrone can help your agency is with our core affiliate stats aggregator.
Data aggregation aka getting your affiliate stats
These are the top 2 features that StatsDrone can help with.
- Help you get the affiliate stats of all the accounts you work with
- Be able to give dashboards to your individual affiliates
Without a doubt, the most important feature you can offer your affiliates is a dashboard that shows them how much money they are making on a daily basis. This dashboard should show them their clicks, FTDs (or NDCs), revenue share, CPA and total commissions earned.
I’ll start by sharing the 2 ways affiliate networks are making use of StatsDrone
- Affiliate stats aggregation
- Business Intelligence & CRM
Stats affiliate stats aggregation involves pulling data from all the affiliate programs within that network. We have some companies that build their own in-house affiliate network and we are alleviating the workload in maintaining the data feeds as we are specialists in this area.
The 2nd way in which affiliate networks are using us is to have a better visibility of their affiliates in their network and to help with CRM and Business Intelligence.
Affiliate Stats Aggregation
How does StatsDrone get data from affiliate programs?
StatsDrone collects data in the following ways:
- Scraping using credentials
- API
- CSV upload
For the most part, we recommend all users to use APIs to get your data from your affiliate programs. API can make the task easier of obtaining the data without any substantial risk of downtime.
Managing accounts vs campaigns
Affiliate agencies and affiliate networks typically manage their sub affiliates in 1 of 2 days.
- Account level
- Campaign level
Account level management
When you add an account, you can change the name of the account in case you need to reflect which account is assigned to your sub affiliate.
Campaign level management
Some affiliate networks and affiliate agencies will manage their affiliates through a single tracking link per brand. That is, all of your affiliates are represented by single tracking links and individual campaigns.
Deal CRM for affiliate agencies
As an affiliate agency, one thing you're known for is helping your affiliate users get better commission deals than being on their own. You essentially have a network effect by being able to work on behalf of affiliates. That is you bring many affiliates to operators with the promise you'll deliver FTDs and traffic.
The Deal CRM is a feature that allows you to create a custom deal that can be added or tagged to the account level (affiliate program), brand level or even campaign level.
These are the main categories of deals:
- revenue share
- CPA
- Hybrid
- Flat fees
Invoice generator for affiliate agencies
Tracking affiliate payments can be a major source of frustration for affiliates.
As an affiliate agency, you either are trying to help your affiliates get paid on time or you manage payments like an affiliate network and your job is to collect all the payments yourself first before you distribute.
No matter what, it helps to have a good accounting system to keep track of all payments. The faster you get paid, the happier everyone gets.
Our invoice generator can actually email the invoices to your affiliate manager. You can add in flat fees, make adjustments to the invoice and view your invoice and payment history even on the go. This feature is available in the mobile version of the app.
How to connect your affiliate programs
Connecting affiliate programs is easy but there are a few things you should know.
- We recommend users use API as much as possible over credentials (username & passwords)
- In some cases, your API needs to be whitelisted
- Bulk account loading can be done for API or credentials
If you ever need help with any connection, or adding a program not supported in the app, just reach out to customer support inside the app.
