iGaming industry is booming and so is the competition. User acquisition is even a bigger challenge with thousands of gambling brands competing with each other for players’ attention.
According to BISWorld’s Global Casinos & Online Gambling Industry Report, there are a total of 5,098 registered iGaming businesses in the world, implying that more than 5,000 iGaming brands vying for player’s attention.
That’s why the majority of gambling affiliate programs, online casinos, sports betting platforms and sportsbooks have increased their budget in affiliate marketing and gambling affiliate programs. Gambling affiliate programs investment are doubling this year, owing to its efficiency, better control, and exponential reach.
Even the iGaming brands who were previously investing in affiliate networks have initiated efforts to create their own affiliate gambling programs to have better control over their partners, money, and performance.
This approach might be hybrid or exclusive on affiliate programs depending on the stage, budget, and resources available.
If you’re on this guide, you likely recognize the power of iGaming affiliate programs in today’s fiercely competitive market. However, some key questions might still linger:
- What kind of gambling affiliate program do I need?
- Will it be worth the effort?
- Where to get started?
- How to manage a gambling affiliate program?
This comprehensive guide which is free to access to all will try to answer your questions, giving you a fair understanding of different types of affiliate gambling programs, how to create them, and how to manage them.
Without further ado, let’s dive straight into it.
Power of Gambling Affiliate Programs
From better targeting, scalability, to exponential growth potential, having your own gambling affiliate program has multi-faceted benefits, including;
- Exponential Reach In Target Market: Every affiliate enjoys a vast reach in their niche. Imagine onboarding hundreds of such affiliates – this will amplify your brand’s presence by manifold. This is why gambling brands and operators set some budget aside for affiliate marketing to reach new players, geographies, and cultures.
- More Targeted Approach: Using your in-house gambling affiliate program, you can create a group of affiliates who understand your business, its goals, and aspirations. Building an affiliate program from scratch also gives you the ownership and flexibility to invest only in affiliates who are experts in the niches your business operates in. For example, if you’re an online casino, you can build an affiliate program with affiliates who have proven expertise in the online casino domain.
- More Control: Unlike traditional forms of marketing or relying solely on affiliate networks, building your own gambling affiliate program can help you give more control on your affiliates, performance, commission model, and terms & conditions. Additionally, affiliate programs give you more control over your data and how you use it.
- More Budget Friendly: Joining an gambling affiliate network involves costs like startup fee/sign up fee and commission fees that in turn decreases the amount of money landing with the affiliates and also diminishes the value of your money invested. Even though the initial cost of setting up an affiliate gambling program is higher, this way of doing gambling affiliate marketing is more cost effective in the long run.
- More Scalability: Your affiliate program can expand as you move ahead with your business. You can set up unique commission models, increase the number of affiliates, or number of campaigns per affiliates. Having your own affiliate program gives you more room to expand as your business grows.
In this competitive iGaming landscape, every click counts. With your own affiliate program, you can control every click, conversion and deposit. Imagine – a dedicated team of affiliates across the globe promoting your iGaming brand, bringing in highly engaged players to your platform. Putting them all under one affiliate program is the key to streamlined affiliate management and conversion optimization.
If you’re convinced that your iGaming brand needs a dedicated affiliate program, let’s move to the next very important step – Making a list of things you need to build your own affiliate gambling affiliate program.
What Do You Need To Build Your Gambling Affiliate Program?
Building your own gambling affiliate program requires budget, patience and a dedicated staff to manage it. Let’s discuss in detail what you need in handy to start your own affiliate program, be it online casino affiliate program, sports betting affiliate program, sportsbook affiliate programs, etc.
Affiliate Marketing Management Software
First and foremost, you need a subscription of affiliate marketing platform or software that handles, tracks, optimizes and analyzes your gambling affiliate program. Before you zero down on an option, make sure that your iGaming affiliate marketing platform checks the following boxes.
- Faster API Refresh Rate: Data delayed is data lost. API refresh rate of hours won’t serve you any good in the industry so dynamically changing with each passing day. To make quick and data-driven decisions, it’s important to get real-time insights from your affiliate marketing platform as well as from integration third-party marketing stacks. Make sure that your affiliate management system offers real-time insights that are delivered within minutes and not hours!
- Flexible Commission Models: One of the primary reasons for you to switch to your own gambling affiliate program is the lack of flexibility in commission structures. Don’t let your affiliate marketing software take this flexibility away from you. Before onboarding an iGaming SaaS partner, ensure that it supports multiple affiliate commission models including – tiered, fixed, FTD-based, NGR-based, and custom metric-based commission models.
- Referral Management: Another major goal of your affiliate program apart from bringing conversion is to get more affiliates to sign up for your program. For this, you need a referral program in place and to manage such a program, your affiliate management software should support multi-level referral management including rewards and incentives.
- Ability to Scale: Scalability cannot thrive without customizability. Just like your gambling affiliate program itself, your iGaming affiliate marketing platform should also support unlimited customizations – be it in user interface, commission model, custom formulae, white-labeled tracking links, or dashboard.
- Fraud Protection: Your iGaming affiliate marketing software should be equipped to detect and block fraudulent traffic and transactions coming from malicious sources and affiliates. The fraud shield should work in synchrony with your affiliate tracking system, without requiring any additional steps.
Gambling Affiliate Program Design & Resources
The next step is to have an affiliate gambling program design, structure and commission model in mind that suits your business goals and your affiliates’ growth as well. Here’s how to go about it;
- Commission Structure: Your commission structure should be built in a way that it empowers and not stifles your affiliates. Build tiered and flexible commission models that rewards the top-performers and motivates the underperforming with an opportunity to make amends.
- Affiliate Marketing Resources: For an gambling program to run smoothly, you also need to hire resources like an affiliate manager to manage your affiliate program, onboard affiliates, analyze their performance, and provide support wherever needed.
- Creative Management Tool: A central dashboard to assign, manage, and track performance of creatives and copies on campaign as well as affiliate level.
Types of Gambling Affiliate Programs
Many iGaming brands build their own gambling affiliate programs to promote their product. Based on the offer product, the affiliate gambling programs are sub-divided into the following categories:
Casino Affiliate Program
Casino affiliate programs are leveraged by brands that own an online casino to promote their products through a network of affiliates, sharing commissions based on transactions like first time deposit, registration, or betting.
Based on the commission model that suits for your brand, and its stage, online casino affiliate programs can be further segmented into revenue share online casino affiliate program, CPA affiliate casino program, or hybrid online casino affiliate program.
Online casino brands and operators can build their own affiliate program to promote their casino offerings, boost user acquisition and player retention, overall impacting their Net Gaming Revenue (NGR).
Sports Betting Affiliate Programs
If you own sports betting websites, sportsbooks and gambling sites where bets are placed on sports events, you can set up your own sports betting affiliate programs based on your budget, resources availability, and business goals.
There are different kinds of revenue and commission models in sportsbook affiliate programs including Cost Per Action (CPA), Cost Per Lead (CPL), and Revenue Share.
Navigating The Challenges Of Managing A Gambling Affiliate Program
While the benefits are many for creating your own gambling affiliate program, nothing comes without its fair share of challenges – affiliate gambling programs have their own. But every challenge has a solution just waiting to be discovered.
But before getting to the solutions, let’s revisit iGaming affiliate program challenges one by one and understand how and where you’ll face them.
Finding The Right Affiliates
- The iGaming industry is competitive, which makes it harder to scoop high-quality affiliates for your brand.
- Even after onboarding, you have to carry out proper due diligence to see if your affiliates have the license to promote gambling products.
- Managing onboarding, sign ups, and permissions.
Performance Management
- Managing performance and creating reports at campaign-level, and affiliate level.
- Keeping a track of total payouts, pending payments, and total revenue generated.
- Checking what major KPIs are being tracked and fulfilled.
- Deterring and weeding out fraudulent activities from real player activities.
- Lack of consolidated and customisable reports.
- Lack of real-time reports, slow API refresh rates.
Payout Management
- Calculating and releasing timely affiliate commissions/payouts.
- Creating manual invoices every month, week or quarter.
- Managing invoices and payments in multiple currencies in case of global campaigns.
Creative Management
- Keeping your affiliate marketing campaigns in line with your brand guidelines.
- Assigning custom creatives and copies to affiliates and tracking their performance.
- Conduct A/B testing on affiliate campaign creatives without maintaining spreadsheets.
Technical Infrastructure
- Lack of adequate data integrations to get comprehensive reports at one place.
- Lack of technology to prevent bonus abuses and protecting genuine affiliates.
- Lack of flexible technology to scale your affiliate program as you grow.
While these challenges exist, they shouldn’t deter you from building a successful gambling affiliate program. These hurdles can be dealt effectively by onboarding an iGaming affiliate marketing software like Affnook, that alleviates not one but 5 problems with a single subscription.
Let’s explore how.
How An iGaming Affiliate Marketing Software Streamlines Your Gambling Affiliate Program
An iGaming Affiliate Marketing Management Platform like Affnook acts like an all-in-one subscription-based tool to help you onboard affiliates, track their performance, deter iGaming frauds, manage & automate payouts, track referrals, and even automate workflows to free up time for strategic decisions. Let’s run them down one by one in detail.
Real-Time Reports & Analytics
iGaming affiliate marketing management platforms like Affnook attributes your iGaming attribution to the right partner in real-time, gives you in-depth player insights, and helps you understand partner performance and player journey better. Unlike contemporaries, Affnook delivers data without any lags to help iGaming program managers fine-tune their affiliate strategy based on data that is current.
The best part? You can customize your reports to show you the metrics that matter the most to your business at that time. Play around with the report filters till you get the perfect view of your affiliate program’s performance.
Custom Commission Modelling
The biggest mistake iGaming program managers make is putting all the affiliates under a single commission model. Why? Let’s try to understand this with an example.
An influencer who is bringing more engaged and high-paying customers to your platform is more valuable than a content creator who focuses on mere volume of registrations/FTD.
Commission models should reflect this ‘value’ that your affiliates are bringing to your business.
Having said that, your iGaming affiliate management platform should be capable of custom commission modeling based on KPIs that you choose and models that fits your business better.
From custom, tiered to rev share and hybrid, commission models, your affiliate marketing platform should accommodate everything.
Payout Management For iGaming Affiliates
Calculating and managing payouts for a handful of affiliates is not a major task. But imagine having 1,000+ affiliates registered on your program.
Manual calculation and invoice generation is no less than a nightmare. That is why iGaming affiliate program managers require an affiliate management platform like Affnook to do the heavy lifting for them.
It automatically calculates payouts based on commissions set by you and releases invoices at a set deadline. The likelihood of errors are next to none since everything is automated and double-checked by Affnook.
Invoice Automation For Gambling Affiliate Program
Delayed payments have never benefited anyone. And in most of the cases, delayed payments stem from inefficient or manual processes rather than intentional oversights. An iGaming affiliate manager is juggling multiple responsibilities, and manual processes on top of that aggravate this problem further.
That is why recurring processes like invoice generation and intimation should be automated and one of many loads can be taken off the iGaming program manager’s shoulder. Affnook’s iGaming affiliate management platform lets affiliate program managers automate invoices at set frequency, set invoice amount threshold and even send automated email intimation to partners every time a new invoice is generated.
The benefit? It builds trust between program managers and affiliates driving a partnership of shared success and mutual growth.
Fraud Prevention in iGaming Affiliate Campaigns
According to a survey conducted by AffiliateWP, 63% of affiliate marketers are concerned about fraud. Therefore a robust fraud protection mechanism is a must if you’re starting your own iGaming affiliate program. Since frauds are where the money is.
An in-built anti-fraud tool is not just an add-on, it’s a requisite to maintain the integrity of your affiliate program and protect the interests of your partners.
To make this clearer, here’s an example.
Imagine you’re running an iGaming campaign to drive player FTDs with two partners A and B. A honestly creates his strategy, runs the campaigns, and brings you 100 numbers of FTDs for which he gets paid 20 dollars for each deposit, making the sum total of 2,000 USD.
On the other hand, partner B invests more on unethical practices, like sending player activity from bots or unknown devices. He registers a total of 200 FTDs and walks home with 4,000 USD in commission.
However, for your business partner A’s numbers are the real win since he’s driving actual players to your platform who’ll generate consistent revenue.
You lose business while your honest partner will lose motivation, revenue, and a fair chance to compete in a level playing field.
Sounds like a big problem? Trust us, it’s even bigger when it’s allowed to fester unchecked.
How Affnook Helped These iGaming Operators
Affnook, a brainchild of Trackier – leading performance marketing software in the AdTech industry, has been helping iGaming brands and operators alike to make affiliate program management easier and more efficient.
Such an example is Unicon365, a leading iGaming operator that onboarded Affnook by Trackier in April 2024. The primary goal of the operator was to populate their iGaming affiliate program with high-performing affiliates.
Read the complete case study to understand how Affnook can drive user acquisition success for your iGaming affiliate program.
They built an affiliate program to help them acquire more high LTV players on their multi-brand platform that includes slot games, online casino, sports betting, bingo, etc.
By leveraging data-based affiliate marketing, a robust affiliate management platform with an inbuilt referral management system, Unicon365 managed to onboard 1,000+ affiliates and 30,000+ players on its platforms.
The notable feat was the 200% spike in its Net Gaming Revenue (NGR) within a period of 3 months, making it a remarkable success story in the iGaming affiliate program industry.
How Affnook Helps Gambling Affiliate Program Reach Exponential Success
You must have gone through dozens of iGaming affiliate program management in the iGaming industry, with the promise of robust attribution tracking technology, reporting & analytics, some even offer fraud detection tools as an add-on.
However, Affnook is not another run-of-the-mill affiliate management platform for iGaming affiliate programs, it’s an all-around doubles up as an affiliate tracking, invoice automation, fraud detection, and referral management tool on your command.
Given below is a detailed description of how Affnook simplifies your iGaming affiliate marketing.
- Better efficiency at lesser cost: Business goals evolve as you move through different stages of growth. Keeping this in mind, Affnook offers customizable reports that help you see the numbers that are important to you at any given time. When you have a clear picture of your campaign goals and achievements, you’re better positioned to make data-driven decisions that eventually lead to better resource and budget allocation.
- Combined capabilities of three in one dashboard: It’s not just an attribution tracking solution, not just an affiliate management platform. It serves as an affiliate referral management tool as well as anti-fraud shield – all in just one subscription, saving you a tonne of time and money on juggling between multiple subscriptions.
- Real-time reports: Even a minute missed in campaign optimization can lead to catastrophic loss of affiliate budget. Our real-time data helps you make decisions as the events happen – conversion, deposit, bets, wins, etc. everything in real-time.
- Customizations on-request: Need something specific? Be it a feature or a look and feel request, we make it happen at a lighting fast speed. So far we’ve processed 100+ custom feature requests from our customers.
Getting Started With Affnook – How You Can Join Us
Taking the right decision sometimes just takes a click – a click to book your free demo, a click to take a live tour or a click to simply join the insider circles of iGaming marketers like yourself. Here’s how you can join the Affnook community of iGaming achievers.
- Book Free Demo: Book your free demo with one of our iGaming experts, followed by a 30-day trial to get a hang of our iGaming affiliate marketing platform. Confirm your subscription only after you’re fully convinced with our capabilities.
- Take a Live Tour: Seeing is believing, that’s why a live tour is indispensable when you’re putting your precious bucks on a SaaS. Take a live tour of Affnook’s platform to see how it works and helps you. Book another guided tour with our iGaming expert later to seal the deal.
- Explore Our Resources: Not at a stage to take a call right now? No worries. Take a look at our resource library and get everything iGaming you need to build success campaigns right here, under one roof.
- Join Our Newsletter Community: Staying on top of iGaming trends and development is one way to achieve competitive advantage. Join our community of 1,000 iGaming marketers to receive swift and actionable insights related to your industry, delivered right to your inbox every week.
