Changelog For Affiliates

In this newsletter, I’m going to take the opportunity to do something I don’t do a ton of, which is product marketing for StatsDrone.

The feature in question is called Changelog and it is important for affiliates and for StatsDrone for many reasons.

Let me quickly explain what Changelog is and how it might affect our positioning in the market. That is, how can we use our positioning to show how we can help affiliates with our tools. 

Changelog is our mechanism for recording your affiliate data in 2 points in time and making a comparison of that data. If anything changes, we’ll find out what those changes are. 

So if you think you’ve had FTDs disappear on you for any reason, then you can get our help in detecting this. 

From our point of view, StatsDrone is one of many affiliates stats and data tools on the market but nobody is searching for “affiliate stats aggregator”. 

Even if you were to search for that, you will now find some of the tools that do that but it never used to be the case.

Regardless, the search volume for this is super low.

So how many affiliates are using these ‘affiliate stats aggregators’?

Let me look at a list of companies that do such a thing and try to estimate how many customers might exist across the whole spectrum.

Affiliate stats tools list

• Nifty Stats

• Routy

• VOONIX.NET

• Affluent

• Trackonomics

• wecantrack

• Strackr

• Affiliate.ai (coming soon)

• AffCollect

• Lasso

• Affilimate

• CPV Lab

I think at one point, Nifty Stats had on their website a long time ago they had 20,000 customers. I know Voonix list about 100 and at StatsDrone, we are similar too. 

If Amazon Associates and Awin Global have at least 1 million publishers each, I’m sure there are more than 2 million affiliates globally. 

If we use crude napkin math, 2 million affiliates and maybe 20,000 affiliates tracking their affiliate stats with tools, that is 1% of affiliates tracking their data.

I think affiliates would like to do this but they are problem aware but not solution aware. 

So that is a long winded way of saying yes, we aggregate affiliate stats for both affiliates and for affiliate networks. 

However I want to focus on our story of why we build StatsDrone and our positioning when it comes to something we call Revenue Leak.

Why we built StatsDrone

Being an affiliate and also having B2B affiliate program reviews, I felt there wasn’t a useful feedback system to inform affiliates when bad things were happening to their business.

I used to be a daily user of Stats Remote which was a stats tool that last was online in 2017.

I would be on that app first thing in the morning hitting refresh of my affiliate stats. In the middle of the day, I’d hit that refresh button a few more times and before bed, once more to see if any data was updated.

Some programs update their stats by the hour but most were once a day. Either way, I was hitting refresh like a junky. 

There were a few things I noticed about how affiliates run their business both from being a former affiliate manager as well as running affiliate sites and networking with affiliates.

1. Most affiliates didn’t seem to measure performance like Earnings Per Click (EPC)

2. If programs closed, nobody was informing you of this anywhere

3. If programs changed affiliate software, your old links were invalidated

4. If affiliate programs closed, you would lose all of your historical data unless you used an affiliate stats tool

5. If the program’s performance dropped, it was difficult to spot unless you dug deeper into reports

6. Programs that owe you money don’t always inform you of this

StatsDrone, helping affiliates fight Revenue Leak

So know you know why we built StatsDrone and that our approach wasn’t just to be another affiliate stats aggregator. We felt there was more to be looked at in their data and more useful features to build on top of what was in the market. 

Revenue Leak has been defined in other industries but not quite in affiliate marketing. 

So what is Revenue Leak?

Of course I asked ChatGPT this and what is cool is they know we’ve written about this. So here is what they say it is

Changelog for affiliates

So I teased you with Changelog at the start of this article and with an image of what it could be.

Currently we are trialing this with a few of our customers and most seem keen to try this out.

Just a heads up, the best use of Changelog occurs when you start using StatsDrone and in a period of time, you re-record your data at least 30 days later.

For StatsDrone users that have been using us for at least the last 12 months, you can use this Changelog process to analyze data to see if anything has changed in that 12 month period.

Changelog can be processed at any point in time and we have built this using StatsDrone and we run this analysis outside of the app.

Special credit goes to Joe Hatch for working on this feature as our Head of Product and to Lynda Salem. She’s been building dashboards in Tableau to visualize what is happening with the results that come from the Changelog process. 

If you have read this far and you’re an affiliate and you want us to help you with this, just reply with a comment “Changelog” and I’ll reach out. Or you could also write "FAFO" too if interested.