First Party Data + Dynamic Variables

What if I told you there was a way in which you could get the emails of the players you referred to an affiliate program? 🤔

What if I told you there was a way to also get the deposit amounts and revenue activity of that same player? 🤔

How valuable would this data be for you as an affiliate? 🏦

And how would this be possible? Cue in first party data combined with dynamic variables. 

Shoutout to the newsletter sponsors:

• StatsDrone

• FTDx

For the readers that want to know the difference between postbacks and dynamic variables, it’s at the end of this post. 

It wasn’t until 3 days ago that I realized the bridge between operator and affiliate data is here right now!

I was recording a podcast with Shahar Attias (from Hybrid Interaction) and towards the end of the discussion came up this idea that operators basically don’t share contact data with affiliates. That is technically true. 

That is when I realized this is a bridge being built from both sides and connecting in the middle. A click ID will give you everything you need. 

The bridge between affiliate (publisher) and program data is bridged. 🌉

Before I do a deep dive on the solution involving first party data and dynamic variables in iGaming, I want to take a short step back on what is happening in the world of SEO and how these changes are setting us up for a better world in affiliate marketing. 

Google has been changing their algorithm ever since the Helpful Content Update (HCU) in Sept 2023. I mean I just recorded an episode with 💡 Jesse Ringer who told me there was another Google update last week. 

What I realized from watching the past 16 months of affiliate destruction followed by interviewing top SEO people like Lily Ray, is that products are the new champion of SEO traffic.

Here’s a look at some articles I wrote in the past 6 months that I think are worth paying attention to:

1. Affiliate marketing predictions for 2025: disruption alert

2. Are affiliate content sites dead?

3. Newsletters, your new affiliate asset class

4. The role of product in affiliate marketing

5. Affiliate network 2.0

6. Did Google updates boost iGaming player forums?

The titles themselves are insightful on their own. 

I will quickly interpret what they mean and how Google has changed the landscape for affiliate marketing forever.

Information only affiliate sites won’t survive and users are encouraged to both productize their site as well as start to capture their own data on their users. 

If you knew that you were going to lose 80% of your SEO traffic in a year from now, you would start planning to get alternative forms of traffic and today you’d want to capture as much data as you could of your users.

Any affiliate that has lost all their SEO traffic and didn’t capture any contact data from their players, is toast. At least if you’ve spent the last few years capturing emails via a newsletter, you would still have a means of sending players to operators if you lost some of your SEO traffic. Owning that data is a digital asset just like your revenue share accounts, your content and your domain.  

Google is actively rewarding more products, this is why Gentoo Media went all in on AskGamblers and Casinomeister. Their complaints as a product is a powerful means of capturing player data.

Even if they were only just forums, they are still capturing data like an email address. Forums are amazing because you can expand upon your users in asking them to share more info for personalization. On top of that, their posts and interaction with content can also be tracked and you could likely run sentiment analysis. 

That is much better than a newsletter and just imagine life without having any email. The horror!

First party data

I asked Google what is first party data and here is the AI overview

The data captured can be emails, addresses, phone numbers, social media profiles, surveys and a long list. The idea is that first party means you’re the one capturing this data. 

Affiliate life before first party data was very primitive.

Players likely would search Google for some keyword, end up on an affiliate site loaded with listings of brands and offers. The player clicks on one and spends money at a casino giving a commission to the affiliate.

Now, the affiliate has to work even harder for that same Google traffic. This affiliate will now want any means of prompting the user to fill in some data such as email as a minimum. 

If you treated this like paid media, you’d either want to capture the data or at least ensure that the click you worked hard for has good value. Attribution is what you need. Attribution and first party data is what we all want. 

Dynamic variables explained

Joe Hatch did a great explainer video showing how dynamic variables can be used with StatsDrone.

StatsDrone launched our dynamic variables service in early summer 2024. I know there is a lot of confusion of dynamic variables and postbacks but let me just say that postbacks can be very problematic. For example some postback results can give you 0, 1, 2 or more FTDs for a single depositing player. 

Now that we support dynamic variables in our app, we have more affiliates that want this service. 

However what is interesting is the type of affiliates that seem more excited for it. Some of them are ones that have their own communities where they have obviously captured the data of their players. 

In some cases, these affiliates have player focused apps that have incentives or features that are based on wagering. This means that the affiliate naturally needs to know some wagering and revenue activity of their players. 

Dynamic variables have all sorts of use cases but the most powerful one seems to be anything to do with trying to identify either individual player wagering activity or knowing in high level of detail where and how these valuable players are converting. 

Some affiliate programs will give you player IDs of your players which is amazing but the affiliates themselves need to connect the dots. This means not using the regular default tracking link an affiliate program provides but rather one that gives you the ability to inject parameters. 

You need the power of a click ID.

I’m going to use a diagram of the potential data you could get but the magic all happens with a click ID that you can only get with a dynamic variable setup. 

Campaign analysis: life before dynamic variables

How could you segment your traffic in the early days of affiliate marketing?

By creating campaigns in the backends of the affiliate programs you work with. 

The downside of using campaigns is that it is tedious to setup and it isn’t built for scaling. 

Link tracking tools

To setup dynamic variables, you need to have either an internal link tool or a 3rd party tool that will inject click IDs into your link parameters. 

I want to highlight a range of use cases of what can be captured in dynamic variables.

You can use tools like Voluum, Keitaro Tracker and there are even some WordPress plugins like Pretty Links that can achieve the same. Fyi we have quite a few StatsDrone users that are using either Keitaro or Voluum with StatsDrone. 

The only thing needed after your links are setup is to test them out and to ensure your dynamic reports are enabled in the affiliate program. You can usually get this with an API or scraping. This is something StatsDrone does for you for programs that are enabled. 

Below is a diagram of the support we currently have for dynamic variables. 

Just a few programs with dynamic variables are ReferOn, RavenTrack, Income Access, A Paysafe Experience, MyAffiliates and Cellxpert.

Dynamic variables for PPC affiliates

This is perhaps the more common thought that comes to mind. Media buyers want to know if their campaigns are bringing more revenue than the cost of those campaigns. They simply need high level attribution and ideally want to get this data more than once a day, perhaps by the hour. 

The most important feedback for anybody in paid media is that they don’t have hour after hour of expensive traffic leading to no sales. If this happens, the campaign needs to get paused and this is why paid media care so much about anything like real time data. 

I could be wrong but I think PPC was part of the demand and driving force behind dynamic variables and postbacks as a solution. Media buyers always want to know the ROI of their ads exceeds their cost and they’ll want to shut off a campaign when the costs exceed the revenue. Simple. 

Dynamic variables for data transparency

Many programs support dynamic variables tracking that gives the affiliate data by the hour. There are many affiliates that don’t want to work with programs that can’t update their data more frequently. That is every 24 hours won’t cut it. Without saying the S word, you know, shaving, the idea is trust and transparency as the whole purpose.

How can dynamic variables help for data transparency? Well the idea is that it would require someone to manually edit data every hour if they wanted to manipulate it if you don’t trust your affiliate program. 

Dynamic variables for affiliate networks (sub affiliation)

If you make use of the first variable as a unique click ID, you can either randomize that click or make it static. A crude example would be making the variable a number where every tracking link you give to your sub-affiliates, you’re essentially hard coding the tracking link for them. It is still a dynamic variable tracking link, but one of the variables has a number that is assigned to them by the master affiliate network. 

Now that network can technically create tracking links at scale for their next 50 affiliate signups where every campaign is the revenue of the affiliate. 

Dynamic variables for time stamping

Most programs will give you your affiliate data by the day but not always by the hour. If you use one of the variables and inject a time stamp, you can start to learn more about your audience about the exact time of the day they would be converting. 

Example you could inject simply the time of day or even the year, month, day and time as one of the variables.

Dynamic variables for slot games

If you have slot games and reviews on your site, wouldn’t it be nice to know where those FTDs are coming from?

Dynamic variables will be perfect for this. You could inject the game name with software or simply the URL as part of that variables so when the player deposits to a casino that came from your slot game page, you’ll know exactly where this came from.

Stay tuned for a demo example from Joe Hatch and this time he’ll be doing injecting the following variables:

• Page URL

• Device type

• IP address

In Joe's example of what he posted on LinkedIn and on YouTube was Slots Launch with Pretty Links with Google Tag Manager with Mercury theme.

Dynamic variables vs postbacks, what’s the difference?

I gotta attribute this long section to Joe Hatch whom wrote this. 

What to do next?

One issue that I haven't addressed in this scenario is how you handle cookies that can and will expire. This becomes a race for higher conversions or a scenario to potentially swap in a new link to refresh the cookie.

Follow us because we’ll be publishing more content on the subject including some case studies. Speaking of case studies, we are looking for a few slots affiliates to work with to help them get setup with dynamic variables. 

You can message anymore on our team from Joe Hatch, Darrell Helyar, Lynda Salem or moi. 

We haven't even got started on the types of data visualization we can do with dynamic variables but if you want to know what is possible, you'll definitely want to talk to Lynda Salem about designing this in Tableau.

If you want to try out dynamic variables, you might want to get an account at StatsDrone first and it is a feature we only enable by request.