Improving affiliate program software

I’m going to start this newsletter the same way I’m going to end it: I’m asking you to leave your comments, replies or DMs on how you think affiliate software could make life better for operators, affiliates and the affiliate software platforms.

I think affiliate program software could be made to be a lot better. It isn’t to say that what we have today isn’t good.

I just think that some convos about what could be improved are happening but they are not being written down.

This philosophy is what made me create the Affiliate BI podcast to take these private convos and make them public. I’m doing the same with this newsletter but taking some of my own personal ideas and blending it with ideas and info I get from talking to other people and interviewing them too.

FYI, the StatsDrone Awards are still happening and you can select your favourite affiliate software AND vote for the best affiliate dashboard. Vote here now!

Quick shoutout to StatsDrone and FTDx as our supporters. DM me if you want to support this newsletter too!

Enough with the stories, it is time for the 8 course meal I’m about to dish up. If there is one thing I hope to achieve with this newsletter is to get a fraction of the chatter that the StatsDrone ICE video we did.

Payments for affiliates

I’m probably going to suggest something that I think most people are not expecting to read. I know this from speaking with quite a few CFOs at various iGaming affiliate companies.

Pain: Tracking which affiliate program paid you is problematic.

Are there any solutions to this problem? I think so. One we are aiming to work on with StatsDrone but the other would require a bit of help from the affiliate platforms.

Request: I’d like to have an API that would send me info when an affiliate program paid me. I’d like to know the payment amount, currency, method and a few other meta data points to go with it.

If the programs would send notifications for payments rather than stuff them into reports, it would make it easier to know that either a payment was sent and/or completed. You’d make the finance departments a little happier by building this out.

Now it doesn’t solve the full problem but it would make life easier. If this existed, we would definitely include the API feed so we could give this back to affiliates inside the StatsDrone app. Affiliates can always send invoices using our app but it would be heavy to solve some of the payments paid that affiliates have.

Balance

Some affiliate programs show the account balance and this is a signal that money is likely owed to the affiliate. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve put in an account in StatsDrone and noticed the balance and revenue spike up to like $20k out of nowhere.

I’m glad we have the account balance feature but we get this mainly through scraping. Very few affiliate platforms will provide the account balance as an API end point.

We have something we are working on at StatsDrone that will make payments a little bit easier but that is more for investors to know and our customers to find out when it is launched.

Best practices tips for payment reconciliation for affiliates

The concept I’ll share I know is something other people have thought about especially in the payments space. My idea comes from wishing I had multiple bank accounts to assign unique banking accounts to assign 1 bank account per affiliate program.

There are numerous banking solutions on the market that will allow you to create hundreds of IBANs. If you were able to use one of these banking platforms, you could assign an IBAN per affiliate program and know when you’ve been paid by looking at your banking transactions.

The same concept in theory can apply to ewallets as well as cryptocurrencies. If you’re accepting payments with crypto like Bitcoin, ETH or USDT, then by having a different and unique receive address per payment, you can in theory make your life a bit easier for following and tracing payments.

Security

For as long as I can remember in talking to affiliates, the stories of affiliates having their accounts compromised with payment methods updated just still don’t go away.

So is security the responsibility of the affiliate, the affiliate program or the affiliate platform itself?

I think when it comes to accountability, I think the answer is all 3.

Pain: Sometimes affiliates have their accounts compromised and payment methods changed.

I’ll start first by explaining how an affiliate program software could do some of the heavy lifting in saving affiliates the brutal pain of having their payments stolen.

Request: Affiliates should have some security data included in their API to include login history, changes in any account related info and changes in any payment methods. One more request would be to potentially limit device or IP restrictions for accessing an account.

How can affiliate programs and affiliate managers help with security?

When any account info is changed, what any affiliate manager should do is reach out to the affiliate to confirm the changes are legit.

How affiliates can stay on top of their security

The beauty of StatsDrone is that it helps you get your data once a day to stop you from logging into your accounts and storing your data. With that said, it is still not a bad idea for an account manager to login to the main accounts that generate the most revenue and double check account and payment info.

I could go on about how 2FA should be enabled and all of that jazz but I think some security best practices are never bad for any affiliate to think about. That is, using strong passwords and perhaps considering changing passwords more than once a year.

I think the reality is that most of the people I know in iGaming likely don’t have any training in security. I know I don’t and I’m perhaps self taught at best.

Having your payments stolen is the worst type of revenue leak that could ever happen. I’d really like all the top platforms to address these concerns and find ways of building more secure systems that protect affiliate payments.

Affiliate software that will adopt these best practices will get this highlighted as a standout feature and bravo for the ones that already have this built into their platform.

Password management for affiliates

I’ll keep this short but I want to mention this. Quite a few affiliates use password manager tools. Without calling out any of the tools in question, some of them have had repeated breaches which makes me very hesitant on recommending them.

With that said, I think some of them potentially offer good solutions to manage passwords in a single place and have some extra security benefits.

Use these at your own risk.

API

We have better coverage of getting data for affiliates through API in lieu of scraping. API in theory should be a more secure system. It is 2025 and there is no excuse for any program to not have API for affiliates to get their data. In particular I’m looking at the proprietary affiliate programs where they do their own affiliate program software.

Pain: If someone gains access to your API key, how can you revoke it or create a new one?

Request: can API data be revoked easily and can we monitor usage of API data?

I think there is a lot that is misunderstood when it comes to API.

What questions I have is that I know affiliate managers could see an affiliate’s data but I don’t know if they should have access to the actual APIs themselves.

At StatsDrone, we’ve seen so many variations of API and I think proprietary programs can create their APIs in so many ways including the popular affiliate platforms, it is hard to know what standards exist.

I’d like to think of an API key as something like a password. How often are they changing? Can they be reset? What if a former employee had access to all of these API keys, would thy

Deal management

Short story and I won’t mention the person’s name, the affiliate company, the affiliate program and affiliate platform this happened on.

My friend told me he just got the account manager job at a decent sized affiliate company. He had no record of the deals from a specific program and when he went into the backend, all the history deals were listed. However they were listed as text only with zero indication of which deal was active.

Amazing right?

Pain: Not all affiliate program software have the existing deals listed in the backend.

I know a few affiliate platforms where the deal is just text.

One of the common complaints we hear from customers is that despite them keeping detailed records of their deals, they gotta reconcile this once a month to ensure the program is honouring the deal.

So what’s the deal?

• Flat fees

• Exclusive revenue share

• Exclusive CPA

• Hybrid deals

Request: I’d love to have the deal info standardized in some manner and to have this info available as an API. I’d like this data to not be a text field that is perhaps disconnected to the backend. Make this available as real data and have affiliates be able to notice the changes of this as well.

Now if any platform starts to make the deals more standardized and provides this as an API endpoint, we could feed it directly into StatsDrone.

I think affiliates would celebrate this. If you’re an account manager reading this, don’t be shy to share if this would be impactful or not. Otherwise it is just a guess for me but this is what we at StatsDrone are hearing in our discovery calls.

Deal CRM

Did you know that we have flat fees management and a deal CRM built into StatsDrone? For now this is the ability for you as the affiliate to manage your deals and not have it in another spreadsheet.

I’d like to see a future where the deals you’ve negotiated with your affiliate manager are pushed into StatsDrone.

For the affiliate platforms reading this, if you have this or have it in your pipeline, let us know!

Insertion orders and contracts

IOs and contracts could technically be extensions of the deals and deal management but I wanted to follow it up with its own section.

We are now moving into a weird territory that combines CRM with inventory management. To my knowledge, I don’t think there is any central system that makes this easy for both affiliate managers and affiliates.

At StatsDrone, we don’t quite have inventory management yet and I have no idea if affiliate managers have this documented in any way. Perhaps this is a territory that could involve little standardization other than pure documentation.

Pain: contracts and insertion orders don’t seem to have any standardization of the data and quite often these items can exist in emails but not as a properly stored shared document.

I think quite often, these contracts can be done over Skype, LinkedIn and email. Maybe the docs themselves are put into Dropbox but it is up to the affiliate to organize all their insertion orders and contracts in a single place.

I know this can be set up in a CRM like Monday but how many affiliates have the time to set this up?

Request: to create some meta data around inventory management, insertion orders and contracts and perhaps tie this in with deals and invoices.

I’m confident we can put this info into StatsDrone and we likely will try to build some system that makes it easier.

Invoices

Ok so insertion orders and contracts are things you do that hopefully should lead to invoices.

Pain: invoices sent by affiliates are often not documented in the affiliate program backend.

Request: Just like the contracts and insertion orders, we should have a documented list of invoices that were sent. If we have them on the side of StatsDrone being issued, it would be nice to see and access this in some form in return.

Many affiliate managers seem to lose their own documents and I think documents is not quite the responsibility of any affiliate program software. I am tired of sending invoices and getting no response or sometimes being asked for them again when they were sent previously.

Ok time to pivot into something else as we spent enough time dealing with finance and legal. Time to get deep into tracking technology.

Tracking links

Here is an odd request we’ve had at StatsDrone.

• Can StatsDrone go inside our account and get all our tracking links?

• Can StatsDrone create a whole bunch of new tracking links for us?

In theory, we could make this a possibility but the truth is, we want to move away from a login focused system to one where StatsDrone just focuses on API.

To my knowledge, I know ReferOn will manually give you a large batch of pre-defined tracking links but I don’t know who doesn't do this as a service other than by using dynamic variables. 

PSA: if your software has the ability to have a tracking link available but no deal applied, I don’t think the links should be presented in the backend in the first place. Having virtually dead tracking links seems a bit unethical to me to even make it such a thing.

If 0% or 10% revenue share is being applied to a tracking link, make it obvious this is happening in the first place.

Marketing data

If you want all the brands and bonuses offered by a casino or iGaming operator, you’ll have to curate this yourself. Quite often, this data is with the operator but they don’t give this as a data source for their affiliate partners.

Pain: How would any affiliate know if any data points have changed on a brand like added or removed payment methods or changes in any bonuses? 

Request: Offer all the marketing data as an API service where affiliates can know instantly when something was changed. 

Some affiliate programs do this for their affiliates but it is rare and the data is also not standardized. 

Adtech

Adtech usually gets people excited but I don’t know if this is something that can be solved by a single operator but maybe an affiliate platform could start this off. 

Pain: Banners are basically obsolete and any adtech given out by an operator is nearly impossible to use with 5 other brands from different software. 

Request: Marketing data as a service would perhaps bridge the gap in adtech. 

Affiliates might not want to use the adtech provided by a single program but maybe if this was combined at the platform level, it could have an impact. Imagine having a widget of free spins filtered by GEOs from all MyAffiliates platforms, a newest casino widget from ReferOn, live odds widgets with multiple brands from PartnerMatrix or retention offers on any brand with RavenTrack.

KYC

The best way to ruin an affiliate program is to have brutal KYC protocols that take months to solve. Darrell Helyar often will call this the sales prevention department.

Pain: Keeping track of KYC docs and knowing which programs have received them, is nearly impossible. 

Request: I don’t know who’s going to solve this but maybe there can be some documentation inside the backend showing what KYC was sent, when it was sent and when it was approved. 

I’m tired of affiliate managers asking for KYC when it was sent weeks ago and their followup answer is they can’t find it. 

Personally I’d be happy if a company like the Department of Trust was a custodian of KYC. What do you think Charles Cohen and Michael Byrne?

Sub-affiliation

I think affiliate networks, aka sub-affiliation, is going to be an important future in iGaming and all of affiliate marketing. I wrote about this in detail in the Affiliate Network 2.0 article. 

Pain: Not all platforms are built to power other affiliate networks. 

Request: There needs to be more native tools that can power affiliate networks with ease. Data aggregation is one part of the problem but thankfully StatsDrone does an amazing job at that.

Some affiliate networks create a separate account to manage your profile while others will simply assign you a tracking link. The cumbersome part of the setup is that with a tracking link, the operator must apply separate logic to the details and treat a series of tracking links as if it was an account. 

Speaking of sub-affiliation, a network has to deal with compliance and KYC. This is where adtech solutions and perhaps KYC solutions could solve these pain points. 

Data visualization

When I took Kevin Hartman's data visualization course in 2022, I got a chance to ask him what he thought about some of the dashboards that were standard in affiliate marketing. 

This guy worked at Google for 10 years and held the Chief Analytics Strategist position. He’s been building dashboards for a long time.

I asked if he thought these dashboards could be better and without tearing them down, he said absolutely. 

Pain: There is a lack of insightful data viz in many affiliate programs. 

Request: Let’s see some new dashboards and help affiliates by giving them more insights into their data. 

Just a reminder that you can vote for the Best Affiliate Dashboard in the StatsDrone Awards. If you want to see better dashboards, let this award be what encourages companies to work to build a better dashboard. 

I do think tools like Routy and Voonix are doing some amazing work in data vizualization and I think everyone in affiliate marketing can learn from each other and push each other to do better work. 

Business Intelligence

By default, any affiliate program platform I would consider to be a BI platform in some capacity. 

Pain: Much like data viz, there are not a lot of BI tools that are provided with any platform. 

Request: We need more BI tools built inside of programs

I know when PartnerMatrix acquired DeepCI and rebranded it to PartnerMatrix Intelligence, this was an interesting step. I don’t know these tools are natively available to affiliates yet but this is certainly an advantage for the affiliate manager to have access to these tools. 

This is why we added Lynda Salem to our team to help us with BI and dashboards. We simply want to get better at data viz.

Feedback wanted

I publish this newsletter in a few places so wherever it is, please leave your feedback by leaving a comment, replying if it is in Beehiiv or send me a DM on LinkedIn.

If you want to see something change in affiliate marketing, this is where your voice might have an impact.

Don’t be shy. You know I’m not lol so you got nothing to lose and a lot more to gain.