Why Click ID level tracking is the only way for iGaming affiliates

Last week, I got the chance to meet up with Armin Aganovic 🕸️ a few times in Montreal. The last time was for a coffee and he talked about how every interaction with a player should be treated with the highest care.

It is a rare sentiment I hear from operators or affiliates and I’d say unfortunately very rare from affiliates. 

We also discussed how it’s more effective to focus on doubling the conversion rate of a click rather than simply increasing the number of clicks.

Of course, Changelog came up as well as how we can help affiliates optimize their business.

Quick shoutout to newsletter sponsors of StatsDrone and FTDx. PS also join the newsletter on Beehiiv as well.

It was through these discussions about click ID level tracking that I realized that this technology needs to be in the hands of every iGaming affiliate.

It might be something that is even important in all niches within affiliate marketing. Of course, when you are dealing with tracking links, recurring revenue combined with winning and losing players, a click is not just a click anymore.

So if Armin is right that all players should be treated like a VIP and knowing the value of a player is important, then we need to know what every player is worth.

Dynamic variables to segment your players to achieve Lifetime Value (LTV)

If everyone could isolate every player and assign an ID for them in your reports, you would have the best KPI you could achieve: LTV.

The player Lifetime Value (LTV) KPI would be invaluable to the entire affiliate business.

One of the first trends that should come to life would be the average deposit value and the average lifespan of players at every operator. 

Optimizing revenue by selecting the right brands

Once you realize which brands might be doing ok in the revenue department but should be one of your best affiliate programs, that’s your cue to further optimize your affiliate strategy.

When you have the LTV data, that is a useful KPI to know which brands deserve more traffic and which ones need improvement. 

How to block injection of winning players

One topic that isn’t openly discussed in the affiliate marketing industry—particularly in iGaming—is shaving and how it occurs.

Without naming names, I’ve had conversations with some affiliates where they said they knew the last few days of the month would make them nervous.

They expected that some programs would magically have winning players appear in their reports wiping out a whole month’s worth of revenue.

I can tell you that when I used to run affiliate sites, the last few days of the month were always nerve wracking. I’d watch the numbers of the better performing programs and hoped they didn’t get wiped out by a winning player that I didn’t know if it existed or not.

So how could creating a unique click ID for your players stop this behaviour?

It isn’t a guarantee it would stop it but if the operator wanted to inject a winning player, they would need to manually do this process and it might be challenging.

If you are an affiliate that has a newsletter and you were very technically advanced in your link management tools, you could know if and when a link was issued to a player.

If the operator doesn’t understand how you issue tracking links, it becomes much harder for them to inject a fabricated winning player.

How dataviz can help identify patterns

If any of your affiliate programs were manipulating data by adding winning players, with some dataviz and basic statistical analysis, I could determine the odds that any of your affiliate programs are adding winning players to your accounts. 

One of the first ways to detect this and this is something any affiliate can do manually on their own, visualize your daily revenue across all your affiliate programs. If you have been recording your data for the last 5 years, then you can even do this analysis on the past 5 years too. 

If you want help building bespoke data visualization, we can help do this in either Tableau or Looker Studio. 

Revenue Audit

If you want a revenue audit to identify optimization opportunities—or detect possible shaving—send me a DM.