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The Ultimate Guide to Casino Affiliate Management
Many iGaming operators utilize affiliate management solutions to massively enhance their marketing. It helps casinos develop and maintain productive relationships with their affiliates and get higher returns on their advertising investments.
Affiliate marketing in general is a great way for online casinos to get better results from their promotional campaigns. Saying this, not as many take advantage of an affiliate management solution, which has the potential to vastly expand their reach and increase profits.
But what is casino affiliate management anyway? In this article, we will go through the intricate details of this side of the affiliate marketing sector and explore everything it has to offer. We will also take a look at what important aspects you need to watch out for when looking for a service to work with and how to get started with the solutions of your choice.
Table of Contents
What is casino affiliate marketing?
Casino affiliate marketing involves outsourcing marketing to an affiliate website specializing in online gambling advertising, though not entirely. Affiliates typically have access to marketing tools and data provided by casino affiliate programs, such as banners, press releases, and statistics, all of it created and curated by the operator.
Utilizing the services of an affiliate means that the latter is responsible for posting the materials, usually on their website, social media page, or anywhere else that will get relevant traffic, following guidelines set out by the operator. These guidelines are usually given by the operator’s casino affiliate manager, who will oversee their marketing partners and complete other tasks, like expanding the firm’s affiliate network and maintaining productive relationships with their partners.
Generally, operators expand their affiliate networks themselves by finding marketing firms to work with on the internet. They either partner with affiliate networks or join an iGaming directory, like AffPapa, to help them find affiliates quicker.
In addition, affiliates initiate collaboration with operators by joining their affiliate program and even bringing in more affiliates if the operators provide sub-affiliation opportunities (a referral program, where affiliates receive a set commission for every affiliate referred).
The main advantages of casino affiliate marketing
Casino affiliate marketing presents quite a different experience in comparison to traditional marketing. It has a number of advantages, with two of the biggest ones being flexibility and scalability.
- Flexibility
This one applies to both how and how much an operator advertises. They can decide not only what type of ads to roll out, but also where to put them on an affiliate’s website or platform. This flexibility also extends to payments, which is conveniently the next advantage we are going to explore.
- Payments
Payments are a major upside of the affiliate marketing industry. These types of campaigns have no large upfront costs, massively lowering the barrier to entry for upstart operators, and generally only require payments to be made after the operator has received its traffic. Furthermore, utilizing the most common Revshare, CPA or Hybrid methods, casinos will need to pay proportionally to what they received, ensuring a stable positive value for money. You can learn more about these methods here. Coincidentally, this payment structure contributes to a very low level of risk for the operators, which is conveniently our next topic of discussion.
- Low Risk
As most iGaming affiliates request their payments after they have completed their tasks, they will be getting paid with the funds they generated for the operator through marketing. When using a revenue share model, affiliate marketing becomes even less risky, as there is no chance for the operator to end up in a position where they owe money they don’t have.
- Scalability
The fourth one is pretty self-explanatory, as the operator can create their standard promotional materials and then just distribute them through multiple companies. However, the more affiliates they work with, the harder it is going to be to track each individual firm’s performance. This allows us to segue into our last point of discussion, one of the few disadvantages of affiliate marketing, before we jump into our main topic, iGaming affiliate management.
One of the only disadvantages of casino affiliate marketing
The only sizable disadvantage of casino affiliate marketing is the amount of management required to maintain relationships with lots of affiliates. This will mean that even relatively smaller operators will need to have multiple affiliate managers on staff that work with casino affiliates, answering questions, sending promotional materials and paycheques, and analyzing performance. However, there is a way to solve this annoyance, and that is to outsource these tedious tasks and use a management service. Let’s now explore casino affiliate management solutions in-depth, along with their benefits.
What is a casino affiliate management service?
A casino affiliate management service is a solution that combines the capabilities of skilled iGaming affiliate managers with specialized software that makes it easier for them to track performance and log the telemetry of each affiliate over a period of time. For an operator with ambitious goals, these solutions will be quite handy, as they will be able to massively increase the productivity of their online casino affiliate managers.
The benefits of an online casino affiliate management solution
On top of the advantages of affiliate marketing, casino affiliate management solutions offer a number of additional benefits that make them an excellent choice for managing marketing affiliates. Let’s explore a number of them.
1. Detailed Telemetry
First off, we have detailed telemetry. Most quality affiliate management solutions from reputable providers will offer a thorough reporting system that will let operators track the performance of their affiliates. This is quite useful for gambling firms of all sizes, as even if an operator is working with a few affiliates at most, they can optimize their spending by working with more efficient affiliates.
2. Low Barrier to Entry
Similar to casino affiliate marketing itself, affiliate management services have a very low barrier to entry and allow operators to scale easily. Gambling firms can start with a few affiliates, which will be handled by the service at a relatively affordable price, and scale up when they have the resources to do so.
3. One place to manage all marketing activities.
Casino affiliate management provides operators one place where they can go to manage all of their marketing activities. For operators working with hundreds, or even thousands of partners, this can only be achieved with affiliate management solutions, as even the best affiliate managers can only take care of so many affiliates by themselves. This provides quite a streamlined marketing experience, allowing the operator to focus their resources on delivering a great product for its players.
Thanks to these major benefits, casino affiliate management services are a worthwhile investment for operators of all sizes. For larger operators, they are a no-brainer, while smaller ones will still benefit from these solutions. But what if an online gambling firm works with only one affiliate or even none at all? How would an operator that’s just starting to get its feet wet in the affiliate marketing industry know what benefits may be awaiting them with an iGaming management service?
How to find iGaming affiliate managers?
Employing the help of an iGaming affiliate manager will be beneficial for every operator, no matter the size. Their services will give gambling businesses a taste of what full-fledged management services can do, while not breaking the bank on an unfamiliar feature. Operators can find many great iGaming affiliate managers on various directory websites or pages featuring them, which have a selection of some of the industry’s most experienced professionals that would be more than happy to help them.
Things to look for in an iGaming affiliate management service
Now that we have looked at all the reasons why, let’s take a look at the how. The first step to integrating any service into your workflow is obviously finding the right one. But what do you need to look for in an online casino affiliate management service? There are a couple of things that we will explore.
Industry Contacts
First off is industry contacts. iGaming affiliate managers or management services will require industry contacts to be able to expand the list of affiliates they can work with. This one is especially important if an operator is targeting rapid growth and has plans of targeting the best affiliates in the industry.
Experience
Just like with any other service, having an experienced professional carrying it out is going to deliver better results. An affiliate manager is going to have to communicate with multiple companies about marketing materials, campaigns, results and many other things, which is not the easiest task in the world. Thus, choosing a provider that is more experienced will certainly be worthwhile.
Detailed Reporting
One of the biggest reasons to upgrade an operator to an affiliate management system is to get more detailed reporting on the performance of their marketing associates. This is quite important, as this is the main way a gambling firm can optimize its affiliate marketing spend. Eliminating or de-prioritizing worse-performing partners can sometimes provide quite a sizable bump to the value for money the operator is getting out of their advertising expenses.
Dedicated Managers
While having dedicated managers in an affiliate management service is not a necessity, it is quite a nice thing to have. Having dedicated managers in any relationship involving affiliates can streamline it and make collaboration easier for both sides. In an affiliate management service, operators working with managers who know their quirks and features may even experience some performance benefits. The only downside of having dedicated managers for affiliate management solutions is the additional cost, however, it will be worth it for the vast majority of operators.
Flexibility
Lastly, we have flexibility. A casino affiliate management solution should allow operators as much flexibility as possible, allowing them to change as many little details as they desire. The most common parameters an online gambling business will want to tweak are the placement and the sizing of ads. Most quality management services offer this along with many more customization options.
How to find the best affiliates for online casinos?
One of the most important aspects of affiliate marketing is the affiliates themselves. These companies are the ones that are going to be playing a big role in the marketing of an operator’s brand, so it is important to work with qualified professionals who can guarantee success.
The best way of finding affiliates would be to just work with a casino affiliate manager who has contacts with quality firms. This is another reason why “industry contacts” was mentioned first in the list of things to look for in a management solution.
However, if an operator is just starting out and doesn’t have the resources for that, another great way to find affiliates is on various affiliate directories. We offer such a list on our Best iGaming affiliates page, which we periodically update to provide the most up-to-date information. In any case, after finding affiliates and a management service, the operator is on the final stretch, ready to get started with the solution of their choice.
How to get started with the management service of your choice?
Lastly, after doing extensive research the only thing left to do will be to acquire the desired service. Most affiliate management specialists make this easy, having a simple account system that will allow an operator to get started immediately. For some others, the operator may need to contact the company to get rolled in. In either case, however, this is the easiest part of the whole process. After this step, the gambling business will get to enjoy its vast catalog of affiliate partners who use specified marketing materials to drive traffic to its website.
Wrapping things up
To conclude, casino affiliate management is quite a useful tool with virtually no downsides that can be utilized by operators of varying sizes. It makes the jobs of iGaming affiliate managers a whole lot easier while providing ample expansion opportunities. If you have your own gambling operation that is looking for a marketing boost, definitely give affiliate management services a go and grow your business at pace.
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