Great if you know how to grow it!
Recently I was discussing the relationship between affiliates and operators. The question was: what does each party care about.
I then sent them a long-ish email and I thought I’d post and amended version for you.
One important thing to consider when you read this : Affiliates exist because of the deficiencies in the operators marketing ‘machine’
Smart operators are always interested in learning from successful affiliates.
What affiliates care about when they are looking at choosing an operator?
Affiliate point of view:
- Often the only way they can get traffic is by SE(and some other routes), they want operators who are weak with SEO
- Better deals i.e. ultimately affiliates care about lifetime value since that translates into income spreading along the marketing ‘foodchain’
- Rev share
- Bonuses
- Strong conversions
- Operator branding is strong
- Landing pages and messaging is strong
- Good payment systems in place users can fund easily
- Better customer retention on the part of the operator, life time values can increase and the increased ££ share can be passed on the affiliates
- Exclusivity with an affiliate i.e.
- a unique deal for a given affiliate
- better than usual bonus for the user for the affiliate sites
- Back end affiliate management system
- Needs to be easy to use
- Reliable
- Comprehensive information dashboard that allows affiliates to
- Understand betting patterns of the users
- Churn rate of the users
- Lifetime value
- In fact any metric is good since the affiliate will dig out the information they need.
What operators care about when picking the right affiliates:
- They want the right customers in volume!
- Better converting customers
- Good lifetime values
- Less cost of acquisition
- ‘Low maintenance’ users i.e. not using customer services often
- What they want in affiliates
- Low maintenance i.e. affiliate managers don’t need twork with affiliates often
- Low cost i.e. the lower the affiliate spend the better, assuming higher numbers of good new users.
- Affiliate management systems to be flexible, cheap and easy to run
- Fewer affiliate managers
- Affiliates to be really flexible when it comes taking new marketing assets i.e. new banners.
- They want traffic from SEO, the better they are at SEO the less reliant they are on affiliates
Assuming the previous points, the next question is what operators would ask about affiliate marketing practices.
- Why are affiliates outranking the operators
- What SEO are they using
- How they can do it for a fraction of the cost of an operator (assuming affiliate budgets are tiny)
- What technology affiliates use that operators could take on board.
- On PPC
- Why are affiliates out converting operators?
- How do they do ‘blackhat PPC’
- How can operators fight this (if they are loosing share against affiliates)
- What would persuade affiliates join an operator programme?
- How to find good affiliates and get your offer right 1st time. (varies from operator toperator – a lot! )
- What is their online profile i.e. what does a great affiliate site look like?
- What metrics should you use tidentify them?
- What tools do you need find them
- Variations on what an operator wants from an affiliate
- Operator strategies and finding the right affiliates for their requirements.
- Needs large volumes of users to increase liquidity
- Needs large volumes of low acquisition cost users to up sell later with CRM
- Small volumes of high value users
- How do you recruit affiliates in scale
- How do you manage the ‘long tail’
There are a lot of questions here, but as you know – good answers come from good questions!
