Key Affiliate Software Features That Impact Operator Performance: Affilka Case Study

Afflika is a major iGaming-specific affiliate management software for casino and sportsbook operators. Over time, it was decided to separate the two products and develop the Affilka service platform independently of SOFTSWISS. Affilka was created by the same team that developed SOFTSWISS’s flagship product, the casino platform. SOFTSWISS’s unique technological developments, combined with its extensive experience in the iGaming industry, laid a strong foundation for the new product. With 260+ clients (including some big names, like BC. Game and Bitstarz) and over 15 years of experience in the field, Affilka is a big deal. What they do is provide a set of excellent practical features and management tools that can seriously improve most affiliate programs.

By using a proper set of tools, you can drastically reduce retention and churn risk while also improving the lifetime value (LTV) of your affiliates and the eventual return on investment (ROI). You do it by properly automating most aspects of the affiliate pipeline that have to do with scaling this business. The payouts, for instance, must be stable, predictable, and backed up by transparent, accurate commissions – that’s how you keep a client, but let us show you exactly how it works, case by case.

Performance Factors in Affiliate Software

Performance in this line of work has much to do with making it easier for affiliates to scale their businesses, which, in turn, increases their average LTV. It’s a mutually beneficial arrangement, where their profitability drives yours. And there are several key factors that can ensure your affiliates can stay for longer and make money for both of you:

• Payout stability & speed. This scheme must be transparent and predictable, because if an affiliate can receive their pay on time in precisely the amount they expect, they can quickly reinvest that money and continue their trade uninterrupted.
• Reporting quality. This has to do with campaign information, including the traffic source, GEOs, cost, and creatives associated with each new player. You can’t really make scaled-up decisions without this data.
• S2S postbacks. Automated postbacks can inform the affiliates of the new players and their characteristics soon after they arrive. This can improve the speed of decision-making, the accuracy of those decisions, and overall effectiveness.
• Incentive control. With proper software, you can include various performance-based rewards for your affiliates, like extra commission for big first deposits. Flexibility in this regard makes sure affiliates earn their exact deserved share.
• Media control. Manage banners, promo texts, logos, email templates, and creatives for different purposes to make it easier for affiliates to attract traffic, be they a SEO portal or a content creator.
• Integration speed. The onboarding process must be as streamlined as possible. Speedy activation eliminates much of the initial churn right away.
• Partner-network expansion. A proper network of diverse agents, such as streamers, review portals, SEO affiliate websites, is important for increasing your reach.
• Support. Proper customer service toward affiliates can improve their results, but making this partnership more personal can also increase their LTV.

Flexible Commissions Constructor

The commissions must be flexible to account for all the different factors in affiliate activity. Just installing CPA, RevShare, and Hybrid options doesn’t cut it – we can and should go deeper. Rewards for valuable traffic, special rules for countries, traffic sources, exclusions, and other provisions are all great for optimizing your commission plan. You can pay justly for valuable traffic, increasing retention for effective affiliates. At the same time, it’s never valid to pay for low-value traffic.

The Affilka commission builder has a lot of tools that can help you make the payout system more nuanced:

• Reward algorithms create a fluid system in which affiliate payouts are calculated based on reaching important player milestones, such as FTD amount, total deposit amount, and bet sum – you can set the tiers yourself, creating visible markers for your partners.
• GEO-specific rules let you set higher or lower commissions for traffic from certain countries, depending on what traffic you require.
• Player exclusions let you detract certain categories of users from the payout pool, should they meet certain qualifications, like being blocked, a duplicate, and so forth.
• Negative carryover settings let you define conditions for how much debt you want to retain, ignore, or forgive into the new period for given affiliates.

Impact

Optimizing the commission plan means the payouts will be much more performance-based. Affiliates that drive in valuable traffic are well-compensated, while you also don’t overpay for less valuable leads. And that helps your business protect its margin, increasing the overall ROI. This aligns with all three big commission plans, which may be more or less favorable depending on a given affiliate’s strategy. Fortunately, with Affilka, you can reward any initiative with a well-tailored commission plan meant specifically for that affiliate.

Built-In Payment Processing

Delayed payments are likely among the biggest causes of affiliate churn you could imagine. After all, they seek a beneficial arrangement, and you can never create a scalable business if you can’t even plan your finances due to the unwieldiness of the affiliate software. Affilka solves this problem in two ways.

Firstly, they actually have payment providers integrated into their system. Neteller, Skrill, crypto, and bank transfers (among others) are all processed through the back office. It eliminates payment delay, making transactions much more trackable and convenient. You don’t have to export invoices elsewhere – it all happens right there, automatically.

Secondly, they have an interactive, meticulous payout schedule. This helps affiliates immensely, as they can change their payout frequency (weekly, biweekly, monthly), monitor the past and future bills with precision, see what they’ll be owed, and use the convenient dashboard in other ways. It’s a transparent approach, which increases the LTV factor dramatically.

Impact

A healthy financial ecosystem is a basic need for all affiliates. Delayed payments, lack of any transparency, and general lack of control are all great methods of increasing churn. Affilka also lets companies add non-integrated payment providers themselves. There is a great API that lets you hammer out all the financial aspects of the business, such as what currencies to accept, automating your payouts, and more.

It all comes down to transparency and customer satisfaction. Making sure these aspects are pristine when it comes to money is a good way to build healthy affiliate partnerships. Churn goes down, retention goes way up.

Analytics and Reporting

Affiliates must stay constantly informed of the results of their work – the fresher the information, the better. It’s particularly important for arbitrageurs and media buyers, who need new data all the time to keep their business tenable. And their happiness means your happiness, meaning you must keep them posted. Which is what postbacks are all about, actually.

A server-to-server (S2S) postback is a package of information sent from the operator’s database to the affiliate’s system with all the details about the new traffic that is necessary for this affiliate. The postbacks are: A) automated, updating every several minutes; B) full of details on the user who ended up clicking the tracking link. The affiliate can decide what these details are, but you can also configure them yourself for different affiliate categories.

This information can contain campaign ID, landing page ID, creatives used, GEO, but also actions on the website – such as whether they registered, how much they deposited, and so on. After that, it’s up to the affiliate to make necessary adjustments to their strategy. And depending on what they receive and how they do it, they may drive their affiliate strategy to better results or not.

Impact

The constant information flow is vital for all types of affiliates. The operator’s job is to provide as many necessary, relevant details as possible in as timely a manner as needed. It’s also their job to make it clear that postbacks can actually be configured to present a more useful picture to a particular type of affiliate without burdening them with unwanted info.

Otherwise, they can’t make adjustments fast enough, which may compromise their scaling speed and your ROI. For instance, here’s how different they can be in this regard:

Case #1 – SEO Affiliate

An online casino comparison portal (SEO affiliate) targets Colombian users, as does the operator. They have a CPA plan, meaning they count on users to register and make the first deposit, as it brings the most commission to them. For each user, they receive the link’s ID, user GEO, brand ID, registration, FTD, and deposit sum info. They also receive the info about the commission they received from all this.

As a result, they can see which of their materials brought over the most users, how many of them completed a qualifying action, and how many came from the wrong GEO. They can then adjust the weaker materials to reduce the number of unwanted visitors, which don’t earn them much money.

In this way, they conduct an optimization loop to increase their earnings-per-click (EPC) by reducing non-target clickers.

Case #2 – PPC Affiliate

A paid traffic partner buys ad spots through Google Ads specifically for Serbian, Croatian, and Bosnian users, the operator targets the EU region. The commission plan is RevShare. The operator chooses to pay the regular commission for Croatian clicks and 70% for BiH and RS clicks. It’s thus more profitable for the affiliate to favor only Croatian users, even though the cost is higher, while the volume is lower. The affiliate uses operator-issued banners in Serbo-Croatian but decides to favor Croatian wordforms in the ad title.

As such, they request that their postbacks include GEO, click timestamp, ad ID, and information on all the website actions, as well as their end commission for each user. This way, they can monitor the effectiveness of their language tactic, while also monitoring whether investing in lower-cost and lower-return RS and BiH users is worth it in the long run.

Likewise, the PPC approach requires this information for future bid adjustments in relation to lower-cost users.

Case #3 – Arbitrage Affiliate

Arbitrageurs require constant feedback at all times, they are particularly sensitive to it. This exact arbitrage affiliate buys clicks from several SEO portals, as well as content creators. They need to know if the money they spend will be more than covered by the revenue. They go for a CPA + Hybrid approach, but request that the operator send them the whole spectrum of details, including click ID, ad ID, creatives used, the link’s page, and all other associated data. They also receive the information about the user’s activity on the website in its entirety.

Every few postbacks, they calculate if the ROI per this campaign is sufficient and arrange suitable adjustments right away, making decisions in real time. For this sort of affiliate, pauses between postbacks should be minimal.

User Experience and Management

Proper user experience is paramount for affiliate retention, increasing their scaling and LTV. The UX covers all the aspects of the user interactions with the operator – the onboarding, working with creatives, viewing their progress, and communication. It must be swift, comprehensive, and precise.

The dashboard should allow the user to access all the information that may affect their business right away. Affilka provides an interface, but it’s up to you to make it suitable for continued operation by configuring all the parameters accurately. It’s also the operator’s critical task to provide guidance through the system, provide support, and necessary resources (guides, media, and such).

Affilka also makes it easier for operators to manage their affiliates by categorizing them, gathering all the data on them in one place, and letting operators assign managers to different categories of affiliates or tasks. Verifying, blocking, or communicating with affiliates can and should be delegated to specific professionals for a more optimal experience for everyone.

Impact

A highly valuable affiliate may be within the operator’s reach, but it’s impossible to let them reach their full potential without proper guidance. It also helps when the dashboard is easily navigable and isn’t cluttered with pointless info.

For instance, let’s imagine what it’s like for both parties when a potential ROI-booster affiliate arrives at the premises, and it falls to the UX pipeline to encourage them along the way. It can always go either way.

Summary

Flexible commissions, on-time payments, proper performance feedback, and a transparent user experience are all features that you must have covered as an operator. If you don’t, you can make it harder for your affiliates to scale their businesses or churn them altogether. In turn, this decreases your revenue and earns you no LTV customers, which is important for your long-term prosperity.

Retention is your bread and butter, which means that it’s no longer sustainable to be passive around your affiliates – you must be helpful and thoughtful at every turn. Affilka is a good example of a modern software provider, which makes it possible for both affiliates and operators to conduct their businesses sustainably and stress-free. It’s great for striking mutually beneficial deals, which is what affiliate marketing is all about, in the end.