A Guest Affiliate Blog Post by Riaan de JagerThere is only one thing more precious to affiliates than traffic and that is keeping close tabs on where that traffic is going and how it is performing.
For this reason, the quality of the affiliate software and its ease of use has become a critical factor for affiliates when monitoring where our best traffic goes. If ‘every click matters’ is your mantra, then choosing partners that enable you to manage your traffic properly is a no-brainer.
There are a number of non-negotiable features when it comes to affiliate software. Let’s look at the top five of them.Non-Negotiable #1: SPEED!I put this first for a simple reason. When you operate large websites with potentially hundreds if not thousands of pages, managing your tracking profiles and campaigns needs to be quick, easy and intuitive. You simply cannot wait even half a minute for tracking links to appear if you are building a site with 1,000 or more pages and you’re wanting to do deep targeting.
I spend an inordinate amount of time making sure we track our clicks properly. Time is of the essence. We have summarily dropped casinos because of their underperforming affiliate programmes.Non-Negotiable #2: Easy Campaign ManagementSetting-up campaigns needs to be easy and you have to be able to adapt the system to your own naming conventions. Cryptic campaign identifiers are your greatest enemy here. It takes a lot of discipline to spend the time upfront to get this right and the affiliate software must be flexible. You cannot draw meaningful reports if you don’t get this right.Non-Negotiable #3: Managing Your Conversion FunnelAt the very least, we expect reports that allow us to collate conversion data to a campaign and sub-campaign level so that we can use this data when comparing programmes. Revenue earned and conversion numbers alone are only one part of the full picture and you should be able to extract reports that allow you to compare programmes side by side over more than one month. Income Access is a good example of an affiliate software platform that makes this process easy.Non-Negotiable #4: Player-Level ReportingThe absence of player-level reporting for many affiliate programmes is common and is not related to shortcomings in the affiliate software itself. However, I have a hard time trusting a programme that does not provide player reports and cannot help but think that they are trying to hide something.
How does one measure actual programme performance without keeping track of your player retention? It’s easy to ignore retention when you are lucky enough to land a few big players, but you really have to look beyond your earnings to know which programmes really perform. Once again, Income Access helps us to do this effectively.Non-Negotiable #5: CommunicationYou might think that this is an odd requirement, but we all miss emails. I really like to fact that with the Income Access platform, important status messages and programme updates are displayed when I log in. That way I know when a bonus has changed, or terms and conditions have been updated. The affiliate software is an important channel in keeping up communication with affiliates.
There are many other important features, but for us these five are the most critical. I breathe a sigh of relief every time I log into a new programme and am greeted with the familiar Income Access menu down the left hand side of the dashboard. In our business, we consider the Income Access platform a real asset in managing our performance, and so will you if you make use of its rich feature set.About Riaan de JagerRiaan has been an affiliate for longer than he cares to remember (but more than 15 years if you have to ask). His company operates websites like https://www.puremicrogaming.com and many other niche sites that aim to give a balanced view and enable players to make informed decisions. Riaan was born in South Africa but currently calls Australia home.
