If anyone thinks an affiliate network in gambling is anything like an affiliate network in e-commerce or sweepstakes — you’re badly mistaken. These are fundamentally different businesses, different partners, different problems. Let’s take a look at how to find offers and attract affiliates the right way.
Affiliate networks are usually started by people who already have some personal experience in traffic arbitrage and understand a particular vertical. So naturally, they roll the network out in the niche where they’ve got contacts and a reputation. But a business is often started by people with minimal knowledge of arbitrage, or by those who are knee-deep in several verticals at once. How do they settle on a niche for their future business? In this series of articles, we’ll break down what makes each vertical different when it comes to building an affiliate network.
Finding Offers
Finding offers in gambling is as easy as it gets. Almost every casino has an “Affiliates” section on its site, where you can quickly find the right contact to reach out to.
But this is also where one of the problems for gambling affiliate networks grows from. If a direct advertiser’s contact is that easy to get, why would affiliates pay a commission to a network at all? We’ll get to that in one of the sections below.
How do you figure out which offers to plug in first? There are several approaches:
- Create accounts with your competitors and ask their managers which offers they recommend. Do this for every GEO. Network managers always push the offers that convert relatively well while still letting them pocket a good commission.
- Pay attention to which offers new clients ask for.
- Monitor the chats to see which offers are popular right now.
- Go to conferences. They’re a bottomless source of useful contacts that really help with building and growing the business. But be careful: conferences are full of new advertisers whose reliability you can’t be sure of. Working with newcomers on RevShare is very dangerous.
There’s no shortage of advertisers ready to rip you off. It’s worth keeping good contacts with colleagues and asking their opinion on any new advertiser you find. And you absolutely have to check the advertiser blacklists.
Finding Affiliates
This part is also fairly easy to solve in gambling, because the vertical is hugely popular, especially with newcomers. Mid-size and large players work either with direct advertisers or with networks that can offer high payouts. So an affiliate network that wants to focus on teams has to think from day one about how it’s going to offer payouts at least as good as the advertiser’s. There are a couple of approaches here:
- Show good quality on small volumes and negotiate above-market payouts as volume grows.
- Budget for running at a loss. Give teams the best terms. That way you can get both the teams and the advertisers hooked, since the advertisers are getting large volumes of quality traffic. On the back of that, you can get new terms out of the advertiser. But it’s a risky approach, and only networks with a lot of investment money available for the project can afford it.
That said, newcomers can generate good profit too. For that, you need to provide them with quality infrastructure and help them grow. You’ll need:
- Competent support and affiliate managers. Some of them need to have arbitrage experience, so they can answer the questions that never stop coming.
- Plenty of staff, both in the support department and among the affiliate managers. Newcomers have a lot of questions and problems. So they’ll keep your staff busy, and that staff needs to give fast, specific, useful answers.
- Your own knowledge base and training for affiliates. Either free, or cheap with quality that’s worth more than the price. But I’d advise making it free: that approach pays off tenfold.
Also, to attract affiliates with any volume of traffic, a network needs to hand out free apps or domains for PWAs. That’s the market norm.
The only ones who can skip this are either old affiliate networks with a big client base, or affiliate programs with exclusive fresh offers — the kind people will run traffic to even if support sends affiliates packing with a cheerful four-letter word.
By the way, in AlterCPA Pro you can build app rental right into the network’s affiliate dashboard. For example, the TD Apps integration installs as a hack, and the affiliate picks an app themselves and submits a request to have it added to their ad accounts.
Technically, finding affiliates works the same in every vertical. But I’m going to spell it out in every article anyway. The ways:
- Spam in chats and DMs. Sounds awful, but it works. I’m as shocked as you are.
- Content marketing. The long road, but the most effective one. A network that puts out useful, interesting content is buying attention and goodwill. When will that person come to run traffic with you? Maybe right away, maybe a year from now. But they’ll definitely either come themselves or recommend you to people they know. It’s a way to build yourself a reputation that will keep bringing in clients forever.
- Branding, launching targeted ads, advertising in niche Telegram channels.
A Network’s Value to Affiliates and Advertisers
For an affiliate network to succeed, it has to be useful to the parts of the market it brings together. That means both advertisers and affiliates. If both sides enjoy working with the company, it’ll do just fine.
Advertisers need:
- Big traffic volumes.
- Traffic quality.
That’s it. If an affiliate network can deliver those two things, you can squeeze the advertiser really hard on terms. Volume is solved by finding affiliates, which we covered above. And keeping quality up takes analytics of your own. I’ve already covered that on my blog: How an Affiliate Network Can Catch Fraudsters.
Affiliates need:
- A payout guarantee. This is a network’s single most important value. It’s the one factor that keeps even large teams — the ones that could easily go straight to the advertiser — running traffic through affiliate networks. If an affiliate ran their traffic honestly and the advertiser refuses to pay for it, for whatever reason, the network is obligated to pay out. Otherwise its value is purely decorative, and it has no right to take a commission above 2%. And that’s while networks usually set their margin at around 30%.
- A wide selection of interesting offers for different GEOs and traffic sources.
- Infrastructure. Exactly what an affiliate needs from their gambling tools is broken down in detail in Top 9 Features of the Ideal Gambling Tracker.
- Fast, professional support and affiliate managers.
An affiliate running traffic through a network needs to feel comfortable and safe. Then they’ll keep running traffic through it forever.
Conclusion
Gambling is a very good vertical for building a high-margin affiliate network. Yes, the competition is fierce, but there are also plenty of advertisers and affiliates, and there are more of them every day. The niche already has all the hype it needs, so a network doesn’t have to go looking for people and talk them into running gambling specifically: they’re already up for it.
In gambling, it’s critically important that the network acts as a guarantor. It’s just as important to maintain an astronomically high level of service if you want to grab a serious share of the market.