Assisting businesses in monetising more efficiently by “simply knowing more” may sound, and read, that a straightforward task, but that, in its most basic form, is that key challenge being faced by Routy on a day-to-day basis.
The software aimed at affiliates aims to help company’s see where actual revenue is generated quickly, which, in turn, would drive understanding and allow efforts to be channelled much more effectively.
Here, Haim Bell, Founder of Routy, addresses some of the challenge faced by affiliates when it comes to monetisation, if this is currently being done to its fullest, how challenges can be overcome and more.
CasinoBeats: Do affiliates really understand the importance of data and tracking?
Haim Bell: I think the vast majority of affiliates understand the importance of data and the need to track it. I would say that nine out of ten affiliates are using the most common tracking software in the world, Google Analytics, and they are using it to monitor site traffic.
When it comes to player data, however, most affiliates are not even aware of the ability to track on a player level, with even less actually monitoring and analysing player data and behaviour across their site or sites.
CB: What are the benefits of tracking and analysing data at the page and player level?
HB: There are a few reasons why affiliates should track on a player level. The first relates to accounting – affiliates need to know how their revenue has been calculated and if they are not tracking data and activity at the player level, they are essentially handing over control of their revenues to their operator partners.
“No, even the largest media companies are not fully monetising their traffic right now”
For example, most operator portals show a commission column using different metrics – per day, per brand, per tracker, etc. This is a total figure based on one or more players and in most cases does not break out the total number of players, average player value, number of players converted during the given period, players from previous months, etc.
This data is crucial to the affiliate understanding how revenues have been calculated and also how to position that brand across their site to maximise conversions and revenues.
This leads on to the second reason – monetisation. Ultimately, an affiliate’s role is to sell cheap traffic to the highest bidder. There are a lot of different factors that can impact ROI here, but a high ROI together with a happy operator partner makes for a good performance marketer.
But to increase ROI and keep partners happy, affiliates need to know exactly how their traffic is behaving and the only way to do this is to track data and activity at the player level.
CB: Are affiliates currently fully monetising traffic?
HB: No, even the largest media companies are not fully monetising their traffic right now. To maximise monetisation, affiliates need to be able to access as much data as possible relating to their traffic and the conversions they generate. But due to the way that affiliates must access individual operator portals to monitor traffic and track performance, it is almost impossible to do this.
CB: Sticking with the theme of monetisation, what more can be done to optimise the process?
HB: This depends on the individual affiliate and the resources available to them. For smaller affiliates, I would stick with very basic player level tracking. This is to avoid data overload which can lead to what I call analysis paralysis – this can be pretty devastating for a business as the affiliate can’t handle the large volume of data that it is gathering. But by focusing on basic data and keeping it simple, monetisation can be improved.
“When it comes to player data, however, most affiliates are not even aware of the ability to track on a player level”
For larger organisations, I would recommend hiring a data analyst – someone experienced in this role knows how to gather, clean and study data sets to ultimately take monetisation to the next level.
CB: What would you say are the key challenges faced by affiliates when it comes to monetisation and how can they be overcome?
HB: To be able to monetise, affiliates need to have end to end data on a single report with the lowest key tracking possible. It is possible to monetise with the tracking profiles offered through the affiliate program, but affiliates can only do that effectively across a handful of pages and with a small number of brands. In short, it is not a scalable approach.
To bring all data into a single source of truth, affiliates must use tracking software and a stats crawler. There are dozens of tracking platforms out there, but not many of them have been built specifically for the online gambling industry.
Stats crawlers and aggregators are a little more complex. There are many affiliate software providers servicing the market – NetRefer, CelXpert, MyAffiliate, etc – but only a small number have an API which makes it hard to access their data. Some larger affiliate organisations look to develop these capabilities in-house, but it can take months if not years of design, development and testing.
In addition, a DevOps team is usually required to make sure the infrastructure is stable and then to constantly add more affiliate software providers and programs.
Of course, there are third party providers that can bridge the gap, and that is exactly what we are looking to do with Routy.
