Data privacy in affiliate marketing

“Hey John and Darrell, thanks for taking the time to meet with us. The reason why we wanted to meet you two is because we wanted to know how good our deals are, given that you see what other affiliates are getting.”

My response,

“actually we don’t see any of our affiliate’s traffic or revenue data.”

My friend was shocked.?

During customer calls when new customers are testing us or onboarding, they straight up tell us that they assume we look at their data and they are in disbelief that we can’t by choice.

In fact, I think I’ve had at least one potential investor call me an idiot for not doing it.

Sometimes, half of our discovery calls, the affiliates tell us how important data privacy is for them that they don’t want us seeing their data.

Quick housekeeping shoutout to StatsDrone and FTDx for supporting this newsletter and our Affiliate BI podcast. Do me a big fave and join my Beehiiv newsletter here too.

What’s even more ironic is that sometimes affiliates make a big deal out of data privacy, only to turn around and ask us to fully setup their StatsDrone account with their usernames and passwords to get the API keys and everything.

Speaking of onboarding, we are always happy to help with onboarding especially Darrell Helyar and we’ve even built tools for bulk onboarding for 50, 100 or 500+ accounts.?

Ok Ok, the customer is always right, right?!?

I’m going to cover 4 layers of data privacy in iGaming and affiliate marketing.

1. Data privacy for operators
2. Data privacy for affiliates
3. First party data for affiliates
4. Data privacy for affiliate networks

Let’s start from the operator side of the business and share an angle that I think not a lot of affiliates think about.

Data privacy for operators & affiliate programs

Your affiliate program has 3 ways they could launch their affiliate program and it looks like this.

1. Build the program in-house
2. Use an established affiliate program platform
3. Use an established affiliate program platform but on-premise

Before we talk about why affiliate programs choose to build their own affiliate program, let’s talk about what affiliates are comfortable with.

Many affiliates are used to the backends of established platforms. In fact, some affiliates prefer a program launched with one of these affiliate program software.

So despite knowing that affiliates feel comfort in seeing a familiar looking affiliate backend, why are affiliate programs choosing to build proprietary software?

For their own privacy reasons. Simply put, they don’t want any other platform to have the ability to see all of their players, let alone their VIP players.?

I am sure Gali Hartuv would have a few comments here talking about some of the unwritten rules of VIP, but this is why any operator would choose to go through the painful process to build.

To do a good in-house affiliate program, you’d likely need 2 full time developers for 1 year to build it and the costs to maintain it likely will cost more than using an established affiliate backend out of the box.?

Using an established affiliate program platform

In many cases, the affiliate program software you use, might give your affiliates a good or bad impression right off the bat. Not all affiliates like the same affiliate software equally but there are many favourites in the industry and I’ll name drop a few:

• MyAffiliates
• PartnerMatrix
• RavenTrack
• Intelitics Software
• ReferOn
• Cellxpert
• Affnook
• Affilka by SOFTSWISS
• Income Access, A Paysafe Experience

Data privacy for affiliates

I’m not quite talking about 2FA security protocols or about certain password tools that have a habit of getting hacked however those are important topics too.?

I’m talking about the privacy of YOUR affiliate data.?

The top reason why any affiliate builds their own in-house stats tool is mainly for privacy. They are worried that a company like StatsDrone would look at their data.

Desktop affiliate stats: Stats Remote & Nifty Stats

I used to use Stats Remote and when I did, I’d be on that app daily. I’d hit sync first thing in the morning, a few times in the afternoon and once before going to bed to see what stats were updated hoping for more FTDs and revenue.?

StatsDrone was already in motion before Stats Remote shut down. The idea behind wanting to build an app when there were already 2 on the market was that I felt revenue leak in affiliate marketing was a real thing.?

Back the topic at hand. Nifty Stats and Stats Remote are/were both desktop apps which in theory makes them a bit more secure.?

Did you know that the very first 2 StatsDrone apps were desktop?

It brings back memories seeing the first 2 versions of our app. The first one was a desktop app that worked in Windows, Mac and Linux but after 2 years, we shut it down because simply put, we made all the mistakes. Trying to do this project is very difficult but we never gave up.

The 2nd time we had success but I was frustrated at the speed of developing features. It was after a chat with our CTO that we would be able to build features at 3 to 5 times the speed in a cloud environment than in a desktop environment.

So now we had a decision on our hands:

1. Stay in desktop and always be secure but struggle to build features in a timely manner or
2. Build in the cloud, have customers worry about privacy but ship products all day long

Our ethos was to respect your affiliate data. We took a risk and we saw the trends in the SaaS world. Your banks, your ewallets, even Quickbooks, none of this is working on desktop software.?

Ironically enough, this article called Welcome to the Death of SaaS by Brett Serjeantson Serjeantson, was published in January 2021. This was literally 3 months before we decided to pull the plug on our desktop app and go all in on the cloud.?

tl;dr on the article is this: Salesforce did an awesome B2B viral campaign that software is dead and SaaS is here. Marc Benioff was right (hey Marc, can I get a cheeky like?)

Adge by Gambling.com was a cloud based solution but they kept it for their own companies.

VOONIX.NET launched around 2018 and Routy in 2019.?

With any SaaS, there is a lot of trust being given and assumed by affiliates.

So what have we done about it?

A few things:

1. Self hosted data
2. On-premise app

Our users can choose to host the data on their own database and we took the app to the next level by building our product called DIDO which is the on-prem (on-premise).?Dark mode in effect amirite Joe Hatch ?

This is something we take seriously.?

We do NDAs with most of our customers and the only time we see any sensitive data is when we are asking for an affiliate’s help in inspecting a single account so we can make changes and ensure the app is accurate.

The only other time we would see data is if the affiliate asks us to build a custom Tableau dashboard for them. Speaking of Tableau, check out our Tableau for iGaming webinar March 26th featuring our Head of BI & Analytics, Lynda Salem .

https://www.dhirubhai.net/events/advanceddatavizforaffiliateswit7300541535832408064/theater/

BTW we sold our main affiliate sites so we could focus 100% on StatsDrone and not feel like we are competing with our customers.?

API over credentials

When it comes to using tools like StatsDrone, you can choose to use API or credentials (aka username and password). We recommend API for a few reasons.

• More secure means of data transfer
• API we find rarely breaks down in reports

When it comes to API versus credentials, API is easier for us to maintain and we have less connection issues as a result.?

We still have a lot of users preferring to deal with credentials over API but it is our job to help users switch.?

As a mention to the article I wrote called Improving Affiliate Program Software, I would say offering affiliates the ability to delete their API key and rebuild should be a feature that ALL affiliate platforms should have.

First party data for affiliates

This next topic is a very important one and it might be slightly off topic from the data privacy for affiliates but there is a connection.

First of all, first party data is going to be the new normal moving forward for affiliates. Newsletters, databases and products that you register to along with subscriptions, this is really knowing your customer.

First party data with dynamic variables is very powerful and I take a deep dive into that in this newsletter post here.?

Link tracking & data privacy

In order to capitalize on first party data, you want to be making use of a unique click ID you send to your players. This means you need a link redirect.??

Now link tools can be in your full control or be managed by another company.?

A fairly quick example:?

1. Pretty Links (WordPress affiliate link manager)
2. Voluum

Quick shoutout to Voluum and Martin Kumiega Kamila ?uksza-Szpyt .

Just to be clear how this works, you can take the basic tracking link you get from an affiliate program and using an example from MyAffiliates for LTV Partners.?

Technically you could use the raw links and paste them on your marketing channels but seriously don’t do this. You’ll want a link management CRM to control this.?

Even Bitly is an example of a link redirect that you could technically use for your affiliate links. Just that if you don’t use anything that generates unique click IDs, then you’re missing out on the full power of dynamic variables.?

Pretty Links still requires a license but once you have that license, it can be essentially stored locally assuming you ONLY use WordPress.

Voluum is a bit more advanced. Actually I’d go as far to say they are the most advanced link tracking tool I’ve ever seen. All the tracking links with Voluum are hosted by them.

It goes without saying, Voluum has been in business a long time so they’ve built up a lot of trust in the global affiliate marketing industry.?

Some people prefer to manage their tracking tools in-house and make it all custom. It can be a nice luxury but I think most affiliates are better off generating traffic rather than building tools that others have already built.

Still, there is a technical element of privacy when it comes to tracking links.?

Data privacy for affiliate networks

There are many affiliate network platforms around such as Income Access, Affhut , Intelitics to name a few. Also AffCollect was a stats aggregator that was recently acquired by Nordic.Partners so that might be another affiliate network platform on the market.?

Then there are ones that I think do their whole project in-house like KeyAffiliates.com (shoutout to Brian Pedersen MBA or Gambling Affiliation .?

The core issue for the sub-affiliation network is the same as the operator mentioned at the start of this article.?

You can either build your own affiliate network platform and own your data or use an established platform.

The only way to consider an on-prem version of an affiliate network would need to have a tool much like StatsDrone DIDO.?

So who is StatsDrone for?

• for affiliates
• for affiliate agencies
• for affiliate networks

If you need any help as an affiliate, agency or you want to build a sub-affiliation platform, send me a DM.