Affiliate programmes: Are they worth it?

Nick Garner from oshi! bitcoin casino gives his thoughts on creating a successful affiliate programme in 2016

For those of you who have read this column for a while, you’ll know that I founded a successful SEO agency and then went on to set up my own online casino. Prior to all of that, I had been head of search for Unibet and search manager for Betfair. Along the way I’ve hung out with affiliates, worked with affiliate management teams, and I am also an affiliate myself as I have a sports news website that gets around 1.5 million visits a month.

Now that I am actively building up the user base for my casino, I am effectively an affiliate manager and it’s leading me to ask some big questions. As we all know, affiliates fill in the marketing gaps that operators can’t close. They are the commission-only sales people of the internet who have very little responsibility around the legalities of egaming. Affiliates are also extremely dependent on search traffic because of the way the ecosystem is stacked.

Paid media is very difficult for affiliates because they are typically on a revenue share equivalent to the marketing spend for an  operator. The difference between an affiliate and an operator is that operators have brand equity and large marketing infrastructures, whereas affiliates are generally only able to market on the ‘compare the market’ ticket. That’s why getting cheap converting traffic is ‘ground zero’ for any affiliate, because they have very little leeway.

Affiliates can work through social media channels, but in my experience, social does work but not that well. Of course there are lots of cases where affiliates have nailed social, but they are the special ones. You’re then left with SEO. Ten years ago, SEO was relatively easy because Google’s search algorithms were immature and vulnerable to being gamed. Today that’s all changing and a website that ranks has to give real value to the user as they want to see good websites. So Google does whatever it can to make that happen.

Should I bother?
Part of me is fearful, because if I give away control of my brand to a bunch of money hungry lawless commission-only salesmen, what will they do to it? The other part of me wants to push on and find affiliates who I can trust to represent the brand properly and build out brand awareness and, of course, new business.

Having spent so many years around affiliates, I think we will work with affiliates but very selectively. My strategy is simple. Engage with affiliates, check out their websites and if I like them I’ll offer a strong deal and a great amount of support to help everybody out.

Why am I being selective? As I mentioned earlier, one dimension is keeping the brand intact, but the other is picking winners early because building relationships with these people will put you in a better place than being a latecomer. One of the core competencies of SEO is site evaluation. Fortunately there are some really good tools to help you quickly assess the website for the right traffic, in enough volume.

SEMrush has over 100 million websites on its database and a similar number of key phrases, and it tracks Google search results across 27 different country territories.

By running a website through SEMrush, I can immediately see its traffic patterns, whether it actually has traffic, where the traffic is coming from and which key phrases the site ranks on. In my case, I’m looking for sites that would rank around bitcoin casino phrases, but you may be looking for other things.

Another important sign is growth or decline in search prominence. Because Google is changing so much at the moment, if a site has seen a consistent decline in search visibility, you can assume it’s a tide that probably won’t change very much. Therefore I would walk away. But if the traffic is growing and the site checks out well from a user perspective, then it’s worth a conversation with the site owner.

Quality over quantity
Typically in the past the more links you got, the more you would rank well in Google. This is changing and I always check out websites to see what kind of links they are acquiring. If the links are from poor quality websites, then I would be very circumspect about working with this affiliate.

It’s important to be clear on what I mean by ‘quality’. In the past, Google was really bad at understanding which links were a genuine vote in favour of a website. However, because of the Penguin algorithm, they are able to spot and devalue links which come from junk websites or look paid for. In effect, Google can evaluate a website better than a person. So if you think a link is junk, then Google will too. So if you’re evaluating an affiliate, look for those junk links.

The Google Quality Rater Guidelines is a document which it uses to train its quality raters, which then evaluate websites. These site evaluations are fed into Google’s artificially intelligent learning algorithms, which then go on to evaluate websites for quality, then affecting rankings.

Sounds complicated? It is. All you really need to know is Google has become more clever at evaluating websites than a human being (Did I mention that already?). If you check out a website and you honestly think it’s junk, then so will Google. If not today, tomorrow.

So how do you find affiliates at scale? As you know, I think Google is the epicentre of affiliate traffic. Therefore, when I seek out affiliates, I’m looking at Google search results. Fortunately for all of us, SEMrush is a great place to find thousands of affiliates. It has a competitor search feature which shows you every site they have that also ranks for similar phrases to the site you are looking at. In other words, I can pull out 500 ranking websites in my segment in about five minutes.

That’s the hard work part. Fortunately for me, I have an SEO agency with a really good outreach team that can work through these lists of sites. We use an outreach tool called Buzzsumo, which is cloud-based and will crawl every website in the system and pull out any contact information. It also has email templates and a follow-up process, making thorough outreach very straightforward. As with outreach in SEO for link acquisition, one person does the emailing and outreach. Then when there’s a reply, it gets passed on to somebody else, which in this case is my affiliate manager.

No lunch please
This is a very basic outline of my process flow, but it amazes me how little affiliate managers understand the basics of site evaluation and use of tools to make their lives easier. It has also always bemused me how operators rely so heavily on relationships with a few affiliates. You can only take somebody out to lunch so many times before it gets boring.

As an affiliate, I’d rather skip the lunch and have a better deal and spend the lunch money on better media assets. Operators, in my opinion, don’t appreciate the overall importance of getting their presence on other people’s websites looking right. Another junk banner isn’t good enough. Every website has its own unique conversion flow and it’s in everybody’s interests to make the operator website ‘pop out’ in a really positive way, wherever it is. That’s why I would rather work closely with affiliates who I can get involved with and create custom assets for them, using smart technology like Bannerflow, which is a banner making infrastructure.

With a little bit of process and clear thinking, any operator can dig out those winning sites which can deliver real value. By investing more in assets and less in ‘lunch’, I really believe the operator/affiliate game can be raised. Of course, it’s easy to talk about it in an article, now I have to go and make this happen over the next three years. But as you know, I think I speak from experience on this.

If you’re an affiliate, I suggest you demand more from the operator when it comes to ‘support our media assets’ and so on. If you’re an operator, I suggest you just get more clever about who you work with and invest more time and effort into better affiliate selection outside of the known Tier 1 players.