A data driven iGaming affiliate platform: ReferOn

AI over just the last seven months has been crazy in general Society apply that to affiliate programs you'll be laughing you can see profitability you can see forecasted uh rates of churn by players you can see oh maybe this deal has been applied to this Market what's the average all this stuff I mean this all comes to the vague term of business intelligence what does that mean it's looking at data and making smart choices okay so if any of these programs start doing AI internet they'll

be top of the pile instantly because that's where people want to be you want to look at instant business decisions with your data you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast with John Wright brought to you by statsro so welcome to the affiliate bi podcast I got two special guests here with me uh David Harris and Vlad bondarenko from refer on and I'm going to start off by asking a question which will give you a chance to introduce yourselves but I met

both of you at the ice conference in London earlier this year and I saw something about a new affiliate program software which got me excited because I mean that's what we do we connect with all the different platforms I got a chance to see a demo and listening to both of you talk got me excited because I knew you weren't building just another affiliate software so tell us what you do and let's talk about how this conversation got started at London okay I'll go first so

hi I'm David um I'm a affiliate program Tech lead and I've kind of been doing this position for for quite recently six months but I was a senior before that so two years in all um and Vlad and I have kind of been building the product for about two years prior to that I um had about four years prior to that in the eye gaming Market actually in from based in Malta and um yeah that's kind of where we got started I got involved in this

company and then Vlad joined my side and we built it on then Moon yeah my name is Vlad and I'm working for referendum yes it was Dave for two years already in this field of sphere I'm about six years already and I was affiliate manager I was affiliate program manager I was a team lead having a team with six people now I am a product manager of marketing and the new product referon so something like that awesome so I mean the next part of the question

is I mean I already know this answer but why why would you say refer on is going to be a Sears player in this uh interesting affiliate marketing or affiliate program software space uh let me start Dave I think this is yeah you can take this bigger question for me in the way that y generally reference uh we have started with referral I don't want to start with the obvious details about the platform features or whatever the direction we are moving uh more about site functional

aspects we will speak further but in my opinion the industry of affiliate management still relies on the some outdated practices from 80s 90s whatever I by the way remember your post about apis uh John and the analogies with the movie The Goonies so it's really clear there is a press in needs for like comprehensive overhaul especially concerning the reporting capabilities overall friendliness of the system generally of the sphere and the main goal from my point of view is to encourage a fair uh competition in this

market generally speaking as the industry keeps changing and new platforms new systems come up often this is like pushing technology forward in this field and I want to be uh like at the Forefront of this competition and we believe that the healthy competition motivates us constantly to improve ourselves to innovate ourselves and this like can benefit both parties operators and Affiliates and also we are quite new to the market believe me we have just implemented only about 10 of all the features all the plan functionality

however the interesting part of that that this 10 of all the feature uh already surpassed in some cases like features which supported in the marginal just default in the market yeah and this 10 I think should have been standard and default for uh everyone as the best practices in this field especially in terms of user interface convenience reporting a API Dynamic variable this is kind of trigger words for everyone so this is how reference has been started why we are doing this and something like that

this my thoughts on those just to add to that both of us came from a bit of a technical background and both of us knew the market from a technical affiliate manager but also we have you know backup behind us on affiliation we speak to affiliate Managers from different operators as well not just kind of the ones we are close to so we understood and did a bit of due diligence on what was needed and the days that Vlad and I did backlog prioritizations went on

for hours for what was needed what wasn't what wasn't what can we push and we've tried to make it quite transparent with up to the end of the year with features coming up and then next for next year we're going to have to do the same kind of long meetings together to do another assessment of those so we do try to make it transparent we understand it's not as we've just said 10 and we've got our loads to come we understand it's hasn't got everything but

we are working on it by the way Dave I just recently read the article from my CEO of Shopify and I like the idea how he told like great products are built by tinkering and adjustment not just by strategic though and those Southern biggest longest documents that we have written with you we still I think uh build not exactly what we have written down but something else and this is a nice part of the work building new products this is what happens blood doesn't release every

two weeks I write documentation which goes out of date in two weeks so it's a relativity process yeah I feel that pain I've got a customer for our software like do you have a document for this I'm like we're about to redesign everything in we're adding new features all the time but I think the thing that for me stood out when I talked to both of you in uh in London and also recent with you David and Amsterdam was you it's not just the experience you

have on the tech side but you really take this uh product driven like product owner type of growth and it's something that I can relate to and what we have to do and I think that's probably what's going to give you an edge in terms of like there's a lot of competition here like there's no shortage of options of people going what affiliate software am I going to use to power our operation but um I I found that refreshing and when you say 10 that that's

all you have right now and you already have an amazing product I I actually believe uh you do have like another 90 to go and I find that really exciting exciting exciting believe me the backlog is long good good yeah I mean look it's not a case of we're coming into this with one competitor everyone knows there's so many out there and it's we're not doing this by ourselves as well there are other programs trying to burst into the market share as well and as Vlad

said a healthy competition makes for a healthy product okay otherwise becomes stagnant but as you kind of kind of Lent to we do try to take pride in a bit of affiliate feedback a bit of our own feedback because we kind of get this on a daily basis to say oh this is annoying oh can you make this better we understand software always has bugs you know software it's made by humans you're going to get errors but as we develop features it becomes you know a

web and as that builds up it's important to understand of this is a product oriented strategy and this is a client feedback strategy and we need to make sure we prioritize accordingly but that's what we're doing we did workshops before it went live we've done feedback sessions already with loads who are live and we're kind of collecting that information kind of re-jigging some of this stuff which still hasn't been released as of yet but it's ones that we prioritized already prioritized already guys we need revolution

in this field this is for sure I'm not sure if we will start this revolution but in any way this should be started you're a Ukrainian just simmer it down a bit on the revolutions okay yeah no I I fully agree it's I think with what's happening you know especially in our space I think this actually ties in perfectly to my next question because you've already hinted that there's a bit of staleness in the space and so I want to take a few steps back and

talk about the state of the industry today in relation to the Gap we have in operators and affiliate managers with their grasp of data or maybe their lack of understanding of how to look at how to manipulate it uh what are some of the problems you see today and how do you think we can change this in terms of getting affiliate managers and operators up to speed to say hey there's a new wave of tools coming and affiliate managers they should be looking at data in

a different way do you want me to take this one yeah yeah okay so so um we understand for any new platform not just our own okay you're gonna come with with with change okay this could be from those who know a platform which is 15 20 years old for someone which is five years old and then you take referon which is not even a year old it's gonna come people don't like change no matter what industry you're in no matter what vertical you're in people

don't like change how do you overcome this hurdle well we've done our best to be an involved with affiliate managers with other operators as much as we can from the very start and we've kind of alluded to already about documentation videos all of that stuff we've kind of pre-built um ready to go um you can kind of have a look see how they are when we do demos with new clients we take you through kind of analogies show you how it's done give them access making

sure that operators know what they're buying before they're going so you have your decision makers Which is higher up and you know we'll give them demos and stuff but the affiliate managers yes it is a case of how do you get a tool and use it properly okay with any platform you are always providing the tools and then they make how how easy it is to get that answer with referon and what we've tried to do is make a much more kind of data driven approach

and make it much more accessible you may I don't know if I've shown you or not from the platform but statistics uh widgets previous period and current periods and kind of the pivot table of reporting gives much more accessibility to the data the clients that we have already have already said to us directly they've already saved costs made a better and quicker business decisions on reward plans and you know General clicks that are coming in and general metrics that are showing in every step of the

way we don't want to have that clunky flow and stop someone to engage with the data we're trying to make it as much easier as we can we have Affiliates that are signing up all the time which have never touched the stuff before okay and I'm in these chats I'm in a million Snapchats and it could be like I need to get a tracking link and I don't know where to do it I've clicked this what have I done wrong I give them the video or

I have a little chat with them and suddenly once it clicks it's like super easy to understand it's like a slight Zeitgeist without me kind of making too egotistical but it is a new way of looking at tracking looking rewarding and making it much more fluid and once you get that it's just so easy that makes makes total sense um continuing on with this similar theme I've gotten my next question prepared but I'm going to rephrase it a little differently because both of what we do

as a company and what you do as a company we're in the B2B space and we have to sell products and features and the software in a totally different way and I actually believe that how we have to sell our products and services to both affiliate managers and operators or for at least from your point of view we need to do it in a way that's like building relationships and one thing I've noticed at the Amsterdam conference and I asked a lot of people their their

take on this I said this industry is getting bigger more programs are opening up we have a lot of new affiliate managers coming in and a lot of them are coming in with this head first like Bowl in a china shop going I need to make sales they want to get that single sale count but they're not focused on the after like the retention the relationship building and I believe for affiliate marketing this is like extremely critical so I know tools can help for this but

what do you think is the next thing that needs to be done it's not just educating affiliate managers on how to use data but how do we get this transformation of going you can get your sale but if that's all you're interested in you might be missing out on bigger opportunities of retaining like Affiliates are they're almost like players like you can acquire them that's expensive but to retain them you have to retain your Affiliates just as much as you have to retain a player uh

Vlad you want to take this yeah I can start with the answer yeah this is quite a good question because the system should be as a central Hub of information which enables uh them us to monitor all affiliate activities and evaluate first of all the campaign performance and adjust strategies based on this and like at the control center reference first of all gives us opportunity like ubiquitous accessibility all to all the manual repetitive tasks it eliminates it fully and freeing up some valuable space and time

for affiliate manager to focus on relationship building and not to make some like unnecessary steps and unnecessary clicks so like everything is out of the box and they need the desire for analytical tool and the market is having already this desire for analytical tool like to be able to calculate in Roi correctly full visibility on some relevant measures etc etc like for example from our point of view as I have been involved in this Sphere for past like six years I often tell people that I

consider myself as a lazy person yeah and my trigger words always were optimization Automation and structuring and this everything is interconnected because I constantly striving to align my like work with some specific rules to avoid repetitive tasks some manual action this is what central Hub means for ourselves from referon and like our daily routine and not only our I I'm sure involved uh extracting some CSV file from third party to upload it to Google Sheets and with the help of a extensive crms based on Google

Sheets or whatever we could then analyze data this is not the proper flow we need to like that's why as time passed I started feeling tired because of all this restriction limitation of uh using only Google Sheets or Google Sheets with some other add-ons whatever and like our CRM outgrew its capabilities and that's when the idea of reference was born and I recognized the need of more advanced tools comprehensive affiliate management system that's why this is everything interconnected we can be focused on some retention on

some Partnerships only when we are not doing any manual steps we are not doing repetitive tasks and moving from our initial CRM in Google Sheets to developing developing developing reference was a natural step basically and so we needed to overcome those limitations that's what I mean when I speak that referon can be a proper Central hub for affiliate managers to maintain the proper Partnerships and for Affiliates to have the proper understanding how each campaign is doing how each of us is performing this is what's reference

and data-driven lazy approach obviously we're looking at a bit of a angle on affiliate Managers from this perspective and obviously they're getting the fdds but no retention but another level of what referon offers and any platform is actual operators operators are using this and they want to see how a brand converts not just at the individual affiliate manager now coming back to the question of building that retention making sure you have that relationship if you take the example of an operator comes to platform X okay

and they don't like it they're not going to add any more Brands to that platform they're not going to be any more data streams they're not going to use it continuously if you build up the relationship and you show it's worthwhile and they know they can get certain data aspects out of it and they find it friendly or accessible they're going to add and probably get more Brands onto the system so you build a relationship in that angle and at the same time the affiliate managers

are used to it you can have multiple programs running through the same kind of URLs the accessibility and usage of it is multifaceted it's not just affiliate manager getting ftds and showing case click to ftds okay I'm done that's me for the kpis it's there's more there's more layers at an affiliate platform than just the Affiliates coming in now I agree I think with what uh Vlad mentioned uh previously is that you know having this uh affiliate manager Hub is important I mean we kind of

already know that a lot of these affiliate platforms affiliate program software they are meant to be that Hub in the first place but I feel like a lot of them are missing something so I've got two more questions and one's already written down and another one's kind of sprung up where do you think there's going to be a next wave I mean I'm pretty sure I kind of know the answer to this next wave of affiliate program software that has not just what it says it

does but there's more analytics and business intelligence built into this where it's doing this analysis saying hey maybe we think we can optimize your affiliate program based on what we're seeing as patterns um let me just take this a sec but so agree 100 AI over just the last seven months has been crazy in general Society apply that to affiliate programs you'll be laughing you can see profit ability you can see forecasted rates of churn by players you can see oh maybe this deal has been

applied to this Market what's the average all this stuff I mean this all comes to the vague term of business intelligence what does that mean it's looking at data and making smart choices okay so if any of these programs start doing AI into it they'll be top of the pile instantly because that's where people want to be you want to look at instant business decisions with your data it's something we have discussed discussed discussed but it's still something which is maybe next year that makes sense

it's uh you gave me the perfect snippet to take in yeah I like that uh the next question I mean we know in the news recently that deep CI was acquired by every Matrix and I listened to another podcast I think it was the gambling files and got a chance to listen to I think it was what's the guy's name guy's name guy's name for live deep CI DTI I think it's Clyde Clyde yeah so applied was basically kind of walking through the features I I

gotta uh went through the video demos but it looked really interesting uh do you think there's going to be more of these tools hitting the market and I mean we're going to assume that every Matrix will keep us going but they could easily say hey this is only for in-house or they might actually say the best features are going to be pure in-house I mean they could I'm not saying they're not going to I'm not involved I think there is definitely more like that I mean

most people most most Affiliates nowadays know nowadays know or use hrefs similar web or deep CI those those are the top three okay they all do very similar things I'm not going to give you pros and cons of each of those markets that's up to the watches to decide and what to look at but most affiliate managers use these on a daily basis the fact that partner Matrix has um kind of acquired deep CI I think is a great move I think that's that's a great

move for them to encourage more of the checks in-house rather than relying on third parties this is something we've alluded to in this school already removing that Reliance third-party programs this is just one of the many um to say it's going to stop there is almost saying like are there going to be more affiliate platforms it's people always come up with new ideas uh there's the market changes there's going to be new things that will come on board more data more stuff to extract from websites

it's not going to stop anytime soon um but I just want to point out quite Matrix did a fantastic move there yeah I wish I could fully agree with the idea that affiliate managers are using similar web deep CIA okay theoretically they know about them maybe they don't use it I don't know about them that's clarification because I mean I am teaching a couple people in the background how to use hrefs uh for any different uh points of view and um I kind of wish a

deep CI was in the market earlier and it was actually expanded everywhere because I mean we've been Affiliates for like a good 10 years and we still have test accounts so we create an account for every single program because we need to add that in our app and it's just frustrating the types of questions we get and a lot of it I'm gonna have to say it comes from new affiliate managers even when we had our affiliate sites they had always asked for the number one

spot and even when I tried to explain to them that our best converting pages are this one and that one and a couple other subsets just no just want number one spot and it's like okay do you want to overpay for it and they're like oh we don't want to pay but we want number one because we're the best and it's just kind of frustrating I think these tools I hope at some point change change change um like going full circle back to previous discussions this

uh I need to get the sale and then once I got the sale I move on I just think that there's a lack of uh education no one's going to college or university to become an affiliate manager they come into the space they get hired because they've got a sales background and I kind of think that maybe they actually need to start taking some courses on affiliate management I mean there's thousands of courses online you know you go to udemy or whatever but it depends on

which vertical I mean we're currently focused on gambling is the the vertical we're kind of focused on but there's so many others people say you know how to be an affiliate let me get one million in six days it doesn't happen instantly and there are experiences there's people be in the market you know for sometimes 20 years looking at the original kind of affiliate and Performance Marketing and it's very basic to the very kind of modern day modern day modern day getting that experience in that

knowledge and the connections is the biggest kind of way to you know people know you people know what the brands you promote and if you do move companies people you know will respond and probably promote you accordingly it's building those relationships but yeah if you're number one one one why get number two right [Laughter] [Laughter] number one and number two and number three it depends how many Brands you have yes yeah maybe all right anything about that on that one from your experiences I agree with

you guys I was back in time affiliate manager I was using ahrefs and all the stuff I know John what you are speaking about because uh even in my case like my uh with whom I was working before yeah before yeah like two like two to start using some tools is always is always a challenge especially when it comes to some new tools like deepsea or whatever whatever whatever but the industry becomes more data driven more such tools will come and obviously that's we are speaking

now we are living in a AI uh Century so to say I hope I'm sure I'm not hoping but I sure that such tools will be available also uh for AI the thing is that I gaming sphere is quite limited we have a really nice really nice really nice um like examples of web series sphere like all these cryptocurrencies here it's much much much is having much more higher expectation yeah a lot of people much more people are involved in that and much more sophisticated solution

uh are there but even there even there binance for example doesn't give us proper API so what we can speak about eye gaming where money is big and a lot of money are coming here but if binance cannot give us proper apis what we can speak and tell about this small uh topic so this a matter of time I saw I suppose I hope and more tools will come and I am a fan of chat GPT I'm a fan of new tools I I know that

it's it's quite low amount of people still right now who wants to use new Tools in igaming sphere so this is coming from a person who literally uses chat PPT for everything yeah every time I'm doing a screenshot with him he always has an open every single thing single thing you know and it helps a lot it helps us a lot I want to see this kind of judging reference as well I just need to find the guy who will like GPT exactly what it's going

to be called then you should buy the domain I want to work with people with uh like how does wizard with the Stars yeah in the eyes yeah yeah yeah you know who is in our delusion exactly exactly exactly exactly yeah a vision for the future I mean we used to joke with Vlad during the early stages of relevant he had so much passion he was like yeah we were talking and I was talking at a normal level and then everyone else would be like go

find a room like you're so loud he was just he loves he loves his date Erin you know he's found the right job you were calling me even Dave always passion fruit yeah yeah [Laughter] [Laughter] oh that is so good we'll we'll say that discussion for another one and especially I mean easily chat CPT that could be a while they're uh yeah that's a whole different ballgame that could be a whole other can of fruit so to speak yeah um next question yeah I love that

um cookie so what's happening with cookies and what do you think is one or a couple good ways of trying to solve this what could be a problem um I don't know if it's supposed to be this year or next year it's going to get delayed so I'm gonna do an introductory thing and then Vlad can take over so essentially Google's been saying this for years let's let's let's be honest here here here what's happened in kind of website development or general kind of Internet over

the last couple of years since they even said it has been phenomenal I mean technology has always come fun just kind of Leaps and Bounds every year almost so removing cookies is not going to be the end of the world in my opinion there are many other ways you can still obtain information I mean look in the last five years just five years pixels and post-backs and variables have shot up in demand like hugely I mean you yourself John you you see this in all probably

your API pools and everything but go back five years it was barely mentioned so cookies have been around since the internet was in its early infancy the fact that we're still using it is already a phenomenal like it's crazy we have so many other types of doing it so I don't think it's gonna be the end of the world I just think we'll just find another way to to track it that's all yeah I think go ahead I think guys this topic should be perceived mostly

As the market trends and everyone want to stay informed we even spend like five minutes to speak about cookies and some people are speaking about those cookies and when it's an end so everything will be down like we will be dead for three years like I constantly reading those articles but in eight like 80 approximately percent of all cases uh cookies are still sent are still used so while while there are some indications uh of a shift away from cookies I would still consider them as

a trend right now uh and we can discuss this endlessly we have different approaches like server to server tracking postbacks like device fingerprinting uh unified IDs uh whatever whatever but it's quite interesting topic but to my mind in the near near future it will not end with cookies I fully agree and uh last question I I ended up all these podcasts with is what do you see the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence do you want to end with that Vlad um

yes like we I'm trying not to laugh while you guys are talking about passion fruit that's okay we have a rapport it's okay okay okay like generally speaking which of uh affiliate marketing I really seen the data driven approach as we have spoken many times um such topics as a real-time reporting fraud detection like and prevention uh Predictive Analytics all these topics are a part of business business analysis business intelligence uh and all this stuff and obviously the data driven decision making will be much more

easier when some business intelligent tools will be applied in this sphere but to be honest till when it happens until then we we at least we need to the proper reporting Right Now API availability Dynamic reporting to start from someone from somewhere like from the first 10 default pers this 10 of default uh things which should be uh available from the box in the system and then we can already uh interact with uh bi with analytics with everything else we don't have the proper API now

in this sphere we don't have the proper tracking in this sphere whatever like some uh programs tools cannot even properly track uh amount of clicks my first couple of clients were taking the XML as we had and we're feeding it into Google data studio and we're doing their own dashboards I mean we give everyone the raw data they make it what they will and you know you can then do analytics your own because we're not going to stop you or give restrictions on that that's what

you want to do so already we're trying to open the door it's up to you whether you want to step through it or not so yeah I fully agree yeah I think uh dashboards and getting people the ability to play with their own data is an interesting thing but I do think uh you know going full circle about a just kind of touching a little bit on the AI component is can we do this in an automated way and I've already seen a couple tools that

will take data and say we think these are some insights and it's up to you to basically agree or disagree so maybe this could be the the next future where you guys are right we need good data to work with because if you've got messed up data it's everything falls apart or you get the wrong insights um the next part I mean I work hard we're living it right now where you've got Tableau power bi you can do whatever you want with data but I think

the next ones are kind of like you know this uh you know chat CBT type of plugins where you can say let me put the data in here and give me a different report that I've not seen before I mean I've done these experiments almost by accident and seen insights that I'm just like wow I can't believe I'm looking at what I'm seeing right now just because I I took the the time to just throw in a bunch of basically campaign data into Tableau and what

what it came out with them I just believe that not a lot of people are doing these things like that and you guys are right the early days that's the thing the just to take some words of the the time okay in some platforms out there you can do this it just takes time or you need to look up on a lookup on different reports it is possible to do this it just suddenly takes time if you can reduce that time to a more reasonable level

then you have more time to analytic for to do the analytics so all of those cases I mean a really good one would be what's the average CPA for this Market what's my customer lifetime value okay what's my profit margin those questions are almost interlinked but to get that information you need clean data you need actual true data to make sure it's you know it's not being fiddle Grid or anything like that and at what date range and all these questions are sometimes easier to get

than others but these are the kind of stuff we have honestly we've spoken about these are the endless meetings that we had to say yeah wouldn't it be great if x wouldn't it be awesome if we could do y and then we come think about like requirements right how do we what did we say again and we had to write it all again so but yeah even from our initial public release from February we took a ton of research we did loads of meetings and then

Amsterdam again I took a bunch of stuff back and get more feedback so it's all it's all that honestly if you came up and said to us I don't think you have this we probably do somewhere somewhere I'm keeping glad's hands full I'm sure the backlog is immense with uh what you guys are building and yeah I'm excited to see uh you know uh product launch after product launch we got a ton of PR coming up as well uh we've got a number of clients that

have just been on there very recently as well and as I said we've not even been alive live for a year yet so we're looking we're looking good so early days uh guys uh thank you so much for doing this um it's always a pleasure chatting at the conferences uh I get excited I mean our software are kind of similar in a lot of ways and you know a lot comes down to Big Data how can people get a hold of both of you so you

can either reach out to us in general uh with the sales at referral.com or www.refron.com or um find us on LinkedIn just find David Harris Under referon And also finder Rico as well buy us on LinkedIn and username uh at passionfruit at passionfruit that's that's it that's his Twitter handle Twitter handle Twitter handle um um um how does this joke become more public public if you don't have a if you don't have the Twitter handle we're gonna we're gonna do a GoFundMe too bye yeah yeah

that's it I'll see you probably speak to you at Sigma Malta Sigma Malta um I don't think we'll be there in the September conference but uh I'm sure we'll see you at Superman it'll be one show after another for sure and I I'm looking forward to see things get bigger more clients and um yeah it's just uh it's very interesting to watch what you're doing and like I said once I saw the product I was like oh we gotta we gotta get a little bit more

sharper so we are not competition by any means but uh what you guys do in school work together yeah we work together but it inspires me to uh to be uh very top of Mind very serious we have competition and uh Vlad you're right it keeps us sharp and it's what we need to push things forward yeah okay well thank you thank you John for your time and for organizing thank you guys Vlad I'll speak to you okay thank you listeners I'd like to ask for

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