Advanced tracking and analytics with Allan Stone of Intelitics

whether you're an SEO affiliate traditional or you're a performance marketer I think the minimum requirements are the operator needs to have the ability or the partners you have the ability to pass Dynamic variables there's a reason why five UTM parameters on Google is the standard because that's typically how how many levels down you need to go in order to be able to optimize effectively that does not exist currently with the with the current solutions that most these operators have deployed so that is a table stake

for most performance marketers if you don't have that they can't do the analysis optimization on their end that they need to be able to do therefore they're starting off on the wrong foot I'm John Wright and you're listening to affiliate bi the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by stat strong welcome to affiliate bi podcast we got a special guest here Alan Stone I've known him for a couple years and he's the the founder of intelitics so I'm going to pass it over

to you to tell us about yourself yourself yourself hey John how's it going um thanks for having me a little bit about myself uh yeah so I'm the co-founder and CEO of intolytics um intolytics was born out of a desire to actually not a desire more of a need to build technology for real money gaming space that would allow us to answer some very complex challenging problems uh when it came to deploying campaigns at scale on behalf of operators so trying to understand to understand to

understand user acquisition cost at scale across channels and sources but not just that looking at what those users were actually Worth Post acquisition so being able to be very intelligent with impression to conversion to retention and monetization of those players over time so we could make better informed decisions on where we're buying customers which campaigns we're going to be scaling and which campaigns to turn off off off so I mean what you just said there I mean if we were at a conference and we're talking

about this the same stuff like five or ten years ago people are big okay that's kind of like a necessary evil I mean like we need tracking we need all of that um what have you seen over the last maybe it's five or ten years where there's been a big change in interest where affiliate program software isn't just a necessity there's a lot of power behind it in terms of like you know what data operators need and what can be done with it yeah I think

um I think this industry is unique in that it is you know it is sort of if you build it they will come right uh you know Benny and gaming gambling however you want to call it it's there it's an inherently it's an entertainment product and people want to engage with entertainment products and so that that mentality I think was born a little bit out of out of out of hey if you can set up a brand and do things right you'll you'll just make money

no matter what um I think the shift has come into sort of when we look at it there's two very sort of distinct catalysts that have caused that shift number one is the shift in consumer Behavior so instead of sitting down and engaging in a you know long form entertainment sessions where they were sitting there for hours on end um you know the shift to mobile caused um you know a difference and and how consumers interact with Brands and content and so that that shift was

one of those moves I think the second one was the fact that our industry is maturing and now you look at the big players and they're all publicly traded right so there's a very it's a very different very different um mindset to growth or to scaling businesses when you have a public market to answer to I think those two if we were to look at it those would be just sort of the two biggest catalysts for okay for okay the software and the solutions that exist

need to become more data driven and more intelligent um and they need to do so in a way that is scalable beyond what we had seen up to clock the last five years right um I think those two things are really major or really what's driving this if you look at sort of the current and those are historical right you know that consumer shift happened around 20 2012 and then more recently that's in the last six years when a lot of these Affiliates plus operators were

going public even in the last three years I think the macro environment that we find ourselves in now and what's driving sort of this the topic and the desire more recently has been uh the culmination of those things happening at the same time so you have the bottom-up pressure of not only Affiliates but other marketing Partners really putting pressure on operators to have better technology and give them better solutions to be able to be more intelligent with what's working what's not what's not what's not um

and then again you just have the the public market pressure now of hey um we as we as a public we as shareholders want to see more um more diligence around where you're spending money and what you're actually getting for the money you're spending and so I think those two things really are starting to come to a head right now I mean really in the last two quarters yeah and it's really interesting that I mean even with the affiliate groups where they're public and a lot

of them are sharing certain types of data where it's a breakdown of the revenue um what would you say like are the differences between Performance Marketing Affiliates and I think what we want to call everyone else's more SEO Affiliates I mean we're starting to see more of these numbers show up in these reports and companies saying you know this is actually a more important segment and starting to maybe grow bigger than SEO yeah look I think we have the fortunate um um um insight to having

done a lot of business outside of gaming and so I think what you're starting to see is the gaming industry catch up to every other vertical vertical vertical um um um yeah again I think it's a lot of it's driven by consumer Behavior right um consumers are less likely to sit down and read a 4 000 word review on you know a particular slot game they're more interested in finding out hey I play this way I'm looking for this type of bonus and I'm looking for

this type of uh of uh an experience with a brand which brands provide that to me right right right um so I think I think the shift that you're starting to see happen or the maturity that you're trying to see happen really more than anything is um the consumer behavior is moving in a way that allows for more quote-unquote performance marketers versus the traditional SEO Affiliates um to enter the space now I think I think that those guys are um I think there was a push

around 2018 2019 and so I think a lot of those guys got a bad taste in their mouth because again the technology didn't exist then it wasn't widely adopted at that point by most operators but I think what you're seeing is um um um a desire from The Operators to expand their channels beyond what they're currently getting they have to continue to grow and uh I think what you're seeing is again there's just the Tailwinds and the industry in general a lot of these non-traditional performance

marketers are looking at the betting industry saying okay well now maybe they've come maybe they've matured a little bit more maybe there's some opportunity for us to re-engage and test but in terms of the difference to be fair I think the Gap is closing in the in the difference what I mean by that is you know even the guys who have high intent SEO they're they're being very methodical and scientific around okay I'm gonna spend money to um improve my content add additional resources do all

those things they're trying to get as granular with that return on investment as the operator is and definitely as granular as those performance marketers traditional performance marketers are because they're paying for every click that they're delivering and so they need to know and as close to real time as possible if I paid to buy this impression that resulted in a click um am I going to get a return on that investment investment investment um because that that player is going to actually convert and then how

do I do that at scale so um I got two questions so one is like what kind of tools do Affiliates need or Performance Marketing Affiliates need that aren't always provided with the a lot of The Operators and the the other one is kind of like what's your take in terms of like how many like we know like there's like thousands of online casinos out there but I've talked to quite a few that they're not really tapped into the Performance Marketing space and they don't really

know what values there and I have talked to some operators which say say say um they almost want to keep this a secret like you know stay out of the space because it's really good right now so what's your take on both of those angles angles angles so in terms of tech we we always refer to it as table stakes and I don't think to me it doesn't matter if you're again we don't differentiate between the two I think it's table Stakes across the board whether

you're an SEO affiliate traditional or you're a performance marketer marketer marketer um I think the minimum requirements are you need to have the ability the operator needs to have the ability or the partners have the ability to pass Dynamic variables Dynamic variables um and not just one not just two up to five so think of think of it the same way as Google has UTM parameters right there's a reason why five UTM parameters on Google is the standard because that's typically how how many levels down

you need to go in order to be able to optimize effectively that does not exist currently with the with the current solutions that most these operators have deployed so that is a table stake for most performance marketers if you don't have that they can't do the analysis and optimization on their end that they need to be able to do therefore they're starting off on the wrong foot I think just as important um and maybe even critically more so is a real-time feedback loop on the data

of what actions are being taken post click so I deliver a user they get to the landing page they fill out page one boom that action was taken trigger uh they complete a full registration that's trigger number two and now they've funded an account and made it a successful first deposit that's trigger number three those three things we view as again table sticks if you don't have those three things then most performance marketers aren't going to take you seriously and they're not even going to look

at it very seriously at all at all at all um and if you want to be successful as an operator with getting those campaigns up and running and successful and being able to optimize them and be able to get as as much value out of those campaigns as possible you need those things you have to be able to have those uh in place in order to be able to effectively make sure that the capital you're deploying is going to be spent properly I think the sort

of third layer we look at a lot of times when evaluating what creates success and doesn't doesn't doesn't uh it's about the willingness and the desire to provide that data transparency of the post acquisition performance of those players so hey you know if you've got a Performance Marketing partner and there's a you know you're expecting a certain number of players to be delivered at a certain cost it's not just about can I acquire those players for that cost it's about am I can I acquire those

players for that cost within how are those players performing over time with the product once they're there there there and most performance marketers want to know that they want to know hey I I need to optimize my campaigns for a post acquisition performance metric what is it what can we normalize it to so that's easily transferable and digestible not something very complex something very simple and attainable um that give us as a partner the right indicator that we're sending you the right players right players um

and that's again those are the three sort of categories of what we call table Stakes like hey you have to be doing these things as an operator if you want to have any any chance of success uh in being a profitable operator in any sort of competitive environment yeah I know it makes sense I mean I've talked to a lot of different software providers that do things like you know postbacks and dynamic variable tracking and it's the same conversations uh these operators are being dragged to

these software companies saying we won't work with you unless you have the setup so go get it set up and then then we can actually have a discussion and it's uh I think it's think it's think it's um maybe not the the right way of going about it but it's still getting the job done where this this still has to happen yeah I think I think what's interesting from an operator's perspective and the feedback that we've gotten is that look it's not just the performance marketers

it's not just your existing SEO partners that are delivering you great players right now that could benefit from this the the money you're deploying internally the third party creative agency that you're using the um the SC or the PPC agency that you're using or you know your internal PPC team right right right um all of those teams will benefit from these because these these table Stakes are not just for Affiliates this is digital marketing 101 table sticks this is not Performance Marketing table sticks like if

you're spending money at all whether it's it's it's Affiliates performance marketers uh you know influencer campaigns or your own Facebook campaigns you've got to be you have to have these things in place in order to be able to have the campaign work and optimize exactly and uh next I want to go into what do you think is going to be changing or has to change in the next few years both in Performance Marketing and in affiliate marketing yeah yeah um so more broadly or specifically for

our space space um I kind of want to say both but let's start with igaming start with let's start with igaming first first yeah so so in eye gaming I think what you're going to see what needs to happen is a greater adoption of the right technology data stack to get those um table stakes in place I think once that's there that's there that's there um a greater understanding of the Partnerships that are available so looking at Partnerships as less transactional so so a lot of

times operators are looking at their affiliate or performance Partners as just acquisition Partners right um I think you're going to start to see as the market consolidates in terms of Who The Operators are and also consolidates in terms of who is controlling what controlling what um access to to which you know which customers and then as well as the the shift in consumer privacy and lack of third-party cookies all of those things are leading to the evolution of the Partnerships from purely acquisition to acquisition Plus

additional reach into those players right right right um the conversations that we see happening in North America specifically is okay we need to grow net new users but we also need to grow our share of wallet within the existing user base we already have already have already have um how can those performance Partners or affiliate Partners who you originally thought of as primarily or or exclusively in acquisition partner how do those relationships evolve to into something that is acquisition Plus um you know retention or or

ongoing you know promotion know promotion know promotion um and the the knee-jerk reaction is roll Rapture right tire and Order rupture I think that's very complex I think at the end of the day again talk about the fact that these operators are publicly traded a revenue share partnership immediately moves that that relationship into a liability column as opposed to uh Opex so I think there's a I think there's headwinds there I think there's more creative ways to get it done um where um where um where

you're creating alignment between the two you know all the stakeholders um but it's not something that's going to end up potentially having the chance to be one-sided either way either in favor of the operator or or the partner um so I think you're going to see a lot more sort of dynamic Partnerships evolve or dynamic commercial Arrangements inside of those Partnerships starting to evolve evolve evolve um I think you're going to continue to see more see more see more uh uh uh more consolidation around where

consumers are spending their dollars I think the thing that our industry tends to forget is we're competing against other verticals right everyone knows that a better has high intent and can spend money and right and so as much as you know when you talk to an operator they're like we want to be number one you know within our industry or we want to beat out X Y and Z partner it's like well yeah but you're still competing with everyone else who's also competing for those eyeballs

and a lot of times those guys are more Savvy they have less friction in their conversion flow uh and so they're going to be able to out-compete you from a dollars and cents perspective even though they have a product that that is not as high of a lifetime value is not as long or as engaging as a lifetime value but they're able to uh move more nimbly and take advantage of that high intent of a user to purchase right so I think you're going to start

to see more operators I at least we're hoping look and feel and act more like a you know some of these larger e-commerce Brands where it's highly personalized highly driven based on user engagement and not this cookie cutter one size fits all you show up to my sports book and I'm putting the promotion of whatever event is happening that weekend right it's going to be highly tailored user experience and that's going to flow through everything from from from the initial Banner on acquisition down to what's

the what's the SMS messaging that I'm delivering to this customer to get them to come and re-engage in the product product product yeah you're spot on that I mean when you look at e-commerce everything looks like advance and then when you look at igaming you're like wait a minute it's uh two different worlds yeah the interesting thing is igaming actually has a better if you look at you know if you break that down and you understand the engagement of a product entertainment like igaming versus a

versus a just a straight sale of a product there are so many more opportunities for personalization in eye gaming because gaming because gaming because every player engages in a different way and and and there's just so much more Rich data available to The Operators to understand okay what really makes this person tick you know um these e-commerce there's just way less signal that they're better at it and they're more the user experience is more personalized and more engaging even though they are um you know they

have way less signal than an operator than a gaming operator would have based on how those customers are engaging with their product yeah it's very true I have two more questions that are more discussion points and this is my opportunity to pick your brain uh the first one is this idea that most igaming affiliate sites they always focus on a sign up bonus and it's very rare that you see anyone focus on retention do you think with some of the tools that are available today we'd

actually be able to have better retargeting of that user where it's like hey they've already signed up to that brand whether it's bed MGM or whatever and they're able to see a different offer that might be more like 10 times more useful for from retention because you see a player that's maybe uh signed up to four out of 10 sites on a listing it's they're getting the same offer over and over again it's it's kind of like a marketing message that it just Falls a bit

flat what do you think could actually change here would this be more pixel tracking to be possibly involved involved involved yeah I don't know pixels might not be the right solution to it but yeah I mean more again the more Advanced the technology The Operators are deploying are deploying are deploying at scale the more opportunities for that type of personalization at the affiliate or performance or partner level is going to get right um you you sort of hit the nail on the head there right if

I'm if I'm gonna and this is technology exists now like we do this um where if a player hits my site and I got them to convert at whatever sports book when they come to my site again I'm not showing them the offer wall with that promotion or any promotion quite frankly we are sort of obsessed with that retention like hey we know that this player converted with operator a we're going to make sure that all the ads on site are now to your point retention

ads it's not sign up bonus it's not it's hey come back and play and we'll give you an additional you know 20 back or whatever right it's all retention oriented I think the Holy Grail of that and this is what we're pushing towards and exploring all kinds of Technologies how do we tie the ability to deep link into exactly what that user was engaging with when they were last time they were on that operator's book so similar you know again use the e-commerce example if I'm

browsing for a particular product and I go there and I I view a product on a site now when I'm seeing ads for that brand I'm not seeing ads for the brand I'm seeing ads with a particular product I was looking for or if I add it to my cart and I abandon right there are very specific ways that you can Target that user who abandoned a card say hey come back in today we'll give you free shipping and you drive them directly into the cart

with the item there ready to go right that level of personalization again has not it hasn't reached Mass adoption by The Operators um and I think it's coming and that that is the type of user experience look that's the ultimate user experience you're gonna you're gonna achieve and it historically that was done with pixels it doesn't have to be done pixels this stuff the technology exists now where all this stuff can be done in the back end um where you just know like okay cool this

is where this user is how it works it doesn't have to be cookie based and that's not third party based either that's the other thing the technology exists now to be first party or zero party data exists to be able to do that as an operator you do not have to rely on third parties telling you um what that could what that user's interest is which is is going to be even more critical going forward with all the different privacy policy changes that are happening both

domestically and abroad so yeah I mean that that that is the Holy Grail and I think we're moving that in that direction um but it it starts again it just starts with The Operators and their technology they have as Savvy as we as partner Publishers or or marketers want to get on their behalf at the end of the day we're still we are limited in what we're going to be able to do for them based on their technology for me anecdotally it's why I'm excited to

see someone like Fanatics right like Fanatics already has that level of Technology deployed on their e-commerce if they can take that level of personalization and understanding of consumers interests and layer that successfully into a sportsman environment environment environment it's going to be very compelling compelling compelling um you know the argument I hear a lot of people say well yeah but you can't move those you know so because someone bought a jersey I mean they're better I yeah sure I agree it's going to be a very

you know to me some percentage of their user base are gonna be known better and they're gonna be able to move them it could be small percentage could be significant shares jury still out but what I do know is that they have the technology infrastructure and the consumer Insight understanding to doesn't matter if it's one percent or it's ten percent or it's 30 they're going to be able to extract maximum value out of those players because they understand how to create an engaging user experience that

speaks directly to that player that player yeah I think uh with that answer I could probably ask another 20 questions but we'll definitely say that for another day that's that's very interesting uh the next discussion question I have is you know we're in the B2B space and there's a lot of Buzz about you know self-reported attribution where uh there's so many touch points in the B2B uh context and I rarely hear about this in the b2c space where your your B2B in working with operators but

you're making Enterprise software that's total b2c um do you think there's a time and place for self self-reported attribution does this make sense in the b2c space yeah I mean you're starting to see it already a little bit um I think that the challenge is going to be and who do you trust right like that self-attribution creates a uh it just creates it creates opacity in the in the data curve right um and then you start getting into incrementality and and and these guys self attributed

here you're already seeing it right like a Facebook and Google and running those they already self-attribute right self-attribute right um so um so um so then that's one of the challenges that we have when we work with operators do is okay where do you give the proper attribution right because Facebook's saying that they delivered it and Google's saying they deliver it and they're both right at the end of the day that user probably did touch both of those things so what does that user Journey look

like and how do you get that attribution model down properly um I think or our opinion and our thesis on it to this point has been that type of attribution modeling and incrementality and those really sort of marketing level 400 buzzwords really don't start to become impactful until you get the marketing 101 stuff done and that's what we tell operators like hey there's a 30 40 50 efficiency increase that you could have by just getting the foundational Basics table stake stuff done like working off of

a just a pure last click like if you can just get the last click attribution working properly working properly and do that at scale then you can start to tackle these other more complex problems problems um um um because if you don't have that data Foundation to begin with then the challenge is you're making decisions that are either opaque or incorrect right because you're you're trying to make very complex data decisioning on decisioning on decisioning on how do I you know these self-attribution plots these guys

are self-attributing um I need to make sense of who I actually give that that attribution credit to uh and now you're talking about doing that at scale you're talking about doing that whereas you're spending a thousand ten thousand a hundred thousand dollars a day like you're not gonna be able to do that unless you have systems that in place that can that can start to do that and automate it and you can create rules around it but you can't start to get an understanding of what

rules to even create around it until you understand hey this is the basics of what we're this is where we're spending money and that's what we're getting for it then you can start to layer in that complexity because that complexity layering in is it's incremental it's marginal right it's it's it's two to three percentage Point differences at scale scale scale um but those two to three percentage points are are massive when they start again massive at scale so um I you know the feedback we always

give everyone is guys there's 50 efficiency that you can create just based on getting back to the foundations and then let's start to tackle those problems in at a later time when two things are happening number one you've got a better foundational you have a better data Foundation to be making those decisions based off of but number two there's still a lot of changes happening at the user level that are going to affect you can make that decision today in terms of how you attribute that

you know who you're going to say okay well Facebook's right Google's right whatever you can you can you can make that attribution model today but it's going to change in the next three months in the next six months of the next year based on okay how's when does Google deprecate cookies right because that's going to change that attribution window when is our additional privacy change is going to come into place from a consumer standpoint where you're now going to have to self-attribute based on the fact

that you now know who that person is beyond an IP address or device ID it's you have their email address and phone number there's a different attribution model that you can create there so from our perspective we always looked at well that's good to be talking about that stuff and I think we should be thinking about it and you should be building the foundational basis to be able to do that but there's still so much opportunity to create in like massive we're talking exponential improvements exponential

improvements that are much easier to implement than okay we're going to now look at some self-attribution self-attribution self-attribution uh you know self-attribution windows from these particular Partners right and that's the challenge too is none of that stuff's Universal it's like well I treat this partner this way and then these these guys self-attribute a different way how do you normalize that right right right so yeah I think you'll start to see more of that happening but we always say there's there's a lot more low-hanging fruit there's

a lot more low-hanging fruit that will create massive impact um if you just sort of know where to look look look I agree and uh last question is what do you see of the future of affiliate marketing as it intersects with business intelligence intelligence yeah I mean I think you're I think we're living in real time I mean I think uh more and more Affiliates are are thinking like uh they're thinking more and more like uh public trade publicly traded companies that are that are that

are viewing every penny under a microscope so I think the shift that we're seeing is is twofold it's most marketing digital marketing now is being bought and sold programmatically and that includes that that even includes SEO right like how guys are looking at their link back strategies how guys are looking at you know their content deployment strategies um you know you you look at what what some of the AI is going to do in terms of being able to compile content on the Fly based on

the user when they're coming in right um You Look At You know we've seen this technology we've built some of this technology actually with HTML5 now you can compile you don't have to have static banners you can actually compile banners in the browser in real time based on all the information that exists right so now you're creative goes to a database as opposed to uh a section you know a a group of create a file of creatives now you've got you just put all the different

elements of the creative in a database and then that database compiles the creative on the fly when that user gets to the site and then now you can be even more granular with your optimization hey this call to action with this Banner with this headline now you can get very very granular with your optimizations um and so you don't have to rely on it just it just speeds up the time to efficiency so I think what you're going to see and again we're already living through

this is as a much more programmatic approach to affiliate and Performance Marketing I mean Performance Marketing says it in the name it's already it's performance market right you're looking at it from a very different perspective but I think you're just going to see a lot more granularity around around around what's working what's not working and then I go back to what we and this shift is happening at every industry not just ours ours ours the move from a transactional based partnership or relationship where it's you

uh you know cost per action CPA cost per action right I think these relations are going to move to a much more Dynamic uh commercial Arrangement where there's some sort of CPA component then there's some sort of Downstream again not necessarily rep share but some other mechanism that's Downstream that is that creates that alignment between the Partnerships Partnerships Partnerships um and then I think you're going to see more dynamicism around that um you know we're moving away from hey I'm going to pay you X for

all your traffic traffic traffic uh I we're getting into this you know with smart contracts and the Technologies now where I can create an agreement with a commercial agree with a partner where it says right I'm gonna pay you pay you pay you um this much for a New Jersey iOS better but I'm gonna pay you this much for a Pennsylvania Air Android better and I'm gonna pay you this much for an Arizona web-based better right um I think the the dynamic the dynamic nature of

the commercial Arrangement between performance partners and The Operators are going to start to change to key in on what is the value of the player you're actually delivering me right now right now um and I think that's that's where the that's the future and again it goes back to to to how do we get more efficient how do we create a more closely aligned partnership between partnership between all the stakeholders in that funnel and then how do we make sure that everyone's winning at the end

of the day this is entertainment industry it needs to be entertaining how do we make sure that everyone in that that ecosystem is is winning and enjoying themselves and uh can you give us your elevator pitch for intolytics and let everyone know how can they get a hold of you yeah so analytics we solve the very complex problem of customer acquisition to lifetime value um across channels across device types across verticals across verticals across verticals um at the end of the day our job is to

help operators be more efficient with the capital they're deploying to acquire customers and to help the marketing Partners in that ecosystem be as efficient as possible and create maximum yield for all the stakeholders in that funnel funnel funnel um how can they get a hold of me uh my email is Alan a-l-a-n intolytics.com you can go to the website um we try to show up at all the shows we try to be everywhere we can be we're on LinkedIn you know find us you should be

able to find us yeah we'll include all those links in the show notes as well yeah Alan uh thank you so much for doing this I think we could definitely have a couple more chats I know every time we chat in person uh the tangents and the discussions get more interesting and you're right we are living this future of affiliate marketing uh right now and things are getting exciting and changing yeah John thank you man love what you're doing uh I think this is this is

great for the industry and I really appreciate you having me on thank you for tuning in to the affiliate bi podcast I'd like to take this time to ask for a small favor to leave a rating and review wherever you listen to your podcast that helps us expand our reach to rank higher in podcast directories and reach more listeners