Affiliate Link Research with Affiliate Track

and welcome to the AffiliateBI podcast. Today I want to talk about a tool we've been building for quite some time. We've tried to make this thing happen over three years ago and we we weren't successful. Last year we built an MVP and we got some success with it and this year we've rebuilt that MVP so we can make it more of an actual product. And that product is called affiliatra.io and it's in beta currently.

So, if you want to sign up, you're free to uh test it out. But I I'm discovering some interesting things that I didn't realize we were going to run into. Um just different things of tracking links and the types of links that are being offered to affiliates, the data you can find when you start looking through some of these tracking links, and just discovering things that I'm not even trying to find them, but I'm finding them anyways.

So, just to give you one example, um this was kind of more accidental. I just noticed a an ad network that was doing pure parasite SEO. Now, parasite SEO has been around for a long time, but the way it used to work, the way I'm going to explain it is that you'd find a high ranking, high authority site. You write an article like best free spins. So, you rank for that keyword, that page ranks for that keyword, and then you have one link that links back

to your money page or your affiliate site, and then that's where you've you're funneling all this traffic from. Now what what I'm seeing is something very different where that page is becoming the top list. So the most famous version of this where parasite SEO was successful and then got destroyed was when all these public companies had deals with like you know I can't remember it's like guardian different newspapers things like that you know it was basically katenna media uh better collective gambling.com I think even rake

might have had some um just all these deals were happening and it was like oh damn like this is going to be the new paraset SEO where it's going to be very difficult for people to compete with. Now I'm seeing all these random newspaper sites. I don't want to call them random. They're sites that you wouldn't think of, but they have a very high domain authority and they rank.

They're ranking for localized content. They're ranking for different languages, anything you can think of. And they have at least like five operator brands or five casinos linking to them. And they're using a different domain redirect. So they're not pasting the raw links they're getting from the affiliate program. They're basically doing a redirect, which is what most affiliate sites do, but quite often they're not showing up in regular reports.

So, people don't always know that these things exist. But I'm now starting to document a list of what I can find for both ad networks and affiliate networks. And I think this research is just going to take at least a year. And I think I'm going to find thousands and thousands of these, if not tens of thousands, and maybe even over 100 thousand. So, it's just I I think it's cool.

Um, I'm starting to learn what people are doing behind the scenes that they probably don't want other people to know about. But with this tool, anyone's going to be able to find out. And like I said, it wasn't our intention to to do this. We just wanted to actually build the tool and kind of go, let's find the internet of websites that are affiliate sites linking to operators.

Let's get our hands on all of them and let's see what we can find. And what we're finding is just immense stuff. So now I'm finding stuff where I've always known this to be true where it's like I'm trying to grow the Stone affiliate program and it's like, well, who am I looking for? I'm looking for people that are promoting uh not just my competition, but if any site that that links to another affiliate program through a sub affiliate link, that's actually of interest because that

means they have web master targeted content, which is what I want. Like I want web masters to know that our affiliate program exists so they can sign up and yeah like just sign up and join put the tracking links and talk about our product. Uh of course I want that but there there's also a massive internet out there of these types of tracking links which are just pure sub affiliate links.

So they're not going to show up in your regular brands and that's going to be something we're going to work on over the next few months of just trying to aggregate all this data and the data is just immense. It is like in just gambling alone. There's casino, sports betting, poker, bingo, lottery. Um you can even throw esports in there. Um there are tracking links of closed brands which is pretty prominent.

And then there's tracking links of brands that have switched software. So the old links are now invalidated which is pretty substantial. I mean, that's a lot of revenue leak in terms of people just losing money by not updating their links because they probably the email, the compliance email they got most likely went up went into spam or the company that changed it, they just didn't really be super proactive about making sure that you did change your links because that's now working in their favor when you're

using the old links. Um, and then the keyword analysis. Um, you can basically type in keywords and look for page titles. So, what are some of the page title searches you can do? It ju it just doesn't end. Um, playtech casinos, playtech bonuses, micro gaming casinos, micro gaming bonuses, slots tournaments, um, no deposit bonuses, um, you know, bet 365 review, um, any review of any brand. You can do it.

You can do comparison of brands. So, put in two keywords like Bet Fair, Bet 365. Um, and then even the things that are kind of more like I wouldn't even say it's black hat. I just say it's uh you know the unethical stuff like people that are targeting GameStop keywords. So it's like well if you do want to know what sites are doing it, you just put in GameStop in the keyword and you're going to start finding pages that link to it.

Now just for context, you're going to find some pages that legitimately link there and it's not intentional. It's probably like a site that has a site sitewide offer that just sits in the footer. So that technically counts. Uh, but then you're going to have other ones where people keywords and they they they definitely want to pull these people in. So, that's not quite ethical. So, yeah, if you want to try the tool, it's affiliated.io.

Uh, we're looking for more beta beta testers. And yeah, I'm really excited at um what we're be able we're able to find. And most importantly, it's I want this tool to be useful for affiliates. First and foremost, it's like if you're linking to stuff that you shouldn't be linking to um because it's probably poor performing or it's closed, that's revenue leak. So, you know, we want you to to know this when you're using Statone.

And if you're an affiliate manager, it is going to be a research tool to help you find affiliates and know if affiliates have kind of basically taken links off of their pages. And it's also going to try to educate affiliate managers to go what are some of the other content pages that you're missing out on that your competition has that you don't. So, for example, it's like we want to do analysis on blogs, like what kind of blog content links out to operators and what kind

of traffic's behind it. I believe there's a lot of traffic, but when I used to be an affiliate, I never had an affiliate manager say, "Hey, can I be on your blog? Can I can we do an interview?" And and even worse, um, can we be in your newsletter? They never asked that. And that was always the way in which we were able to send instant FTDs per day, like on the spot.

like within 24 hours you'd get quite a few FTDs from us with our old affiliate site and I I can't remember a time when an affiliate manager asked for this and we had thousands of brands we had thousands of affiliate login and yeah it's just like they all wanted the top uh top listing on the site and I was just like you know what if you want it you can overpay for it but I don't think that's what you want but I don't know like this

is maybe maybe this is why the affiliate space is the way it is because people just want to basically blast through budgets and they need to get their quotas, but whatever. Um, helpful for affiliates, helpful for affiliate managers, for operators, for regulators. I think it's going to be pretty cool tool. So, check it out, affiliate track.io. And for everyone else, uh, you know about Stats, it's uh, we think it's one of the best tools on the market for affiliates to help you manage deals, your flat

fees. Um, yeah, just get all your stats. We're close to 2,200 gambling affiliate programs and we're now just starting to include noni gaming affiliate programs. So yeah, it's a save yourself a lot of time, a lot of hassle and let us help you get the data on the accounts, brands, campaigns, dynamic variables, postbacks, and coming soon player engagement reports and geo breakdown.