How Dynamic Variables Help Detect Shaving
About This Episode
Can dynamic variables help detecting shaving from operators?
Based on a conversation I had last week with Armin Aganovic, CRO of Joelsson Media, I realized that click IDs are more valuable than I realized.
That is, operators can't inject fake winning players if you're in control of issuing unique codes within your click IDs.
Full Transcript
Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: How Dynamic Variables Help Detect Shaving
Host: John Wright
Published: Tue, 15 Jul 2025 11:42:00 +0000
Duration: 2:10
Speaker labels are a two-speaker split from pauses (host vs guest). Timestamps are `[HH:MM:SS]` from the episode audio. Light ASR; names and brands may need a pass.
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John Wright: Welcome to the affiliate BI podcasts. Today I wanna have another quick episode. It's based on a conversation I had with Armin Aganovich from chief revenue officer of Jolson Media. And he was in Montreal recently and we had a chance to have a coffee and we were talking about dynamic variables and what it can do for affiliates. And it got me realizing that it's actually probably more powerful than I realized. And I kind of took some of it for granted. So for example, if you look at the topic that, shaving and affiliate marketing, it's not a topic that everyone wants to talk about,
John Wright: but for affiliates, it's very important. Well, one thing I realized is that if you're able to know every click that's coming out of your website, going to an operator, it's gonna be very difficult for an operator to inject a winning player that could happen on any of your tracking likes. Now, when it goes into a default campaign, you have no recourse.
John Wright: You can be like, look, the player came through,
John Wright: they've won a lot of money the last few days of the month. You just have to trust it. But if you've controlled the clicks, there shouldn't be two players coming from the same unique click ID that you're the one who's generated. So you can basically say this click ID was generated in Switzerland, in New Zealand, in Canada at this exact time, and it's only happened once. So it's probably gonna be a unique way of fighting operators and going, hey, I know where my traffic's coming from. It came from here, and there should never be two players on a single campaign. So the other advantage is you obviously get player value.
John Wright: So I think when people understand the player values, this is something you can use for negotiation to your operators, but more importantly, it helps you know if you're actually working in the right direction going, hey, are you making your traffic better? Are your players better? Are they worse? You won't know this unless you're measuring player values through the use of dynamic variables where you're able to isolate all of your players.