How to detect when affiliate programs shave affiliates

[Music] [Music] I'm John Wright and you're listening to AffiliateBI, the business intelligence and affiliate marketing podcast brought to you by [Music] [Music] Snapstrap. Welcome to the AffiliateBI podcast. Today is just a solo cast and I want to talk about this concept of shaving and affiliate marketing. Um, since I've been talking about shaving a little bit, um, it's been bringing up a lot of conversations on LinkedIn and in person where people are like, "Does this really happen or how does it happen?" And I did a poll

few months ago earlier this year, and I said, "How many affiliates believe they've been shaved at least once?" And I don't think I could find a single affiliate that said uh, they voted no for that poll. I did that poll in multiple channels. It was LinkedIn, affiliate guard dog, GPWA, Reddit, uh, X, and the only people that actually voted no in some of the polls. Uh, when I looked at the answers, they were affiliate managers.

Um, they seem to be agitated that, um, anyone would be talking about such a a subject as if like, no, that needs to be always swept under the rug. So, I just want to talk about what happens, why I'm not trying to defend it, but people just need to understand it. I mean, in the I gaming space, if you get a player that's potentially spending hundreds of thousands of dollars per month, I mean, that's a massive commission.

Um, I think there's some programs that the ability to untag a player, whether it's, well, maybe it's not really accidental, it's just intentional. It's a single click of a button, that's a lot of money to save in in just one click. So us as affiliates, we have to just basically trust that whatever is happening on the other side of the fence, which we can never see, we just need to trust that it's true.

There are some tools that will help affiliates defend against this in the future, which will be, as one example, dynamic variables, uh, which is kind of like a click ID level tracking. If you're sending players to an operator, you can send with a click ID. And if you happen to have firstparty data, then you'll be able to actually know when that player is actually churned. But let's get back to the patterns of how could you possibly know if an appro if an affiliate program is shaving

you. Um, one tool that we've been working on with the help of our head of product Joe Hatch is something we call change log. It's a feature that is built external to our app, but it uses the stats drone data itself. So, for example, we're getting the last 10 days of data from your affiliate programs through scraping or API. So, every every day we're just getting the last 10 days.

So as this goes on, you could be running the app for months. So what happens is in the last few months, your data was scraped at the time it was recorded. So this is like if it's 3 months ago, it's 3 months ago. Now imagine if you were to reync the data. If you do it currently in the app right now, you're going to overwrite what was previously there.

So if anything's changed, you're actually going to lose what has actually changed. So what we recommend for some of our customers is you just make a copy of your your accounts whether it's credentials or API. You create a new account. So come talk to us and we'll help you set that up and we'll enable it for you. And then basically you export your data either through an API key or you just download the CSV files.

Now you have two unique data sets to compare. Now once you start comparing you can build a basic script to basically compare what has changed and how it has changed. So some of the things that are we are seeing changing in looking at some of these reports are depositing players simply disappearing. And another one that maybe kind of is not obvious but it's when a player disappears from a campaign but reappears somewhere else.

And what's happening there is that player is being moved from campaign A to campaign B. And maybe what is probably happening and this requires a little bit of uh detective work on your end is maybe the campaign that it's been moved to doesn't have a deal or it's got terms and conditions associated with it like a high roller policy. Um or maybe simply put it actually has the deal you negotiated is not on that campaign.

So that could be the one thing. Another pattern that I think people should always look out for, and this is why it helps to analyze your data, is the idea that the last few days of the month, you know, Felis would kind of joke like they're always worried that there'd be that magical winning player that just comes up out of nowhere and magically hits and just wipes out your commissions.

So, you've been excited for the whole month about, you know, you're going to get that your cash out of what you've earned only to see it disappear on the spot where your balance could actually go negative or maybe 50% of your revenue was wiped out from a single player. And again, we don't know if these players are real. We don't know if the program has a magical ability to add, you know, winning players or maybe they actually did tag a winning player.

We have no way of knowing. But what you can do is you can at least analyze all of the brands and all the campaigns across all the affiliate programs you work with and just start studying the the patterns. So if you visualize the data itself, you should see a kind of like a a bar chart. Or if you kind of put this in a tree map, you could see the first, second, 3rd, fourth, fifth days of the week all the way to the 26th, 27th, 28th.

And it goes without saying uh the 31st doesn't happen um every every month of the year. So you can kind of factor that into your calculations, but you want to see, are you experiencing more winning players at any programs on the last two days of the month? If you are, then this could be a sign that something might be happening that shouldn't be happening. And what you can do is if you find any of these things, you can take it to your affiliate program and say,

"Hey, I found this." And if you're not happy with it, just simply tell them. By saying that, you're giving yourself the opportunity for them to do something about it. Now, I've heard that um companies that have talked to us about using Statone. They said the thing that they want best about this change log feature isn't just to catch them catch programs doing it once. It's more of the idea that they want them to know that they're watching it.

And I've heard this from many affiliates before. It's just kind of like, hey, they show them what they found and then they they tell me after that whenever they approach their affiliate programs with the this kind of information, they find that the patterns just stop happening. So, it's one of many ways of which you can kind of defend yourself. Again, it's a topic that no one really wants to talk about, but let's be honest, no one's talking about it and it should be talked about because

it's affiliate marketing. This should be a partnership. We need to trust each other and I think the trust is broken on both sides of the fence. We're trying to fix it on one side. I'm not saying us as a company are going to fix it on both sides, but we can at least start there and and just kind of have that conversation and say, "Hey, we believe this stuff happens and what can we do about it?" Um, so again, I'm excited about the future of tracking

tools where with things like dynamic variables and first-party data, you're going to have for the first time the ability for you as the affiliate to own your player. And that gets me excited about where we can actually take things with tracking tools. And, you know, one of our mission statements is to uh not just automate and optimize affiliate marketing, but try to get these advanced tools in the hands of all affiliates.

So, you don't need uh a $20,000 budget and a BI team to make this uh stuff happen. Thank you for tuning in to the AffiliateB 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 to reach more listeners.