Why API Tracking Is Taking Over Affiliate Marketing with Artem Butov

Show: Revenue Optimization with StatsDrone
Episode: Why API Tracking Is Taking Over Affiliate Marketing with Artem Butov
Host: John Wright
Guest: Artem Butov
Published: Fri, 15 May 2026 20:02:00 +0000
Duration: 24:02

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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[00:00:00] John Wright: I'm sure that API tracking is something like next step to the market. Uh, so if you remember, uh, back in the days, uh, where our market started, it was like pixel tracking. That is not alive anymore because of Google bans restrictions of cookie policies. Uh, it's not no, no more working. Well, I think it's more about AI, not API, because like API is still working with traffic and we're working on different AI solutions inside of a platform, make testing, ABI testing, running traffic way more easier.

[00:00:38] John Wright: For example, this is a goal in the nearest future, like to make you, Hey, generate me like one ton of things.

[00:00:47] Artem Butov: 20 for Facebook, 20 for PPC and other kinds of traffic. The thing is now starting affiliate marketing business is way more harder than it was in like five years before. So it's not a secret. There is a lot of scam and fraud cases in the industry and people doing scam like, um, purpose just because this is their business. They can't do it another way. You're listening to revenue optimization with stats.

[00:01:21] John Wright: This episode is supported by a few companies pushing the industry forward.

[00:01:26] Artem Butov: Want your eye gaming brand to stand out in a crowded market.

[00:01:30] Artem Butov: Odys iGaming are the experts in SEO, digital strategy, and brand protection. They help operators and affiliates rank higher, attract the right traffic and turn visibility into real growth.

[00:01:45] Artem Butov: Visit otis.global. slash eye gaming and own your market today. That's ody s dot global slash I.

[00:01:56] John Wright: And if you're serious about revenue optimization, you need the right data. StatsDrone helps affiliates track performance, spot revenue leaks, and make smarter decisions all in one place. Turn your data into growth at StatsDrone dot com.

[00:02:22] Artem Butov: So let's start at the very beginning. How did you get into affiliate marketing? Oh, it's a long story. I started my career in media and advertising. So I used to dodge first step in affiliate marketing and making that is 2011 or 12. And then I start to, I changed my job to affiliate marketing, to digital traffic. And in a few years I founded my own business, my own affiliate network, and that it, it grow to the howling.

[00:02:55] John Wright: Okay. So I think I kind of see where the story is going. Cause I think we have similar stories where we got into affiliate marketing. We saw problems. People weren't solving them. So we're like, let's build our own SaaS company to do that. So let's just jump right to the end. Tell us what you've been building with Markzell.

[00:03:14] Artem Butov: Well, more so from just, you know, we're a simple language. If the tracker, tracking solution. But we are not about building just a tracker.

[00:03:25] John Wright: This is our complex business tool that helps to improve performance and solve different, different kind of issues and tasks for our users. For example, it can track like do like any checker can.

[00:03:45] Artem Butov: Directly tracking, collecting stats, TRM of affiliate advertisers, employees. But from another part, we are given a software to work with API to send receive fleets, to manage cascades, to send by pink tree for some practical verticals and we're making life easier for our users because they don't need to build their own platform to manage servers, to manage the developer team. So we do all integrations in house and we are helping with everything.

[00:04:22] Artem Butov: So our clients, all they need to do is just run traffic and do arbitrage or affiliate marketing business.

[00:04:31] John Wright: Okay. It sounds like there's almost some small overlap of what we do with stats from which is we get stats for affiliates from affiliate programs and affiliate networks and we have affiliate networks using our tools. So how would you describe what your company does compared to once on the market, cause like the second, like we started chatting, I went and looked up your site and I was like, I don't really think of, I can't think of anyone out there on the market that does what you do. It's kind of like a unique collection of solutions.

[00:05:06] Artem Butov: Yes, you're right. So we are given opportunity to collect leads to make collect different operations on one platform. For example, if our clients work by FBI, API, if they prefer this kind of sending, so they collect data and so they can do later additional monetization of the data so they can do email, sending, called API, do like any kind of marketing they can with the data. And, well, of course, it can be helpful if for like more pro-filids, pro

[00:05:44] Artem Butov: people who are working with traffic, it's just another level because I'm sure that API tracking is something like next step to the market.

[00:05:53] Artem Butov: So if you remember back in the days where our market started, it was like pixel tracking that is not alive anymore because of Google bans restrictions of cookie policies.

[00:06:06] John Wright: It's not no more working and directly tracking is just very simple way to start and to run traffic, but API is more complex solution. It's when you are at the point of managing data and all flows.

[00:06:22] Artem Butov: So we're giving everything we are given a tool. So the work of our clients is make a good optimization of traffic and squeeze maximum from traffic, the app getting and delivering to like the products or advertisers.

[00:06:41] John Wright: And like I come a lot, I'm more from the, the iGaming background where there's a lot of money, but I personally find the tech is, it's very lacking. I think when you go outside of iGaming in affiliate marketing, that's when you start seeing people that are more advanced, more advanced with tools. Do you think that we're kind of now going into a new era where like I call this like before COVID we did B2B tools, which is boring to boring. And I think now everyone finds the stuff that we're working on a bit more exciting. Do you see more of a shift where people are actually caring about data more or they're kind of looking for help. They're like, I know I need to do this. Like where do I start?

[00:07:21] Artem Butov: Yeah, of course. This is a reality.

[00:07:24] John Wright: API tracking, API software are gaining its popularity among affiliate marketers and players across a lot of industries. Of course, there are some industries that are, I mean, niches in the affiliate marketing industry that have under developed API kind of sending, for example, in iGaming, there were streaks about data. So it's not something that works for iGaming for now, but for other world goals like pay-downs, dating, Legion, any kind of

[00:08:03] Artem Butov: sweepstakes, what else, Nutra.

[00:08:07] Artem Butov: So the API tracking and many other, by the way, API tracking is exactly what it's like usual thing. Because for example, in Nutra or Forex, Crypto Vertical or dating, there is like all players know about API, not all of them using it, but for some of them, it's must have too, must have thing. And they, for example, such verticals as like Forex and CFD, Crypto, those guys only sending by API, like 90% of tracking goes through API.

[00:08:45] John Wright: Do you see a future where maybe this is lacking on the iGaming side where like in a perfect world, you'd be able to generate all of your tracking links from an affiliate program without having to log in? It's kind of like an API request where you can say, hey, I need 500 links right now. Can I get them?

[00:09:03] Artem Butov: That concept in iGaming is kind of not a real thing. I know one or two companies that are building it. So do you see this more as kind of being normal on outside?

[00:09:14] John Wright: Well, I think it's more about AI, not API, because like API is still working with traffic and we're working on different AI solutions inside of a platform.

[00:09:27] Artem Butov: Make testing, A-B testing, running traffic way more easier. For example, this is a goal in the nearest future, like to make you, hey, generate me like 100 the links, 20 for Facebook, 20 for PPC and other kinds of traffic, put it there and we start traffic. So this is the goal. Of course, for now it's not the reality, but I think our sooner or later it will be like just normal things that our marketers do. Yeah. I mean, short term, it's like, we'll have browser agents that can actually do this for you, which is better than nothing.

[00:10:05] Artem Butov: But at some point we'd like to see this as more automated where like you said, you can make this request on your side. It pushes through and it just happens without having to actually need any agents.

[00:10:19] John Wright: Yeah.

[00:10:20] John Wright: Yeah. Okay. Do you think affiliate networks are going to get stronger as time goes on? Because I mean, my take is affiliate networks outside of iGaming. They're massive. Like you look at A-Win, SharerSale, ClickBank and so many of them, like these are giant companies. Do you think there's room for more of them?

[00:10:42] Artem Butov: Well, those players you mentioned, they are really top. This is the biggest affiliate networks in the world. And this is the network that belongs to big media companies, big media holdings all over the world. And the thing is now starting affiliate marketing business is way more harder than it was like five years before. The competition is very tough and affiliates marketers goes to like a small teams prefer to work with few advertisers and this, it becomes like a massive.

[00:11:18] Artem Butov: But still affiliate networks are existing and we cannot deny that if you do everything right, so you will be successful in this business. The thing is why we are delivering MarkSale to market

[00:11:33] Artem Butov: because with MarkSale you can start your affiliate network having lack of sources. For example, you can optimize like finance, your marketing stuff, like your development stuff. So you can run your network having one, two people on board and with MarkSale this is easy to go.

[00:11:52] John Wright: And we are developing more and more tools. So that's why I'm saying we are not only tracker. The thing is we are building ecosystem. Ecosystem to make it work faster, better to make

[00:12:04] Artem Butov: running traffic easier than it was.

[00:12:08] Artem Butov: Okay. Would you say that people could use smart cell for either launching a network or they could keep their existing affiliate network and still use your tools?

[00:12:18] John Wright: They can keep that work they use and use our tools,

[00:12:23] Artem Butov: especially if they work with the API or if they want to build a smart link, because we are given a platform that allows to build a smart link with API directly connection in like either way with optimization of landing pages rotation and products inside the smart link. So it depends on goals of our clients. Okay. I mean, I'm a big fan of conversion rate optimization and I think more affiliates and affiliate programs and affiliate networks need to pay attention to this. I mean, it sounds obvious, but I think there's been a lot of people that have been able to kind of

[00:13:02] Artem Butov: make very good money without having to focus on this. And I think now, because, you know, if you're just looking at Google as a traffic source, it's very unstable. So, I mean, now we need to care about the click more than we've ever have before. You're right. I think like there is no stable sources right now. All sources like are in kind of turbulence, meta, Google, also SEO that actually was the strongest kind of source for all businesses actually. But now all this, like the only one source that I can mention is ad networks, like barter students

[00:13:41] Artem Butov: traffic that I think will be alive for a long time. It's like the dinosaurs and it will survive any crisis. And going back to the affiliate and publisher side, like, do you think more of them should use

[00:13:57] Artem Butov: affiliate agencies and affiliate networks to get better deals where, I mean, when you get started, you don't have the traffic, so you can't negotiate the better deals. Do you think that this is kind of like a must do for most affiliates or depends?

[00:14:13] John Wright: Well, the thing is you cannot grow without like some special deals, wide labels or some special offers to grow with affiliates. For affiliate networks, for example, the thing is that you start growing, having given to your affiliates additional caps when the caps are over. So your heroes networks to give it caps to make their flow work. But in the same time, you have to understand that if they run out of caps, probably this topic is not very good. So, and so step by step, like starting from giving additional caps and moving forward.

[00:14:53] John Wright: So of course, for every network, every agency, the thing is, the main idea is to keep to their affiliates, some in-house and special products. And this is how they can survive and scale their business. So that's why we took a focus on like in-house solution that can be built with your tracking platform, actually what we do for our affiliates as well. Okay. And I got like a more of a hypothetical, no, it's not even a hypothetical situation. It's a real, it's a real reality of affiliate marketing. I mean, on the iGaming side, and I know this happens outside of iGaming.

[00:15:31] John Wright: We've seen big companies get bigger by acquiring smaller companies and they use arbitrage all day long. Like they had these amazing deals. They talked to a site that they could buy. They know what their deals are. They can pretty much calculate very quickly how long it'll take them to get that ROI. And then you end up with like bigger sites owning more of the ecosystem where they go to operators and say, okay, you now have to pay us these very high CPAs, flat fees and rev-share deals.

[00:16:02] Artem Butov: Do you think like the margins are getting squeezed all across the affiliate marketing?

[00:16:07] John Wright: Yeah. And we see it like obviously the margins are squeezing like across all the niches.

[00:16:15] Artem Butov: First of all, the gray niches are affected mostly with this like restrictions from payment solutions from main traffic sources and it affects the market. Very hard. With iGaming, I cannot say that marginality like decreasing with like very high speed, but there is like, of course, from year to year, making money getting harder when the prices are going up. So we have to survive in these redities.

[00:16:53] Artem Butov: Yeah. It just makes sense. It's like I look at this from both sides of the fence, the affiliate side where if you don't have these deals, it's kind of like it's very difficult to get started. But on the other side with the affiliate programs, they kind of are eating their own tail by saying, okay, if you don't have this traffic, we're not going to give you these deals. So the companies that end up getting the best deals have like very low margins. And I've heard in some cases, the margins are paper thin where it's like, it's almost not even worth, you know, paying for the traffic. So I mean, if you create those situations, you're basically making this a self-affilling prophecy that, you know, only the big will get bigger and then you're going to be dealing with

[00:17:32] Artem Butov: affiliate networks, which is kind of like a super affiliate, the biggest affiliates, which they ask for the best deals. And yeah, I think you're right. I think affiliate networks and the operators, the affiliate programs, they need to, I think they need to start looking at their own data and going, okay, where do we have our margins? Where should we spend more time getting traffic, both from existing affiliates as well as the new ones?

[00:17:56] John Wright: Yeah, of course. But it always was like you cannot play with a big margin with the top of affiliates who are delivering traffic. But you can always like play with a lot of smaller affiliates. So network business is always like kind of negotiation from both sides. But if you do a media buying, so this is another point. So you can find the nice bundles to make your ROI on a high level. And it always like this, but still as like having experience in media buying as well. The marginality in iGaming, for example, again, it

[00:18:34] John Wright: decreased. If you see nowadays the ROI from traffic sending like 100 to 100%. For sure, there is something wrong. Or you get stopped like very fast. You know, something like wrong with the stats of tracking. So you have to take care of everything and be very careful.

[00:18:56] Artem Butov: And what would you say is the state of affiliate management today? Because it's like an iGaming, I deal with a lot of affiliate managers where I actually feel that they're, they come into the space with less training. They got a sales background. So they come in with aggressive sales that don't build a relationship with me or anyone else in my strong opinion. And they all just look and sound the same. It's kind of like they just want more affiliate signups and they want more sales, but they don't care about the quality of traffic. And like what you just said two minutes ago is that they're not even looking at the stats and understanding like wait a minute, where are my problematic affiliates? Like which ones are actually

[00:19:35] Artem Butov: fraudulent or, you know, they're gaming the system.

[00:19:40] John Wright: Of course, it depends on the approach because always it should be a small approach. So from one, one part, you're sending traffic, if it's good, your main goal is to scale traffic to make more money for you for your clients. But of course, there is a lot of so it's not a secret that is a lot of scam and fraud cases in the industry and people doing scam like purpose, just because this is their business. They cannot do it another way. And so that's why you have to be always like pay attention on everything. If you're an advertiser, you have to pay

[00:20:18] John Wright: attention to your affiliates and like daily and even hourly following the stats and rely on your end. If you're a network, you have to control the conversion rate feedbacks from advertisers just to make sure you avoid this fraud or scam cases from another sources because even trusted sources sometimes can mix some very

[00:20:42] John Wright: suspicious traffic to your deal. And so the main thing is just to make difference between like low quality traffic and fraud traffic because fraud traffic is actually this is like something very, very bad that it's like all market I think fight against fraud cases fraud traffic. But from another point, the traffic can be just it cannot fit with the product, for example, or different approach, for example, if affiliate run some crash

[00:21:18] John Wright: approach to slot lender, it will never can work. It will never work in a good way. And of course, this is violation of the rules. Of course, it's again like the this this is equals to like fraudulent traffic. But what I would say that sometimes it's not the it's not a fraud traffic. But it's just not working for advertiser. And here is the point when you have to place a professional with your affiliates and with advertiser to check and to find out

[00:21:54] John Wright: what kind of traffic is it is. Yeah, no, it makes sense. I mean, from my point of view, the way I see it is that you could easily fill your database with leads that they'll register but they're never going to purchase. It's like, why have them in your database in the first place? Like you're just wasting more resources. You're sending out more emails that that's just going to affect your bounce rate. I mean, you know, you're gonna get people asking dumb questions that eat up your customer support. I mean, there's there's no winning there. Yeah, you're all right. Yeah. Artem, this was very insightful. I'm definitely looking forward to learning more about the tool and chatting afterwards. So I want to

[00:22:34] John Wright: pass it back to you. How can people get ahold of you?

[00:22:37] Artem Butov: Well, you can you can drop me an email to be at smarxell.io or join me like a big man on Telegram. But in Telegram, sometimes it's just a lot of noise. So I think like ready to share some of my like contacts to you. And so you will put it in the video recording. Absolutely. LinkedIn for sure. And we'll definitely put a link to the website there. LinkedIn. Yeah, of course, it always works. Awesome. Artem, thank you so much for doing this. Thank you very much.

[00:23:20] John Wright: Let's give a shout out to a few affiliate program platforms that are supporting this podcast. That includes IG suite, Afilka and Inteletix. Thanks for the support. And if you're looking to launch your affiliate program or affiliate network, check out these software and learn more at revenue optimization.io. This is revenue optimization with Statstrome, where better data leads to better decisions. If you're not measuring it, you're guessing. See you next time.