The data an affiliate has and the data it needs
An affiliate can see everything up to the click and almost nothing after it. Its own analytics record the visit, the page, the source and the click on an operator link; the operator's reporting records, at whatever granularity the agreement allows, what the customer did next. The affiliate business is run in the join between those two sources, and most affiliates run it badly. This lesson covers tracking, reconciliation, the metrics that matter, forecasting a revenue-share book, and detecting fraud in the affiliate's own traffic.
How tracking works
The operator issues the affiliate a tracking link containing an identifier for the affiliate and, usually, parameters for the campaign, page or placement. When a reader clicks, the operator's system records the identifier, typically in a cookie and a server-side session, and if the reader registers within the attribution window (thirty days is common; some operators offer longer, some far shorter) the account is tagged to the affiliate. Every subsequent event on the account, deposit, wager, net revenue, is reported against the tag.
Postbacks and server-to-server tracking. Rather than relying on the affiliate reading the operator's dashboard, the operator can send events (registration, first deposit, qualification) to the affiliate's tracking system in real time, by calling a URL the affiliate specifies. This is the standard in performance marketing generally, it lets the affiliate attribute conversions to the exact page and placement that produced them, and it is what allows the affiliate's own analytics to show conversion rates rather than just clicks. Affiliates should ask for postbacks on every event the operator will provide and build their reporting on them.
Sub-IDs. Parameters on the tracking link that identify the page, position, campaign or test variant. Without them, the affiliate knows it referred a customer; with them, it knows which page and which placement did, which is the difference between optimising and guessing.
Tracking platforms. Third-party systems that manage links, receive postbacks, aggregate operator reports through their APIs and present them in one place. The larger affiliates run one; the smallest use spreadsheets; the operator's dashboards alone are not enough, because they cannot be compared across operators or joined to the affiliate's own traffic data.
Reconciliation
Every month the operator reports what it owes, and the affiliate should check it. The check compares the affiliate's own record (clicks, postback registrations and first deposits, by operator and period) against the operator's statement (registrations, depositors, net revenue, commission). The discrepancies are routine and worth chasing: registrations the affiliate's tracking saw and the operator's did not (attribution lost, window expired, tagged to another affiliate), depositors counted differently (qualifying thresholds), net revenue computed with deductions the agreement did not specify, and commission tiers misapplied.
An affiliate that reconciles finds money; one that does not is paid what the operator's system produces, which is not always the same thing. Reconciliation also produces the evidence for the quality conversation in lesson five: the affiliate knows its cohorts' deposit rates and values because it has tracked them itself.
The metrics
The affiliate's operating dashboard has a small number of figures that matter, by operator, market and page.
Click-through rate: clicks on operator links per visit, by page. The measure of whether the content persuades.
Registration rate: registrations per click. Mostly the operator's sign-up funnel, partly the fit between what the page promised and what the reader found.
Deposit rate: first depositors per registration, and per click. The number operators care about most and the one that drives CPA qualification.
Value per depositor: for revenue share, the net revenue per referred customer per month, and its curve over time; for CPA, the fixed fee. Together with deposit rate, this gives earnings per click (EPC), the single figure that compares operators and pages on the same basis.
Earnings per click by page and operator is the core optimisation metric. A page whose EPC is twice another's deserves the better placement; an operator whose EPC is half the average deserves a worse one or a renegotiation.
Cohort retention: for revenue share, what share of a month's referred depositors are still active three, six and twelve months later, and what they generate. The shape of this curve is the affiliate's book.
Channel and market split: everything above, by traffic source and by market, for the portfolio management in lessons two and four.
Forecasting a revenue-share book
An affiliate on revenue share has an asset that pays in the future, and estimating its value is the most important calculation in the business, for management and for a buyer.
The method is cohort-based. For each month's referred depositors at each operator, the affiliate has (or can estimate from operator reports) the net revenue they generated in each subsequent month. Plotted, these produce decay curves: a cohort's monthly contribution typically falls quickly in the first months and then declines slowly for years, with casino cohorts longer-lived than sports and VIP-heavy operators producing lumpy curves. Averaging the curves gives an expected lifetime value per depositor, and applying it to the existing base gives the expected future revenue of the book, which is then discounted for the risk that terms change, operators exit markets or customers are limited.
A simpler version many affiliates use: the last twelve months' revenue-share income from cohorts older than twelve months, as a run-rate of "old money" that continues if new acquisition stopped tomorrow. That figure, times a multiple, is a large part of what a buyer will pay.
Fraud in the affiliate's own traffic
Operators police affiliate fraud, and an affiliate that is not policing it in its own traffic will be caught by the operator first, with consequences for the relationship.
Bonus abuse rings. Groups who register through affiliate links to claim sign-up offers, extract value and leave. They produce depositors who qualify for CPA and never generate revenue share, and operators claw back or terminate when they find them.
Self-referral and incentivised traffic. Users paid to sign up, or the affiliate's own team. Explicitly prohibited in every agreement.
Bought traffic from prohibited sources. Sub-affiliates or traffic vendors sending clicks from sources the operator's terms exclude (incentivised, adult, unlicensed markets).
Attribution hijacking. Toolbars, extensions or redirects that overwrite another affiliate's cookie with the fraudster's at the moment of registration.
The affiliate's defences are the same as the operator's at a smaller scale: monitor deposit rates and revenue-share curves by page, source and sub-affiliate for anomalies (a source with high registrations and no revenue is a ring), verify sub-affiliates, refuse traffic vendors, and read the operator's quality feedback as an early warning. The Fraud and Risk Management course covers promotional abuse from the operator side.
Data protection
Tracking a reader's click and receiving their conversion data is personal-data processing under European and British law and under a growing number of American state laws. Consent for tracking cookies, a privacy notice that discloses the affiliate relationship, and agreements with operators that define what customer data is shared and on what basis are the minimum. Operators have become cautious about customer-level reporting for exactly this reason, and the affiliate's tracking design should assume aggregate data from operators and event-level data only from its own postbacks.
Reporting that runs the business
A monthly affiliate management report answers: revenue by operator, market and model against forecast; EPC by page and operator, with the changes; cohort curves and the book's estimated value; reconciliation findings and money recovered; traffic by channel and the concentration figures; fraud flags; and the compliance items open. A report that shows only revenue and traffic answers none of the questions that decide what to do next month.
What to take from this lesson
Run the business in the join between your own analytics and the operators' reports. Get postbacks and use sub-IDs so conversions attach to pages. Reconcile every statement; the discrepancies are money. Optimise on earnings per click by page and operator, and value the revenue-share book by cohort decay. Police your own traffic before the operator does, and design tracking for data-protection law rather than around it.