This article was originally published on the Income Access Affiliate Marketing Blog under the title Tips for Choosing the Right Affiliate Program.

Revenue and profitability for an affiliate is heavily influenced by the affiliate programs with which you choose to partner. Top performing affiliates understand this correlation, and carefully weigh their business needs against an operator’s program before committing money and effort to promoting a brand.

Tip 1: Choose a Strong Brand
An overwhelming majority of affiliates join an affiliate program based on a brand’s reputation. The Income Access survey found that 88% of affiliates cited reputational factors as the most important factor in their decision to join a program. There are two influential factors that determine the strength of an iGaming brand: (1) the player-facing brand the affiliate program promotes and (2) the affiliate-facing side – the affiliate program itself. Savvy affiliates tend to evaluate each of these before entering into a business relationship with an operator through its affiliate program.

Tip 2: Choose a Brand that Fits your Business Model
The decision to actively promote an affiliate program should hinge on whether that program can meet the unique needs of your business model. The Income Access affiliate survey found that super-affiliates look for three criteria before choosing to promote a program: (1) reliable tracking software, (2) competitive commission structures, and (3) promotional materials.

Tip 3: Robust Tracking Software
As an affiliate, you rely on software to track your referrals, calculate your commissions, and provide transparent reporting that you can use to monitor campaign performance. So before actively promoting a program and investing in your relationship with a brand, it’s important that you ensure their affiliate software supports all these functions.

Affiliate marketing is all about tracking referrals from one party to another, so you want to ensure that software powering a program can provide tracking reports that meet your business needs. The Income Access survey found that higher earning affiliates were much more likely to compare reporting metrics across campaigns. Advanced tracking metrics can help increase earnings because affiliates can compare, analyze and better understand changes in campaign performance.

You should also ensure that the software includes the marketing tools that will help you both save time and optimise your campaigns. For instance, if you use PPC advertising, it will be important that the software is capable of tracking and reporting on players referred, deposits, revenues generated by each Adwords ad and which types of players are coming through on which keywords.

Tip 4: Competitive Commission Structures
To be competitive, commissions need to be lucrative and suited to specific products/promotions. For instance, while the Income Access survey found that over 90% of affiliates work often with revenue share, about 32% of affiliates used cost per action (CPA) and cost per click (CPC) commission structures. This is because many affiliates require a hybrid commission structure to support their business model.

Just as different incentive structures work better for promoting different products, every affiliate has their own promotional methods. Getting the most out your relationship with an affiliate program requires that commission structures are compatible with your business model and promotional needs.

Tip 5: Promotional Support
There are two sides to promotional support that an affiliate requires: creatives and the software tools to manage those creatives. In addition to new promotions, an affiliate program should provide up-to-date creatives. These will support you in effectively publicizing new player promotions, and regularly changing creatives will help combat the effects of banner-blindness.

Similarly, you should look into whether the software includes tools to help you geo-target users with relevant creative. For example, showing users from different countries banners that are in different languages, or feature different promotions is a great way to build your own brand’s reputation as a source of relevant information. That, in turn, helps with conversion rates.

When you join an affiliate program, you are entering into a business relationship that will have a direct impact on your earnings. Evaluating the brand and the resources it offers will allow you to choose the right affiliate program to partner with. After all, a brand that is in-tune with an affiliate’s own brand will complement that affiliate’s business and enforce the rapport of trust that affiliates build with their players, ensuring long-term profitability.