Case Study: How One Casino Operator Scaled Acquisition Without Scaling Admin

An online casino operator had reached the point where its affiliate program was becoming difficult to manage with in-house tracking and spreadsheets. The program itself was performing well, but growth was steadily creating more reporting, commission work and partner administration for the team.

After moving the affiliate side of the operation to Trackdesk, the partner network grew by 75%, first-time depositors doubled, and the operator estimates that around 40% of its routine affiliate-management tasks disappeared.

Industry: iGaming — online casino
Previous setup: In-house tracking and spreadsheets
Commission models: CPA, RevShare, hybrid

Published under NDA with no casino name or domain. Achieved performance is expressed as movement against the operator’s previous baseline. 

Results

• +75% affiliate partners. The network grew without a matching increase in the team managing it

• +100% FTDs. First-time depositors through the affiliate channel doubled

• −40% routine affiliate-management tasks

The Problem

There was nothing fundamentally wrong with the operator’s affiliate program itself. Partners were sending traffic, players were depositing, and the commercial side was healthy. But as this particular program grew, four recurring issues were taking more of the team’s time and were becoming harder to manage with the existing in-house setup.

1. Every new partner brought the same manual work with them

A new affiliate meant another onboarding process, another set of numbers to pull, another report to prepare and send, followed by another conversation whenever the partner’s figures did not match the operator’s.

The same process repeated every month for every partner in the program. There was no efficiency gain as the network expanded. If the operator doubled the number of affiliates, it would have been reasonable to expect the administrative work to roughly double as well.

2. Affiliates couldn’t see their own performance

Partners depended on the operator whenever they wanted to check their numbers. Someone on the team had to retrieve the data, put it into a usable format and explain it.

For this operator, the lack of self-service reporting meant that registrations, deposits and commission figures regularly had to be pulled and explained by the internal team. When an affiliate’s numbers did not match the operator’s, the same team had to explain the difference and respond. As the partner base grew, these requests became a recurring part of day-to-day affiliate management.

Trackdesk Tip: Giving affiliates access to self-service reporting can reduce recurring requests for registration, deposit and commission figures.

3. Fraud was reaching the commission ledger

The operator also had to deal with fake FTDs, bot traffic and registrations hidden behind VPNs. They wanted to identify invalid traffic before money is attributed to it.

In the operator’s previous setup, identifying invalid activity late created another layer of work around commissions. If a fraudulent conversion had already affected a payout, the team then had to deal with the consequences after the fact. Catching invalid activity earlier meant keeping it out of the commission ledger in the first place.

4. Commission math didn’t match how the business defines revenue

The operator’s RevShare agreements needed to reflect the revenue numbers already used by its finance team. That meant calculating commission against the operator’s own definition of NGR and not a generic revenue figure provided by the affiliate platform.

The operator had the same problem with qualifying deposits. A $10 deposit and a $200 deposit could not simply be treated as the same event. Different agreements required different qualification thresholds, so the operator needed those thresholds to sit at deal level rather than being applied across the platform.

The Solution: Removing the Manual Work Between Partners and Deposits

Trackdesk was added on top of the operator’s existing casino infrastructure as the affiliate layer, covering attribution, commission calculation, partner management and the dashboard used by affiliates themselves. The underlying casino infrastructure stayed in place.

The changes were fairly practical.

• Automation took over the repetitive work. Onboarding no longer had to run through the same manual sequence each time, and commissions stopped being calculated by hand. The operator estimates that these changes removed around 40% of its routine affiliate-management tasks.
• Affiliates started checking their own numbers. This became the largest operational change for the team. Instead of asking the operator to pull a report whenever they wanted to see performance, partners could log in and check the figures themselves. That removed a category of recurring reporting requests from the team’s workload and gave both sides the same place to check registrations, deposits and commission figures when questions came up.
• Fraud checks moved ahead of attribution. Through Trackdesk’s Anura integration, clicks and conversions are scored before attribution happens. Bot traffic, VPN and proxy masking and datacenter IPs can therefore be blocked before invalid activity reaches the commission ledger. For this operator, which uses FTD-based agreements alongside RevShare and hybrid models, that meant invalid activity could be identified before it produced a commission rather than being dealt with after payout.
• RevShare began running on the operator’s own numbers. Trackdesk can map the metric that a particular agreement is built around, whether that is NGR, GGR, FTD, bets, wins, sessions or a custom event, and calculate RevShare from there.
  
  Trackdesk Tip: For programs paying on FTDs, checking traffic before attribution can keep invalid conversions from reaching the commission ledger and requiring a clawback later.

The player entity adapts to the operator’s data schema, which allows the NGR used for commission calculations to remain the same NGR figure already recognised by finance.

Tiered and hybrid models are handled natively, rates can be defined per offer, and attribution and calculation run automatically at the end of the period. FTD qualification thresholds are set at agreement level as well, so a deposit only becomes commissionable once it meets the conditions of that particular deal. That flexibility mattered for this operator because its growing network already included several very different types of partners.

The operator works with SEO and content sites, PPC and media buyers, streamers, community-owned properties and larger affiliates on individually negotiated terms. Those partners operate in different GEOs, bring different player quality and work under different commercial arrangements.

Trackdesk Tip: When partners have different deposit thresholds, GEOs or commission models, those conditions can be set at agreement or offer level instead of relying on one platform-wide rule.

Payouts can be conditioned by GEO, offer, landing page, traffic source or individual partner. A media buyer working on a US CPA can therefore be managed in the same system as a streamer working on a hybrid agreement, without splitting those relationships across separate spreadsheets.

What Changed Day to Day

Day to day, less affiliate work had to pass through the internal team. Partners could check their own performance, onboarding and commission calculation no longer required the same manual process, and fraud checks happened before attribution. Individual agreements could also keep their own revenue definitions and qualification rules. Together, those changes freed capacity as the partner network grew.

“For us, the goal was never simply to have more affiliates — it was to acquire more players. Trackdesk gave us the infrastructure to support different partners and scale the program without adding more manual work.”

— Affiliate Team Lead

The affiliate network grew by 75%, while FTDs increased by 100%. Depositors therefore grew almost twice as fast as the partner base that produced them. Depositors therefore grew almost twice as fast as the partner base that produced them. At the same time, the operator estimates that around 40% of its routine affiliate-management tasks disappeared.

You can learn more about Trackdesk for iGaming and explore how it compares with other iGaming affiliate software when it comes to tracking, partner management and commission setup.

Thinking about moving your iGaming affiliate program off spreadsheets? Request a demo and we’ll walk through your setup.