Affiliate Survey – Player Value

ThePOGG

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webmeister
Joined
Feb 17, 2012
Location
UK
We all work in an industry where we have to blindly trust the statistics that are given to us by the programs we choose to partner with and I don’t know an affiliates that hasn’t at one point or another had concerns about the ROI they are receiving from some of their partners. The problem is that each of us individually – even for the biggest affiliates – has too small a sample size to draw valid conclusions.

ThePOGG Network is looking to counterbalance this by compiling a large scale survey of the value affiliates are receiving from the programs they work with.

Historically the biggest barriers to this happening have been that affiliates are reluctant to share performance information with their competitors. That is understandable, we wouldn’t want to do that either. As such we’ve put together a system that will anonymise the information submitted so that even we won’t be able to tell anything specific about your figures.

To this end we are looking for affiliates to take part in a survey.




How it works?

Selection Criteria

Firstly, we don’t just want any old affiliate contributing to this project. Allowing that would significantly devalue the data collected. There are two main groups we want to restrict from the data gathering process:

1) Operator representatives – for obvious reasons any person actively in the employ of an affiliate program has an active incentive to try to make player value appear higher than it actually is.

2) Unreasonably small affiliates – any site with low traffic or that only works with a small number of brands will produce data that is unreliable.

For the above reasons, any affiliate that wishes to take part will have to be vetted before they will be included in the survey. The factors that will come into consideration are as follows:

- Amount of unique content on the site
- Range of programs the affiliate works with
- Alexa traffic rating
Only sites which we believe to be genuine well established affiliate sites with a reasonable array of promoted programs will qualify for consideration. There will be other criteria but we don’t want to publicly discuss this as we don’t want to signpost how undesirable affiliates can get round our procedures.



The Survey

There are two aspects to the survey itself:

1) An approximation of the total traffic your site receives:

0-10000 unique visits/month
10001-25000 unique visits/month
25001-50000 unique visits/month
50001-100000 unique visits/month
100001+ unique visits/month

2) A rating for each program you work with.

The rating you award a program will be decided based on the average player value you have received from that specific program compared with the average player value you receive across your site/network as a whole.

Personally for this purpose I’d suggest StatsRemote, where I can look at the stats for the entire year and at the bottom I can see the average player value for our entire network over all programs and beside each program I have the average player value for that program. The rating should be established as follows:

5 - Average program player value is 50% or more higher than average network player value
4 - Average program player value is over 10% higher than average and less than 50% higher than the average network player value
3 – Within 10% of Average
2 - Average program player value is more than 10% less than average and less than 50% less than the average network player value
1 - Average program player value is 50% or more less than average network player value

Participating affiliates will be provided with a spreadsheet of affiliate programs and should fill in a rating for each program that they have had more than 10NDPs at this year.





How the results will be used?

Once the survey has been returned each result will then have a weighting applied to them based on the approximate traffic level listed in the survey (obviously a site seeing 100k unique clicks per month is more likely to produce more reliable information than a site with 5k unique clicks per month).

At this point all surveys will be collated and the scores for each program will be averaged. This will allow us to produce a single figure between 1 and 5 for each program to indicate the value that affiliates industry-wide receive from that program that will be far more comprehensive than any individual affiliate could make on their own.





How will the data be shared?

After the data has all been process we will compile a report that will be published on ThePOGG.com. We will also email a copy of the report out to all participating affiliates.

We will not publish results for any program where we receive less than 10 responses. For each program that we do publish a figure for, we will also publish the total number of respondents that were used to derive the figure.

We will not EVER publish or share the individual responses of ANY affiliate.




How do I take part?

Applying to participate is as simple as emailing me at webmaster@thepogg.com with details of the sites you represent for verification purposes. Please use a domain specific email address when contacting me. I’ll then review your sites and confirm whether or not you are eligible to take part.

Please note that the survey will be issued at the end of December and we will NOT go ahead with this unless we have at least 100 acceptable applicants.



Comments and feedback welcomed :)
 
Great idea and initiative on your part. Will be very interested to see the final results and your conclusions. Hopefully enough of us 'webbies' will take part. I have been of the view for many years that there are only a total of three programs I can and do implicitly trust. I dread to even begin to comprehend how much money has been 'shaved' from my accounts over the past 12 years.

Email is on it's way. :D
 
Sounds like a great idea, but got a couple of observations that might help if you've not already thought of them.

On it's own volume of traffic is not really a good indicator for reliability of the data produced, surely it's the quality of the traffic, the conversion rate and the country that the player is from that determines the "Value you get from the program".

The data is useful if Affiliates are able to compare eggs with eggs when you publish the results.

For example a site driving traffic from Free offers will probably have higher impressions and signups and very low NDP's with a low player value. A site that targets a niche may have very low impressions, a high click thru rate and a great ratio to NDP's. The player value is also heavily influenced by player country and also the ability the program to convert that traffic once they have it.

This then feeds into the Value that you get from a particular Program. One person may have a great experience with one program while another doesn't. Do you not need to understand what sort of traffic that affiliate is sending to the program and lump all the similar ones together to be able to get an accurate measure of the program.?

Of course you may have already thought of this and got it covered in the survey.

I'll look forward to reading the results when you publish them.

Good luck, sounds like a big piece of work.
 
This then feeds into the Value that you get from a particular Program. One person may have a great experience with one program while another doesn't. Do you not need to understand what sort of traffic that affiliate is sending to the program and lump all the similar ones together to be able to get an accurate measure of the program.?

This shouldn't be an issue. If we were to compare one site directly to another these sort of factors become an issue. My site may have lower quantities of traffic, but higher quality. As such we wouldn't be comparing apples to apples. However, within the survey the rating is being reached by comparing YOUR average site player value with YOUR average program player value. You can say for sure whether a program delivers an above average value compared to other programs with your traffic. If lots of different affiliates with different qualities of traffic largely agree that a program is delivering them above average value it's safe to conclude that the program is delivering above average value across the board.

The rough traffic estimates are a crude way of weighting the significant of the survey response. For obvious reasons a site like CasinoMeister should rightly be given higher significance than a site seeing 5k hits/month. It isn't perfect, but the system isn't looking to create perfect results. I certainly wouldn't want to draw any conclusions about honest/dishonesty based on such a crude tool. But I would like to hope that it'll provide some guidance to affiliates as to how well different programs perform and with repeated sampling over several years trends should start to emerge.

TP
 
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Ok thanks, I misunderstood what you're tying to achieve. My fault for not reading your original post properly. :-)

Sounds like a really useful exercise that Affiliates should be doing anyway. It's certainly made me think a bit.

Cheers
Neil.
 
Beyond the core group of affiliates that I spoke to before announcing this survey (CM, AGD and ourselves) we've had 1 affiliate sign-up. Unless there's an 180 degree about face in this trend we're going to get nowhere near the 100 affiliates required to go ahead with this.

Assuming that we're not going to hit that target, I will move forward if the signed up parties are still interested but will not be publishing the resulting information and will only provide it to the participants.

TP
 
Beyond the core group of affiliates that I spoke to before announcing this survey (CM, AGD and ourselves) we've had 1 affiliate sign-up. Unless there's an 180 degree about face in this trend we're going to get nowhere near the 100 affiliates required to go ahead with this.

Assuming that we're not going to hit that target, I will move forward if the signed up parties are still interested but will not be publishing the resulting information and will only provide it to the participants.

TP

I'd love to help but I am not 'big' enough for your criteria. Good luck anyway.
 
I'd love to help but I am not 'big' enough for your criteria. Good luck anyway.
Same here.
Too small and I don't really even understand question 2... and I don't use Stats Remote - so I guess it would take YONKS to extract the data manually.

Good luck Pogg! :thumbsup:
KK
 
Hey guys,

I think you're perhaps mis-understanding the intention of the restrictions on small affiliates. The intention is to prevent "affiliate" sites that are actually being run by one affiliate program or another from slipping through the net. Those types of sites will obviously have incentive to inflate the rating they give to the program that runs them. In the case of both of your sites you're clearly real affiliates and would automatically be accepted ;)

TP

P.S. KK, Not using StatsRemote or a similar tracking program would make this a difficult exercise.
 

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