Poll on shaving of affiliate commissions, has it happened to you?

[StatsDrone]

I'm doing a quick poll to ask if you think you've had your affiliate accounts shaved.

It is a bit of research as we've been working on a few tools to detect this and help affiliates recover lost revenue from any type of revenue leak.

Aside from the poll itself, leave some comments of what you think about the topic at hand which seems to be more discussed in person and written about less on any type of industry news sites.

 

[CasinoDotReview]

There is a lot of shaving out there! Mostly from what we see nowadays affiliates tend to shave with hidden high admin fees and other fees. I am extremly suspicious of any affiliate program that does not show withdrawal amount in their reports. It makes their shaving so much easier for us to detect. So any such tool to detect shaving would be more than welcome!

 

[StatsDrone]

There is a lot of shaving out there! Mostly from what we see nowadays affiliates tend to shave with hidden high admin fees and other fees. I am extremly suspicious of any affiliate program that does not show withdrawal amount in their reports. It makes their shaving so much easier for us to detect. So any such tool to detect shaving would be more than welcome!

Admin fees is a weird one as not all programs are transparent in this. Some will charge software fee for the affiliate platforms but the software doesn't does a lot spread across many affiliates and the program hasn't enabled all the best features of the software because they don't want to pay more to those platforms.

For me, fees are one thing but the other that everyone should measure is what is the ROI if you have say 2 brands with similar traffic, if one performs the other by a large amount, traffic should go there assuming you trust your lifetime revenue deals will be kept in place.

 

[Symmetry]

I have been shaved with all the ways possible:

-High admin fees like 90%
-Untagging players from account
-Closed accounts that were active
-Manipulation on statistics
-Non payers

Any tool for this would be amazing, not sure if achievable though! How can we help?

 

[StatsDrone]

I have been shaved with all the ways possible:

-High admin fees like 90%
-Untagging players from account
-Closed accounts that were active
-Manipulation on statistics
-Non payers

Any tool for this would be amazing, not sure if achievable though! How can we help?

Closed accounts that were active is a really bad activity but a very good point.

We have a few ways to try to combat some of these things.

1st is with data analysis and data visualization

2nd is with automated alerts that anything could potentially be happening

3rd is with something we are working on called Changelog where we compare 2 separate date ranges where you've pulled your stats from an affiliate account 30 days ago or longer and doing the same today.

In theory, the data shouldn't be changing but in our initial discovery, we are finding a lot happening.

We try to stay on top of closed programs but those can sometimes only be detected if you are connected to them and the login fails to work. A failed connection doesn't mean closed but it could mean a reason to look into it.

 

[Symmetry]

This sounds really good.
Let me know if somehow we can help on something.
Another concern is that the affiliate program won't admit it in the end. Even if we hava data about it.
But this definitely will help to have a better view on what is happening.

 

[StatsDrone]

This sounds really good.
Let me know if somehow we can help on something.
Another concern is that the affiliate program won't admit it in the end. Even if we hava data about it.
But this definitely will help to have a better view on what is happening.

You need the evidence and some programs will adjust depending on the nature of the issue. What I've heard from a lot of people is they like to at least demonstrate to programs they are watching so they are less of a target.

That said, with the Changelog feature we are working on, it helped recover 150 eur with one affiliate across 2 programs.

 

[Symmetry]

Yeah this tool would be a great start. Hopefully it will put more pressure to affiliate programs to be more transparent

 

[StatsDrone]

Yeah this tool would be a great start. Hopefully it will put more pressure to affiliate programs to be more transparent

I've had a few people on my team post in a few other places and getting some interesting insights.

One I've known before is I've had an affiliate friend tell me that when this guy became their new account manager joining the affiliate program, their commissions dropped immediately from that point. I think charts showing this trend with annotations would be ideal. We are about to add your affiliate managers to be able to add in your account like a CRM.