In the absence of in-person iGaming affiliate industry events since iGB Affiliate London in February, operators and affiliate managers have had to work extra hard to bring on new affiliates to promote their brands. Luckily, there are platforms out there such as “Engage” that can do all affiliate scouting work for them, digitally.
Engage was designed with the straight-forward vision of connecting iGaming operators and affiliates, a tool that first came to market back in February, Business Operations Manager Neil Walker explained.
“We had this idea about producing a product that would help affiliate programs identify affiliates when they’re searching Google”, he said.
The goal of Engage is to save affiliate mangers time. Rather than providing affiliate managers with loads of data to then be analyzed, Engage collects the data, crunches it and delivers each bespoke opportunity while also providing information on competitors.
“So if you’re banging in key words into Google, you get the results back, you don’t immediately know – if you’re an affiliate manager – whether any of those results contain your brand profile or not”, said Walker.
“We’ve developed a tool that does all that work for you”, he said.
After running a keyword search in Google, Engage will reveal affiliate sites ranking for those keywords, the affiliates you are not yet working with and sites of affiliates that you are already working with but do not feature your brand. For any affiliate you are not already working with, Engage will provide contact information.
“You can get all that information in seconds and it would normally take you five, ten minutes per result. And then, because you’ve got all that contact information, you can go off and do your acquisition process and spend the time there which is the more difficult part, we think, of actually onboarding an affiliate”, Walker shared.
In addition to easing the pain of the affiliate scouting process, once the initial searches have been done, the Engage system takes over and keeps running those searches in the background. If new opportunities are found for a particular keyword, the system emails you with the news.
“Even when you’re off doing other things and haven’t got time to look for new affiliates, we’re doing that work for you and we’ll just let you know when we’ve got a new opportunity that you really should take a look at”, Walker explained.
What truly makes Engage stand out from the rest of the affiliate acquisition tools out there is its simplicity, one of the features that convinced Walker to join the team.
“It was almost too simple, I was thinking, ‘well what’s the catch here’? There’s no data to be looking through, its not like a traditional SEO tool where I’m trying to track what my competitors are doing and seeing who’s doing what and spending a lot of time, it was just too easy and I thought, ‘surly it can’t be that easy’, but you know what, it is”, he said.
“We’ve got plans for the future, to build the product out, provide a lot more information about the affiliates and about brands and their share of voice. We already provide some information about what brands are being promoted on each of the affiliate sites so if you want to know what your competitors are doing, you can get that information too”, Walked explained.
Walker also went on to explain how all affiliate programs are not created equal in their approach to affiliate acquisition. With this in mind, Engage has introduced the concept of a “subscription pause”, so affiliate programs only have to pay when they are actually using the tool.
“Some affiliate programs are very structured in the way that they look for affiliates, others aren’t, others don’t look for affiliates at all, they hope that affiliates will come to them. So the ones that aren’t structured, they sort of dip in and dip out and this is an ideal tool for them because they can just use it when they want”, Walker explained.
“If you don’t use [the tool] for a month, then you get a credit back on your account, if you don’t use it for six months, you get six months credit back. It works very well, depending on your limit and how often you want to use it. You’ll really get to feel that you’re getting good value for money from the product”, he added.
At present, Engage is equipped to provide affiliate information for the U.K., Canada, India, New Zealand and the regulated U.S. markets, with Germany in the works for results in both German and English.
“You can do localized searches and you’ll get localized results depending on the geography that you want. We can add any country and we’re being really driven by our existing customers so they get first dibs”, Walker said.
“It typically takes us a while to scan a new geography so its not an overnight thing, its quite complicated, but yes, we can add more all the time”, he added.
