INTERVIEW by STATSDRONE.COM

Interview Questions for Darrell Helyar (StatsDrone) – by Alessandro Gherardi 

1. Affiliation & iGaming Growth “Darrell, StatsDrone has become a key player in iGaming analytics. How do you see the role of affiliate marketing evolving in this industry, and what data-driven strategies should affiliates prioritize to stay competitive?” 

We see affiliate marketing evolving, where affiliates can make data-driven decisions to optimize their business a lot easier without having to invest heavily in Business Intelligence. We believe things will change where, rather than having all these impressive dashboards at your disposal, you’ll have apps such as StatsDrone giving you insights, actions and tasks that will directly impact your business. 

2. Data-Driven Decision Making “With so much data available, what are the most critical KPIs that iGaming operators and affiliates should track to optimize their campaigns effectively?” 

The KPIs and data points that are the most important are the ones that don’t always show up so easily in any report.

The best example is this one. Imagine you have a campaign that delivers anywhere from 5 to 15 FTDs per day, but all of a sudden, it has averaged 2 FTDs/day for the last 4 days. Your monthly totals and averages might look normal, but this is active revenue leak. You don’t want to wait another day to take action. Your revenue might look fine for the next three months, but when it starts to drop, it will be difficult to stop without identifying the root cause and addressing it quickly. 

Earnings per click (EPC) is always important; however, it is a metric that can be skewed, but can still be reliable enough to look at. 

All of these things matter for both affiliates and operators. In a perfect world, if one side identifies a problem, they can work together to resolve it. 

3. Traffic Quality & Conversion “How does StatsDrone help operators and affiliates differentiate between high-quality and low-quality traffic sources? What red flags should they watch out for?” 

This comes down to best practices and is something even affiliate managers could help influence an affiliate.

This can be broken into 2 segments for tracking:

1. Campaign analysis
2. Dynamic variables

If an affiliate uses separate campaign links for their traffic, it may help identify what is their best quality traffic, which campaigns are working and which are not.  Ineffective campaigns is again revenue leak.

Take, for example, one casino bonus site we used to run. We would create tracking links for the homepage, the review page, blog posts, bonus pages, and newsletters. We had better metrics on player value coming from the newsletter and the review page.  We had another example where we promoted the same bonus offer using a different campaign; however, one campaign took 5 times more clicks/traffic to generate the same value as another campaign.

When an affiliate does this, it also allows the affiliate manager to spot the same patterns, especially if the campaigns are named appropriately, where you can see the purpose of the campaign in the name itself.  

Regarding dynamic variables, this can provide the affiliate with the highest level of detail on players. You would know if your better players came not just on a weekend, but at any time of the day, what page they came from, and even the device used by that user. Every player generated with a unique click ID will appear individually in a report, and that is something StatsDrone can help affiliates get. The click IDs themselves can be generated using tools like Voluum, Keitaro and even Pretty Links. 

4. Challenges in iGaming Analytics “What are the biggest data analysis challenges in iGaming today, and how can tools like StatsDrone help overcome them?”

In our experience, what we find is that affiliates want and need data visualization to help make better sense of the data. This is something we are doing for affiliates on a one-on-one basis and building custom dashboards in Tableau. 

5. Future of iGaming & AI “Where do you see the future of iGaming analytics heading, especially with advancements in AI and machine learning? How can affiliates and operators prepare for these changes?”

We believe affiliates primarily need to focus on their players and deliver the best value, utilizing AI to support them and gain a deeper understanding of their needs. When it comes to companies like StatsDrone, our goal is to help affiliates easily identify which brands to work with and utilize AI to determine when a brand is delivering better value. That means affiliates would want to know this and to send more traffic to these better-performing brands. 

We believe affiliates do want more done-for-you services, and our goal at StatsDrone is to make being an affiliate a little bit easier. Your success is our success!