DRAFT 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. Achieved performance is expressed as movement against the operator’s 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 affiliate program itself. Partners were sending traffic, players were depositing, and the commercial side was healthy. Four issues became more noticeable as the network grew, and the existing setup gave the operator's team no practical way to deal with them.

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.

Usually that creates friction quickly in iGaming because tracking sits directly underneath the commercial relationship with an affiliate. Registrations, deposits and commission figures are the numbers both sides are working from. When partners cannot see those figures in near real time, questions inevitably come back to the operator. If their number differs from the operator’s number, the team then has to explain the difference as well. With a larger network, those requests were becoming a regular part of the workload.

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.

Once commission has been paid on a fraudulent conversion, the operator is left trying to recover that money from the affiliate. Apart from taking more time, clawing back a payout is harder on the partner relationship than stopping an invalid conversion from reaching 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 same issue existed around 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 as the affiliate layer, covering attribution, commission calculation, partner management and the dashboard used by affiliates themselves. None of the existing casino infrastructure had to move. 

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 an entire category of recurring requests. It also meant that affiliates and the operator could work from the same reporting environment when questions came up around registrations, deposits or commissions.
• 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 a program that pays on FTDs, the timing matters. A fake deposit can be identified before it produces a commission instead of being discovered after the payout and dealt with through a clawback.
• 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.

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. This became increasingly important as the affiliate network expanded because the program was never made up of one type of partner.

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.

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.

“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 final numbers are useful because they show what changed on both sides of the program. The affiliate network grew by 75%, while FTDs increased by 100%. In other words, depositors grew almost twice as fast as the network producing them.

At the same time, the administrative workload moved in the opposite direction, with the operator estimating a reduction of around 40% in routine affiliate-management tasks.

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.