Clint Griscti, from apidae.Digital discusses the challenges posed by the fragmented tech and data stacks used by marketers and operators.
Navigating the changing affiliate landscape is one of the biggest talking points in the industry right now. But Clint Griscti, co-founder and chief executive, apidae.Digital, takes a look at it from a new lens – the data tech stack.
Speaking to Affiliate Leaders, ahead of his appearance at Affiliate Leaders Summit, Griscti dives into the details of some of the operational and technology challenges facing both operators and affiliate marketers, and offers advice on what can be done to resolve it.
When apidae.Digital conducts an initial acquisition audit for an igaming operator, what are the telltale operational signs their technology stack has become a patchy ‘frankenstein’ system?
The clearest sign is normally not technical. It is that different marketing teams give you different figures when asking for KPIs for a specific month.
Ask three people how many new depositing players the business acquired last month and where they came from. If you get three answers, the stack is patched. If you get one answer but it took four exports and a spreadsheet to produce it, the stack is patched and someone is quietly holding it together with their own time.
The recurring symptoms we see are consistent:
- Reporting is a human process rather than a system. Monday morning is spent stitching excel exports together.
- Every tool has its own definition of a conversion, attribution window, and none of those definitions are written down anywhere. The business intelligence team, the acquisition team and the affiliate team are each internally consistent and mutually incompatible.
- Tools were bought to solve reporting problems rather than business problems. Each new platform arrived to fix a gap and added another version of the truth.
- History cannot be rebuilt. Someone changed a tracking parameter eighteen months ago and everything before that date is now effectively broken.
- Nobody can explain why a tracking rule or source is configured the way it is. The person who set it up has left, and the reason was never documented.
- A custom middleware layer, usually built by an agency or a contractor, that nobody currently on the payroll fully understands or owns.
None of this is a failure of effort. It is what happens when a business grows faster than its documentation. Every operator we audit got here the same way: they made good decisions in sequence, and never went back to reconcile them.
Why do many operators struggle with conflicting data between their internal business intelligence, attribution platforms, and affiliate networks, and what does the blueprint for a clean, unified data infrastructure look like?
This has been a problem that has kept me up countless nights and can only truly be solved with proper data governance and a clear central source of truth. The reality is that all three systems are usually right, but answering different questions.
Business intelligence typically measures money at a customer balance movement level and should be used for financial and business reporting purposes. Attribution measures sessions and clicks inside a defined window with defined rules about cookies and identity. An affiliate platform in general measures commissionable events based on last click and an approximate 30-day cookie lifetime window; this may have additional caveats such as the terms of a commercial contract, which may include qualification criteria that have nothing to do with either of the other two.
Those are three legitimately different questions and therefore should be tackled through the relevant source of truth to respond to that problem. The failure is not that they disagree. The failure is a lack of data governance on what systems should be used for what goals and reporting purposes.
Some reasons we identify when reviewing the governance of a brand’s or affiliate’s reporting discrepancies are: timezone differences; currency conversion at different rates on different days; attribution windows and bonus abuse reversals applied retroactively in one system and not another; and you can produce a permanent five to 10% disagreement without a single bug existing anywhere.
How does consolidating fragmented tools into integrated acquisition infrastructure help CMOs protect brand equity and eliminate attribution leakage?
I would separate those two things, because both have very different and conflicting measurements.
Attribution leakage is a measurement failure with a commercial consequence: you pay twice for the same player, or you pay a fee on a player who was already arriving. It is real money and it is fixable with better plumbing to fix the leaky bucket as I like to call it. When running audits, recoverable leaked commission commonly sits in the range of 10 to 20% of programme spend. That number gets attention in a board meeting.
Brand equity is a different problem altogether and is sometimes sadly forgotten in our aggressive focus on FTD and it is not solved by consolidation alone. It is a question of who controls the attention of a player within a session or impression and what touchpoints a visitor goes through before they reach your brand.
Fragmented tooling makes it worse mainly because fragmentation removes visibility: if you cannot see who is ranking and bidding on your brand, who owns those assets, and what commercial terms sit behind them, then someone else is piggy backing on your brand and invoicing you for the privilege.
Looking at traffic siloed to a specific channel or source provides an inaccurate picture of your players journey.
Where consolidation genuinely helps chief marketing officers is overlap. When you can see the same player across different consumer intent touchpoints in one place, you can start to distinguish a partner who originated demand from a partner who intercepted demand that already existed. That distinction is invisible in siloed tooling and it is the single most valuable output of the exercise, because it changes what you are willing to pay for.
I will also say the unglamorous part. Consolidation is a means, not an end. Plenty of operators consolidate their tooling, produce a beautiful single dashboard, and change no commercial decision as a result. If nothing gets repriced, renegotiated or retired after the consolidation, the project did not pay for itself.
Traditional affiliate evaluation relies heavily on volume metrics. Are those metrics misleading to some extent and how have you introduced a more rigorous, mathematical approach to scoring affiliate traffic?
Volume metrics are indeed, in my view, vanity metrics and no different than competing for likes on an Instagram reel or LinkedIn post – they inflate ego but do very little for engagement or retention. Focusing on number of first time deposits (FTDs) without looking at the lifetime value (LTV) cohorts over time is a short lived strategy in an increasingly costly and competitive industry.
First-time deposit counts are real numbers. The problem is what happens when they are the only number in the conversation. Two partners each deliver one hundred depositing players in a month. Under a flat CPA deal they are paid identically. Twelve months later, one of those cohorts has produced three or four times the value of the other.
The operator has, in effect, run a subsidy from the better partner to the weaker one and called it a partnership.
This is the part I want to be clear about, because it usually gets framed as an anti-affiliate argument and it is not one.
Flat cost-per-acquisition pricing hurts good affiliates most. The partner who invests in content, audience trust and genuine intent is paid the same rate as the partner cycling bonus-seekers. Quality-based pricing is not a mechanism for paying affiliates less. Applied honestly, it pays the best partners considerably more and puts the cost where it belongs.
What we score, and how
The scoring model sits inside our platform, currently in beta with selected programmes. It runs at partner level and combines:
- Cohort lifetime value over dynamic windows dependent on the market maturity and risk appetite of the brand rather than blended averages that flatter recent traffic and hide churn.
- Deposit frequency and retention beyond the first deposit, which is where the real separation between partners appears.
- Bonus dependency ratio, measuring how much of a cohort’s activity survives the withdrawal of promotional incentive.
The output is deliberately simple: a traffic-light position per partner with the underlying cohort evidence attached. A score you cannot show to the affiliate is a score you cannot negotiate with, and negotiation is the only point at which any of this creates value.
The maths is the easy part. Cohort analysis is not novel. The hard part is data hygiene: if FTDs are attributed differently in three systems, a sophisticated model produces a confidently wrong answer. Centralise the sources and align attribution windows first, then score.
When you run a comprehensive affiliate health check on an established brand’s portfolio, what percentage of traffic usually turns out to be non-compliant, low-LTV, or cannibalising direct search?
It is very difficult to answer that question as a fixed percentage across such varying metrics, but in general we tend to find that 80% of your good traffic is being generated by 20% of your partners with all of the three factors you highlighted having different impacts on your overall program health.
More importantly, the percentage of partners and the percentage of revenue are two very different figures, and the gap between them is the whole story. Across established portfolios of reasonable scale, the pattern we typically see are:
- 20-40% of active partners warrant repricing or retirement on the evidence.
- Those same partners usually account for only five to 15% of affiliate-sourced net revenue.
- 20-35% of affiliate-sourced depositing players fall into low lifetime value or bonus-cycling cohorts.
- Five to 15% of affiliate-attributed conversions are branded or direct search intercepts, meaning demand the operator had already generated and then paid a second time to acquire.
Operators are often terrified that auditing or pruning underperforming affiliate deals will cause an immediate drop in FTDs. How do you advise leadership teams to navigate that transition cleanly?
The fear is rational. It is also usually pointed at the wrong risk.
What leadership genuinely risks is not a collapse in acquisition. It is a quarter in which the headline volume number moves the wrong way while the underlying economics improves, and nobody has prepared the board for that. That is a communications and incentives problem before it is a commercial one.
So how can they run it? Fix the internal scorecard before you touch a single deal. If the acquisition team is measured on depositing player volume, they will never approve a prune, and they are right not to. Net revenue and cohort value have to be the reported metric first. Change the incentive, then change the programme.
Model and publish the downside before you start. If the flagged cohort represents five to 15% of affiliate net revenue, say that number out loud to the board in advance. A predicted dip is a plan. The same dip discovered afterwards is a crisis.
Reprice before you retire. Retirement should be the last step, not the first. Most flagged partners are not bad partners; they are partners on the wrong deal structure. A hybrid or performance-tiered arrangement solves a great deal of this without losing anyone.
Have the conversation with the partner rather than about them. Good affiliates respond well to evidence, particularly when quality-based pricing means they earn more. In our experience the partners who refuse to engage with cohort evidence at all are disproportionately the ones you were flagging.
Sequence in waves. Two or three partners, measure for a full cohort window, then move. Not a portfolio-wide cull announced in one month.
Warm the replacement channel first. Do not create a gap and then go looking for something to fill it. Expect some of the volume you lose to reappear as direct traffic at zero acquisition cost. Instrument for that in advance, otherwise it reads as loss rather than margin recovery.
Done in this order, the transition is undramatic. Done in the wrong order, and the usual failure mode is a nervous reversal three weeks in, before a single cohort has had time to mature, which leaves the operator with the disruption and none of the benefit.
Many operators have become overly reliant on traditional SEO affiliates and welcome-bonus sites. What are the long-term financial risks of relying on this model rather than owning direct acquisition channels?
The risk is concentration and lack of ownership, not affiliates. I want to be precise about that distinction, because the industry keeps having the wrong version of this argument.
Affiliate partnerships remain the most efficient route to scale in most markets, and the best affiliates are better at acquisition than most operator marketing teams. That is not the problem. The problem is what happens when a large share of your new player volume depends on assets you do not own, ranking in a channel you do not control, under commercial terms you increasingly do not set.
Here are some of the specific financial exposures:
- Algorithm and platform risk: your acquisition base is one search update away from repricing, and you will have no advance notice and no recourse.
- Structural change in search behaviour: generated answers and zero-click results are compressing the click on exactly the informational and comparison queries this model depends on. A page that ranked for a decade can become one input into an answer the player never clicks through from.
- Adverse selection on offer-led acquisition: if the primary proposition is a welcome bonus, the acquisition channel will faithfully deliver players who are there for welcome bonuses. You get the lifetime value your offer selects for.
- Price escalation: where a small number of partners control the visible results for your commercial terms, you are a price taker in your own market, and every renegotiation moves in one direction.
- Regulatory exposure on assets you do not control: your compliance position is being expressed on pages you cannot edit, in markets where the regulator will nonetheless hold you accountable.
The test I would apply is simple. Take your top three acquisition partners and ask what the business looks like ninety days after losing them. If the answer is unacceptable, the exposure is already material, regardless of how good the current numbers are. This is not an argument for building an in-house SEO team and cancelling the programme; strong programmes will remain affiliate-heavy for good reason. It is an argument for having a diverse portfolio of traffic sources blended between internal and external sources.
What does an ideal, diversified performance marketing mix look like today when comparing programmatic media, paid search, social channels, and traditional affiliate partnerships?
A percentage split may not be the best approach, since this alone would vary by market and demographic as a start, your ideal customer profile is vital to ensure you are using the right channels that reflect your audience and where the eyeballs are.
We believe that moving to a more omnichannel marketing strategy and focusing on building out true product focused funnels as opposed to looking at channels or sources in siloes is key to the success of any brands growth. The importance of capturing every site visitor who bothers to browse your content is more key today than ever before. With the increase in regulatory requirements, increase in CPA costs, it is key that first-party data and a funnel based approach is implemented to ensure you are monetising as much of your traffic to decrease that leaky bucket from spilling over.
Younger demographics respond less to standard deposit matches and more to authentic brand value. How does switching to programmatic acquisition allow operators to test brand-first messaging that traditional affiliate channels can’t offer?
Affiliates can absolutely carry brand messaging, and some media and content partners do it better than the operators they work with.
The real distinction is control and iteration speed, not capability. On a comparison page you are one of eight logos, the layout is set, the framing is set, and the competitive context is set by someone else’s editorial judgement. That can still be extremely effective, but it is not a testing environment.
You cannot run twenty messages through it, kill eighteen and understand why. If you measure a brand test on last click you will kill it in week two.
Programmatic gives you three things affiliate placement structurally cannot: creative control, audience control and a feedback loop measured in days rather than quarters. That combination is what makes brand-first testing possible, and the learning transfers. What you discover about which proposition resonates with a 26-year-old in one market should then reshape your affiliate creative, your copy and your retention messaging.
On the demographic point, I would put it slightly differently. Younger cohorts are not indifferent to value. They are unusually sensitive to being obviously sold to, and they read a deposit match for what it is: a mechanic, not a reason. What tends to land is product quality, credibility, and different sources appealing to the younger demographics earning their trust.
With regulatory pressures and technological shifts tightening across global markets, what is the single biggest operational mindset shift igaming CMOs need to make to keep their digital footprint sustainable over the next 12 to 24 months?
Operators are not all willing to hear this yet. We hear the same two complaints constantly: there is no traffic, or the traffic is too expensive. The brands differentiating themselves, building something worth choosing, and diversifying across internal and affiliate-managed sources are the ones set up for success.
The last decade rewarded operators who were good at buying volume cheaply. That skill has not become worthless, but it has stopped being the differentiator, because everybody has it and the channels where it applied are the channels currently being reshaped by regulation, platform policy and generated search results.
The next two years will reward operators who create a brand that delivers value and quality, own at least some of their acquisition channels, and can evidence their compliance position across every channel without a two-week fire drill. Those are the operators who survive a licence condition change, an algorithm update or a platform policy shift without an emergency board meeting, because none of those events can remove something they own.
Stop optimising for the cost of acquisition and start optimising for control of acquisition.
And how do events like the Affiliate Leaders Summit help operators in understanding the need for that shift in mindset?
The genuinely useful function is that it puts affiliates and operators in the same room to have a conversation that is very difficult to have inside a commercial negotiation.
Quality-based pricing is a good example. Raised across a table during a renewal, it sounds like a rate reduction dressed up in analytics, and it is heard defensively. Discussed on a panel, with both sides present, it becomes what it actually is: a conversation about whether the current pricing model is fair to the partners producing the best players. My experience is that the best affiliates are further ahead on this than most operators, because they are the ones being underpaid by flat structures.
The second function is standardisation. Definitional disagreements about what counts as a qualifying player, how attribution windows should work and what compliance evidence a partner should reasonably be expected to hold are not solved by vendors selling tools. They get resolved by industry consensus, and consensus needs a room.
The Affiliate Leaders Summit is the global home of performance and affiliate marketing. Across three days, affiliates, operators, media companies and technology providers come together to discuss traffic generation, conversion optimisation, SEO, paid media and the commercial strategies shaping the future of affiliate marketing.
Co-located with SBC Summit at Feira Internacional de Lisboa and MEO Arena on 29 September-1 October. Get your tickets here.
