Tracking clicks through postbacks is key to ensuring a return on investment for operators according to a trio of industry experts. 

These insights were offered on the latest SBC Webinar, titled ‘Building Trust and Optimizing Channels: The Power of Postback Data in iGaming’.

Clinton Cutajar, Chief Technology Officer for MediaTroopers, began by explaining that users can come to operators through two different paths.

These can be through affiliate traffic, such as a comparison website comparing different offers, which appear in search engine results pages (SERPs) or via paid media, usually in newspapers or other published mediums where affiliates bid for advertising space. 

From there, Cutajar continued, stating that affiliates must maintain software that tracks when a user has clicked on a website and then subsequently if the user becomes a first-time depositor (FTD).

Once this occurs, the affiliate tracking platform sends a notification back which is called a postback.

On the importance of these notifications, Cutajar said: “If the traffic comes from paid media, usually there are publishers who need to be notified that this particular campaign is converting.

“Paid media is not cheap and there is a budget which is being dedicated to a campaign. If this notification is not sent or campaigns that are not converting aren’t stopped, the campaign is losing money. From there, the publisher can either attribute more money towards converting campaigns or non-converting campaigns can be stopped.”

“From my perspective, there’s the famous saying that half of the money invested in marketing is lost, but you don’t know which half,” added Marcin Kumiega, Business Development Manager for Voluum.

“This is vital for standard organic traffic, but it’s super important, if not a must-have, for paid media. If you don’t see which part of your campaign is profitable, you are bleeding money and it’s all about breakeven. So sometimes you might not reach the breakeven because of the lack of this data and transparency and feedback from the advertiser, which is the operator.”

“Timely feedback on how campaigns are converting is absolutely critical,” agreed Geoffrey Smorong, VP of Operations at Income Access. He added that a more profitable campaign means that affiliates have “more money to invest into sending the operator more customers”. 

Although this seems simple in theory, there are a number of challenges with the postback feedback system.

Smorong explained: “One of the key elements we’re talking about here is that server-to-server postback and that ability to get real-time information, particularly to the paid media affiliates. There are a couple of challenges here that we see from the Income Access side, especially when working directly with the operators.

“As an affiliate, you’re going to approach an operator and say, ‘I need postback so that I can optimise my campaigns in real-time’. Depending on what affiliate system, or lack of affiliate system, the operator is working with, they may have to take a postback from you which may or may not be easy for them to implement on their site. 

“Then there’s the consistency of [the postback]. What is the format of the postback? What does it look like? What endpoint are you going to send it to? 

“All these things aren’t manageable, but as we’ve touched on already, it’s very fast-paced and you need to move quickly. If there’s a lot of back and forth and time taken to do this, it’s lost money and can be a lost opportunity as markets move quickly.” 

Cutajar also cited the issue of scale as a problem for the system. Depending on the parameters set, a retention window for looking back at the clicks over a period of time after the initial click could mean that the system has to retain a huge number of clicks at the same time. 

He said: “Imagine all the systems that pass along the way that amount of storage log entries that need to be maintained, and it’s not like they are archived. These need to be query bills so we can say click 12345 converted. 

“It’s not like you need to wait for two hours until you get a response from somewhere and then you convert, usually this is within seconds. So imagine that load on the different systems that exist. Different channels, different operators and everyone passing traffic from everywhere.”

Also on the agenda during the hour-long discussion was the difference between paid media and SEO for igaming operators.

The experts noted that SEO websites have a greater conversion rate as they are often accessed by dedicated igaming players, however, paid media has the opportunity to reach a greater number of consumers.

You can watch the full webinar by clicking here.