Rake back & rake back affiliates

[wagerprofits]

Hi Guys

I would like to get thoughts on Rake back:

1. What % commission as a rake back affiliate do you feel is right?

2. What % of rake back do you feel is the correct level for the player?

I look forward to reading your comments.

Thanks

Shaun

[wagerprofits]

So no thoughts???????


Shaun

[YuraK]

Nobody likes RB affiliates here . I'm not a RB aff, but I think about 5% for affiliate and from 30% to "as much as possible" to players.

[wagerprofits]

So why dont you like rake back affiliates?

The could be said by CPA affiliates about rev share guys, all I am trying to do it get a real feeling for the affiliate industry wants so that I can offer you and other the best possible deals.

Shaun

[smathe77]

Just check out some of the top RB sites and see for yourself

[matted]

It is fairly common practive for RB affiliates to encourage their visitors to stop playing at old accounts and get new accounts under their tracking.

Obviously, this screws the original affiliate.

The good RB affiliates don't do this, but many of the big ones do - and quite often are supported in these efforts by the affiliate programs. I hope if you are looking to increase your RB affiliate base you make sure your terms include that these guys cannot encourage or instruct users on opening a new account at the same poker room.

[PSORG]

Hi Guys

I would like to get thoughts on Rake back:

1. What % commission as a rake back affiliate do you feel is right?

2. What % of rake back do you feel is the correct level for the player?

I look forward to reading your comments.

Thanks

Shaun

1. 8%-10% is pretty standard. Lower than 8% won't get much much exposure in our rakeback sections.

2. 30%

Generally speaking, small rooms looking to pull in the high volume rakeback players will have to go higher than 30% to the players. I think affiliate managers feel they must make a huge offer to the affiliates as well, but at least for me, this is not the case. 10% is the same, whether it's Full Tilt or Carbon. The key is keeping the player happy and playing.

Obviously, an offer higher than the standard 10% can get you more exposure and a reason for affiliates to send an alert out to their players about a "new rakeback deal". No need to break the bank though. Spend the money on the players (higher rakeback offer, vip club stuff, private events) and keep them playing and I'll be happy with my 10%!

When someone approaches us about pushing rakeback, we look at the following items. I've listed them in order of importance. Max offer and cap (numbers 1 and 2) are of equal importance to me.

1. Maximum offer. If I can't match the best offers already out there by other established rakeback affiliates, then I won't bother adding the site to my list of offers. Most high volume players will not settle for less than the max offer, and if my site can't provide it, I'll get passed over. Any players who do screw up and sign up with me will be griping soon thereafter because they're not getting as much as one of their buds is getting.

2. Rakeback cap. This goes hand in hand with #1. If 'better' affiliates or aggressive AM's can work deals for other affiliates that will be better than my "max offer", then I won't bother pushing that poker site. Players will drop you for a 2% increase through someone else, if they can't wring it out of you first. It's rediculous.

Items #1 and #2 can be solved by just having a standard percentage rakeback amount that ALL rakeback affiliates can push. None higher, none lower. Rakeback cap must be enforced across all rooms on the network if your room is not independent. Otherwise new skins will popup that are basically just rakeback skins (Battlefield Poker on the microgaming poker platform for example).

3. Rakeback payments handled by the poker room's cashier. This is such a nice perk. Even if it involves my sending a spreadsheet in with nicknames/amounts owed, it's a lot easier for the cashier dept. to make rakeback payments than it is for the affiliate, especially if you don't have player to player transfer ability. It also makes the deal look more "legit" since if the poker cashier makes the payments it is obviously a legal sanctioned deal... not something under the table.

4. My affiliate cut = ~10% or so. A higher offer is great, but not massively necessary. An extra couple percentage points won't hurt though, and will give the affiliate more incentive to put you above the fold. Less than 10%? No thanks. The best converting rooms that allow rakeback already give the rakeback affiliate 8-10%. No point in pushing a smaller room for a smaller cut.

5. Stats provided by the poker client. Players like to see their stats updated every day. We can do it (and do so for several sites). If the poker site can do it though, it's just another good reason for us to get them on our offers list. If the poker site does both payments and stats, it means our only job is getting them listed on our site and pushing them to our visitors. Lovely!

6. Ability to push both rakeback and non-rakeback players. This is somewhat important for our site, since we get a lot of general 'poker strategy' traffic as well as high volume rakeback players searching for offers. We only like to pay rakeback to players who ask for it.

Let me use Cake Poker for example. They have all the right ingredients (max offer, cap, stats and payments handled by themselves, fair affiliate percentage.) - However, we never put them on our home page sections because it doesn't make sense to give a player rakeback who doesn't even know what rake is. They solved this problem by allowing us to create a 2nd "general traffic" affiliate account. If a player signs up through it and later finds out about rakeback, Cake will switch the player from the "general" account to the "rakeback" account.

AP, UB, FTP players have to email us to get setup for rakeback, so no problem sending them general traffic on the same affiliate trackers. It would be soooo cool to be able to login to my affiliate control panel and check a box beside players' nicknames that said "rakeback". The Battlefield/Rednines affiliate backend had something like this. I could go in and edit each player's rakeback %. It was a pretty sweet setup.

Sorry for the essay. Just some random thoughts from an old rakeback affiliate. We kicked things off with Absolute in April 2004. ;]

Edit - just thought of another nice perk. Retag ability. If a player is NOT attached to any other affiliate, if he contacts me and you can retag him to our rakeback deal, that works out well for all parties. We get a new player through our rakeback marketing channel, the poker site keeps a player who might have went to a new poker room for rakeback, and the player is VERY happy and has even more incentive to play at the original site after a good customer service experience.