CasinoLandia’s Exclusive Interview: Insights from John Wright, Co-Founder of StatsDrone

3. From an engineering perspective, what are the key challenges in synchronizing affiliate program data in real-time across different devices and platforms?

Mr. John Wright: The biggest challenges are trying to standardize the data and make sense of the data you are looking at. I think the reason why there are not a lot of competitors in this space is that it is hard to build a good stats app. Even companies that do in-house stats, often will end up coming to software like StatsDrone, Voonix or Nifty Stats.

The single biggest challenge is having a product or project manager that understands affiliate marketing, tracking and campaigns and also having a programmer that understands it just as good. If you don’t have both, you’ll never get it right especially if you try to do your own stats program. Sometimes things just don’t line up where the API report is years out of date but you won’t know this until you research and encounter this problem a bit more frequently as we do.

5. Could you discuss the role of machine learning or artificial intelligence in enhancing the functionality and performance of StatsDrone?

Mr. John Wright: I see 2 roadmaps with this and I plan to explore both.

• Roadmap 1 – No AI needed
• Roadmap 2 – AI integration

In the first roadmap, we can build automated features for affiliates that would be a done for you service. To explain it in a different way, think about Chat GPT. It is only as good as the user asking it the right questions. We know our affiliates want insights and I think they shouldn’t have to ask the right question to get the answer they need. This would be a feature that we could pretend it was AI and people would believe it.

Roadmap 2 is with AI where you can export your data and ask any AI program to give you those insights. It is possible that with machine learning, things can get better or maybe there is more value in predictions.

Personally I think the future of affiliate marketing will want both roadmaps and it isn’t to say 1 is better than the other. I’m pursuing both as I think they are interesting but I’m going after Roadmap 1 first.

6. In your opinion, what are the most critical KPIs that affiliate marketers should monitor, and how does StatsDrone facilitate their tracking and analysis?

Mr. John Wright: Hands down it is EPC, that is Earnings Per Click.

Not enough affiliates pay attention to this KPI and it is one of the most critical KPIs for any affiliate marketer. It doesn’t just sit on the account level but also on the brand level and on the campaign level.

Not only is EPC important, but it is important over time.

Think about this scenario, a casino you promote updates the landing page and the EPC should go up but sometimes it can go down. Not all designs lead to a greater conversion rate and sometimes the call to action can be accidentally forgotten by a developer.

7. How does StatsDrone adapt to the diverse needs and preferences of affiliate marketers operating in different niches within the iGaming industry?

Mr. John Wright: It isn’t easy but we have to balance things when it comes to commissions not being affected by other products. It becomes our job to not just standardize the data but also make it easier to segment it so your commission totals are accurate.

We are working on newer data visualizations that will help affiliates understand the breakdown of their revenue by product type and help them see these changes over time as well.

8. Could you share insights into the user feedback and market trends that influence the ongoing development of StatsDrone?

Mr. John Wright: The user feedback is ongoing and every affiliate’s situation is different along with their needs and what is important to them.

I would say the trends part is the interesting discussion. We feel fortunate to be a service provider for affiliates. Many of them share their insights on their business and it helps us understand affiliate marketing and the gaming space better. With I find interesting is the needs of affiliates in blending data beyond their stats and commissions in combining things like impressions vs clickthroughs in link tracking tools. Or if they happen to be a PPC affiliate, then they want to see other data sets combined with their stats.

Last but not least, I find it interesting to see the types of dashboards affiliates are building when they use the API data export. Some affiliates use Power BI, others use Tableau and some use Looker Studio. I’m learning it is tough building a generic dashboard that suits every affiliate’s needs but I think there will always be a demand for bespoke reports.

9. How does StatsDrone ensure the scalability of its platform to accommodate the growing volume of affiliate program data and users?

Mr. John Wright: When we rebuild the app in 2020, it was a requirement that we would be able to handle over 10,000 customers if we ever went down the road of servicing that many affiliates. So far, the volume of data doesn’t seem to be as big of an issue. We have some affiliates that have 1000s of accounts connected and it hasn’t created a bottleneck yet. We did have to add another service after we crossed 30 customers using the app and we’ll likely need to do that a few more times.

10. What measures does StatsDrone take to mitigate the risk of downtime or disruptions in service, especially during peak usage periods?

Mr. John Wright: Every morning when I wake up, I do a small prayer. I’m kidding but I can say we’ve not had substantial downtime in over 2 years. We’ve had occasionally half a day and maybe the worst is when we lose service for an entire software because of some changes made by that platform.

12. Can you discuss any unique or proprietary technologies employed by StatsDrone that give it a competitive edge in the market?

Mr. John Wright: I think by keeping our tech stack simple, it has been helpful. We use PHP, Python, MySQL and sometimes Javascript. I absolutely love the new programming languages and databases but I think they can cause stability issues.

I still believe the tech stack is almost irrelevant than having developers with experience in affiliate marketing and a product manager with experience too. If you remove one fron the equation, you won’t get a good stats app at all.

13. Could you elaborate on StatsDrone's growth strategy, including plans for market expansion, user acquisition, and product diversification?

Mr. John Wright: At the start of 2023, we made the decision to focus on Product-Led Growth (PLG) over Sales-Led Growth (SLG). That is all we do now is focus on building a better product. It sounds very cliche but it is nice to hear word of mouth being what brings in new users.

14. What kind of support and resources does StatsDrone provide to assist affiliate marketers in maximizing their ROI and optimizing their campaigns?

Mr. John Wright: To be fair, I think we could do a better job of this. If affiliates start talking to us, we are happy to share insights and what we think are best practices. We do want to try to automate this so we can score affiliates on the spot and give them a report on things they can do to be better in running their business and working with their data.

15. How does StatsDrone foster a sense of community and collaboration among its user base, facilitating knowledge sharing and best practices in affiliate marketing?

Mr. John Wright: Right now that tends to happen with 1 on 1 calls we have with affiliates. We are chatting with our users almost daily and we just get excellent feedback.

We haven’t done too much yet for a community centre for affiliates with the exception of launching the Affiliate BI podcast.

We do want to have some type of community channel as we think this will help affiliates out more especially in relaying messages about new features or when we have to fix software because changes were made.