TAP: Everything You Need to Run a World-Class iGaming Affiliate Program

If you've ever tried to run an iGaming affiliate program on a patchwork of spreadsheets, manual commission calculations, and disconnected tracking tools, you already know the feeling. Something is always slightly off - a commission dispute here, a missed pixel fire there, an affiliate asking why their numbers don't match yours. It's death by a thousand small headaches.

TheAffiliatePlatform (TAP) was built to solve exactly that problem. It's a purpose-built affiliate management system for online casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms, and fintech operators - one that gives you genuine control over your affiliate network without requiring an engineering team to babysit it every day.

Trusted by 100+ companies across the iGaming industry, TAP is a sibling product to Smartico.ai and runs on the same philosophy: the best platform is the one that gets out of your way and lets you focus on growing your business.

Below is a complete breakdown of the main 12 features - what they do, why they matter, and how they fit into the bigger picture of a high-performance affiliate program.

The Foundation: Managing Your Affiliate Network

1. Affiliate Account Management

Every affiliate program lives or dies by how well you can manage your partners. TAP gives operators a centralized dashboard to oversee every affiliate account - assigning permission roles, tracking activity, managing payments, and keeping everything visible in one place.

Affiliates get their own secure accounts with 2FA support (via Google Authenticator and similar apps), so security isn't an afterthought. There's also a no negative carry-over option that can be set at the affiliate or deal level, meaning an affiliate's negative balance from one month doesn't drag into the next - a small but relationship-defining detail that serious affiliates notice and appreciate.

Affiliates can also pull their own reporting data directly via API without ever logging into the main platform, which keeps your inbox clean and your partners happy.

2. Multi-Level Marketing

Not all affiliate programs are flat. If you want to build a network where affiliates can recruit sub-affiliates and earn commissions from their activity, TAP handles it with multi-level marketing structures that support unlimited depth levels.

This matters more than it sounds. A properly structured MLM commission model can turn your best affiliates into recruiters - growing your network organically while giving everyone a financial stake in the program's success. You set the rules, define the tiers, and TAP handles the math in real time.

The platform keeps the whole structure manageable, with real-time affiliate management even as your network scales.

3. Reporting

Data is only useful if you can actually read it. TAP's reporting module gives operators complete freedom to configure how they see and interact with affiliate performance data.

• Real-time data: Clicks, registrations, FTDs, revenue - updated as events happen.
• Flexible filters: Slice data by traffic source, affiliate, brand, campaign, or custom attributes.
• Drag-and-drop pivot views: Rearrange report columns without touching a database.
• Player-level drill-down: Click into individual player rows to see detailed profiles and financial activity.
• Pixel tracking history: Full log of every pixel fired back to affiliates, including status (New, Failed, Delivered, Expired).

For affiliates, the experience is equally clean - they can access their own performance data without bothering your team, and pull reports via API if they prefer automated data pipelines over manual logins.

Where the Money Goes: Commission and Deal Structures

4. Deal Builder

Commission structures in iGaming are rarely simple. Different affiliates bring different traffic quality. Different markets have different economics. A blanket RevShare deal makes sense for some partners and loses you money with others.

TAP's Deal Builder lets you craft exactly the right deal for the right affiliate, campaign, or group of players - no compromises. Supported commission models include:

• CPA (Cost Per Acquisition): Pay a fixed amount per qualifying player.
• CPL (Cost Per Lead): Pay per registration, regardless of deposit activity.
• RevShare (Revenue Share): Pay a percentage of net revenue generated by referred players.
• Hybrid: Combine CPA and RevShare in a single deal.

You can also set detailed qualification rules - minimum net deposit, FTD amount, total deposit, volume thresholds, and activity counts - so commissions are only triggered when players actually meet the criteria that matter to your business.

Deals can be scoped by country, brand, or any combination of criteria. This means no more one-size-fits-all commission structures, and no more paying for traffic that doesn't convert.

5. Multi-Product Commission Structure

Most iGaming operators run multiple products - casino, sportsbook, poker, live dealer, and more. Historically, managing different commission structures across products meant either oversimplifying everything or drowning in manual spreadsheets.

TAP's Multi-Product Commission Structure solves this by letting you assign different commission plans per product and per brand. Run your casino on a RevShare model, your sportsbook on CPA, and your poker vertical on a hybrid deal - all within the same affiliate program, all tracked and reported separately.

Maximal flexibility and transparency: every product, every brand, every deal - clean and separate.

For multi-brand operators, this is particularly powerful. You can unify your brands under one affiliate program while keeping registrations, commissions, and reporting distinct. One admin panel. Multiple businesses.

6. Invoicing and Payment Documentation

Clean payments require clean paperwork. TAP's invoicing feature gives affiliates a structured way to request payments and attach supporting invoices and documentation directly within the platform. No emails and no manual chasing.

Every request flows through a Request-Approve-Pay process, meaning nothing moves forward without operator sign-off. Operators can review uploaded documents from a dedicated Pending Approval queue, then approve or cancel with full visibility into what's been submitted. Completed payments retain their invoice history for easy reference down the line.

For operations where compliance and auditability matter, this turns what is usually a messy, ad-hoc process into something repeatable, transparent, and scalable.

Knowing What Works: Tracking and Testing

7. Custom Tracked Links

Every click your affiliates send to your platform passes through a tracking link. Those links need to be accurate, flexible, and branded - not a string of generic parameters that confuses everyone involved.

TAP lets operators create custom-branded tracking URLs using their own domain, generate short links for cleaner sharing, and add dynamic parameters for deeper segmentation. Affiliates can access their own tracked links directly from their account dashboards, and every click generates a unique tracker that ties player behavior back to the specific affiliate and campaign.

The platform also supports advanced attribution methods beyond standard cookie-based tracking - Server-to-Server (S2S/Postback), Image Pixel, iFrame, Client JS Block, and Facebook Pixel tracking - making it suitable for sophisticated affiliate marketers who demand reliability.

8. A/B Testing & Destination Links

Most affiliate managers know that landing page performance varies, but without the tools to test it systematically, you're just guessing. TAP includes built-in A/B testing for destination links, letting you split traffic 50/50 between two landing pages and measure which one actually converts better.

Setup requires no complex coding. Define your two destination URLs, activate the test, and let the platform distribute traffic and collect data automatically. The results appear as "A" and "B" variants in your reporting dimensions, so you can make data-backed decisions rather than going with whoever argued loudest in the last meeting.

Destination links also support country-based redirect rules. This is crucial for staying compliant with regional restrictions while still directing traffic somewhere useful when your primary landing page is blocked in a specific market.

You can segment destination links by brand, type, and custom attributes, and enrich URLs with additional tracking parameters for even more granular analysis.

Looking the Part: Creatives and Communication

9. Media Management

Affiliates promote your brand. What they promote, matters. TAP's media management system gives operators a centralized place to upload, organize, and distribute every creative asset across their entire affiliate network - with full control over who gets what.

What this includes in practice:

• Banner ads: Upload display creatives in any format, assign them to specific affiliates, and load content dynamically without requiring affiliates to manually update their placements.
• Email templates: Create branded email templates with properly tracked affiliate links built in.
• Landing pages: Build exclusive landing pages with specific offers, logos, and custom URLs. They’re  all hosted by TAP on your own domain.
• Mailers and promotional assets: Create and distribute campaign-specific materials to partners with segmentation by brand, type, and custom tags.

The entire media library is accessible from the BackOffice, and affiliates can access their assigned materials from their own accounts. When your brand is evolving or a new promotion is live, updating creatives across your network takes minutes, not days.

10. Personalized Communication

Most affiliate programs treat communication like broadcasting. They send the same email to everyone on the list and hope someone reads it. TAP takes a different approach.

The Personalized Communication feature automates affiliate outreach while keeping it relevant and targeted. Whether you're onboarding new affiliates, alerting partners to a new promotion, updating deal terms, or re-engaging dormant affiliates, you can automate those messages to trigger at the right time, for the right audience, without your team manually writing and sending each one.

This matters because affiliate relationships are built on communication. Partners who feel ignored or buried in irrelevant mass emails become disengaged, and disengaged affiliates stop sending traffic. A system that handles personalized outreach automatically keeps your network warm without adding to your team's workload.

Under the Hood: Infrastructure and Integration

11. Built on APIs

A platform is only as useful as how well it connects to everything else you run. TAP is API-first by design, meaning integration options are flexible enough to work with any existing tech stack.

Operators can connect via two primary methods. First, CSV file uploads pushed to a dedicated S3 bucket at whatever cadence works - hourly, daily, or otherwise. This is the most popular option and typically has new operators up and running within one to two days. Second, API integration for real-time data pushing, which gives affiliates access to financial and operational reports via API keys generated in the BackOffice, without logging into the platform itself.

TAP also supports fully custom and multi-lingual registration pages for affiliates, which is particularly important for operators running programs across multiple markets where a single-language interface would be a barrier to affiliate recruitment.

The platform is available in any language, and the team provides real-time integration support via Slack during onboarding.

12. Refer-a-Friend: Turn Players into Mini Affiliates

This is one of the more innovative features in the TAP toolkit - and often the most underused by operators who haven't thought through its potential.

The Refer-a-Friend system turns your existing player base into a distributed marketing network. Players who are already active on your platform are often your most credible advocates. They talk to other players, they share content, they recommend products to their social circles. Refer-a-Friend gives them a structured, tracked way to do that and get rewarded for it.

Operationally, it works the same way as your standard affiliate tracking. This includes unique links, conversion tracking, commission attribution, but it's designed for players rather than professional affiliate marketers. The onboarding is simpler, the commission structures are typically different from standard affiliate deals, and the whole thing integrates cleanly with your existing affiliate program reporting.

Every satisfied player is a potential acquisition channel. Refer-a-Friend makes that systematic.

For iGaming operators focused on sustainable, lower-cost player acquisition, this feature alone can meaningfully shift the economics of a program over time.

The Part That Doesn't Show Up in Feature Lists

Every software company claims great support. But TAP structures it differently.

Every client gets a Dedicated Success Manager - not a shared support inbox, not a chatbot, but a real person who knows both the platform and the iGaming industry. They're accessible via Slack, Teams, and Jira depending on what your team uses. For urgent technical issues during integration, real-time support is available. For less urgent questions, feature requests, and investigations, there's a JIRA desk for easy tracking and follow-up.

For operators switching from another platform, TAP has completed hundreds of migrations and has a documented, team-assisted process to make the transition as smooth as possible. The typical CSV-based setup takes one to two days. API integration depends on your R&D team's schedule, but TAP's team is available to help throughout.

Powered Up with Smartico.ai’s CRM

TAP integrates with Smartico CRM, opening a whole new layer of what you can do with your affiliate data. Once connected, you can run missions and tournaments for your affiliates, segment them with precision, and engage them through automated, personalized CRM flows - the same way you would with players. 

It's the kind of toolset that turns a standard affiliate program into a fully managed, gamified partner experience.

Wrapping Up

Affiliate programs are one of the most cost-effective customer acquisition channels in iGaming - when they're run well. The difference between a program that generates consistent, high-quality traffic and one that generates arguments with affiliates and unexplained commission discrepancies is usually the platform underneath it.

TheAffiliatePlatform gives iGaming operators the tools to build programs that run cleanly: flexible commission structures, reliable tracking, real-time reporting, smart media management, and enough automation to stop your affiliate managers from drowning in manual work.

It's built specifically for online casinos, sportsbooks, poker rooms, and fintech operators, not repurposed from an e-commerce affiliate tool and forced to fit iGaming. That distinction matters more than most operators realize until they've tried both.

Frequently Asked Questions

How long does integration take? CSV-based integration is typically live within a few days. API integration timeline depends on your R&D team's availability, but TAP provides real-time support throughout.

Can I migrate from another affiliate platform? Yes. TAP has completed hundreds of migrations and has a documented process to make switching straightforward. They'll send you a step-by-step guide and support you through the transition.

How is data updated? Data is processed in real time as soon as TAP receives it. If you're sending data in daily batches, the platform updates daily. If you're pushing via API in real time, it's live as events happen.

Can I manage multiple brands from one account? Yes. TAP supports multi-brand campaign creation and tracking while keeping each brand's affiliate registrations, commissions, and reporting separate, all managed from one admin panel.

What revenue models does TAP support? CPA, CPL, RevShare, and Hybrid deals are all supported natively. Different deals can be assigned per product, per brand, and per affiliate.

Is support included? Every client gets a dedicated success manager accessible via Slack, Skype, Teams, and Jira. There is no tiered support model where you pay more to talk to a real person.

If you want to find out how TheAffiliatePlatform can help you make the best use of your affiliates so you can raise revenue like nothing you’ve tried before, book your free, in-depth demo HERE.