Levon Nikoghosyan: PartnerMatrix, bridging the gap between operators and players

Since its inception in 2015, PartnerMatrix has evolved from a promising start-up to a mature and complete affiliate and agent platform, today servicing over 100 operators across the globe, including names such as MaxBet, ShangriLa, TotoGaming, JoAffs, Stake7, RioBet, PlayFrank and FortuneJack.

Powered by EveryMatrix, PartnerMatrix aims to help iGaming operators in their efforts of building long-term relationships with their players, this being the number one priority for both bookmakers and casino operators.

5 Star Media sat down with Levon Nikoghosyan, CEO of PartnerMatrix, to discuss why affiliate marketing has become a real game-changer in the iGaming industry, what are the most important trends everyone should be aware of and how PartnerMatrix will further develop in the near future.

Is affiliate marketing different now than when you started?

Today affiliates have a broader niche in the industry than five years ago, without a doubt. We can safely state that affiliate marketing is a true game-changer in iGaming, offering more flexible channels both for customer acquisition and retention. To reach and bring new players on board, operators try every possible channels and marketing techniques, and through all these years, affiliate marketing has proven its efficiency in attracting loyal and long-term customers.

When we started, the industry was not as developed as today, back then employing only a handful of specialists and limited tools. One other obstacle was the lack of trust from operators. Many of them weren’t really convinced that they need to use affiliate tools and techniques at all. Luckily, this is not the case anymore, affiliate marketing being recognized as a massive channel for business expansion.

What key industry trends have emerged in 2019 so far?

The digitalization we witness across all industries affect us all and, of course, riding this wave is a natural thing to do. We now have so many platforms to experiment with, starting with Social Media, forums, blogs and many others, so I think this helps marketing to became more targeted and brings new opportunities for affiliate marketing.

Gambling communities have already started promoting themselves on Instagram, Facebook, Telegram, every other month a new themed community is being organized somewhere on the Internet. I believe focusing more on adding value through content around gambling is a lot more worthy to players than pushing out promotional messages, with little difference to those of the competition.

Which are the essential features an affiliate system should offer to iGaming clients?

PartnerMatrix is an ever-evolving solution, empowering bookmakers and casino operators to manage their affiliate efforts end-to-end, all using a single unified back-office with an intuitive, customizable and multilingual interface.

One of the most important needs for our clients is to have a great real-time reporting capacity. This builds towards having a full understanding of one operator’s Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) and Net Gaming Revenue (NGR). Thanks to this feature, Affiliate Managers can easily visualize reports of bets, clicks, views, and anything they need to track the player behavior and make decisions based on real data. It also allows calculating CPA in real time.

We are the only platform to offer Reactivation Reward, which allows operators to pay out commissions not only for newly registered players but also for reactivated ones. Almost every operator has players that have been passive for some period of time, but with little efforts, they can bring them back with the help of their affiliates. Affiliates get commissions for their efforts, players get bonuses and the operators wins back a customer, so a win-win situation for all involved parties.

Another solution worth mentioning is Branch Management. Both our operators and affiliate agents can move players from one account to another without any inconvenience for the players or clients. For example, you have two accounts and want to merge them, or you want to move one of your player segments to your partner’s account, then you can do this with a couple of clicks.

What are PartnerMatrix’s achievements this year and what can we expect next?

For our team, 2019 was a pretty busy year, with many updates, features and new launched clients. We managed to reach 60,000 affiliates around the world and 4 million players, which is a big milestone. We are now at 6 million monthly clicks, and we expect to see this number grow exponentially in the next year. Q1 and Q2 of this year were record-breaking for us and we are keen to put in the effort of mainlining this growth trend in 2020 as well.

In terms of product development, which is something we are very keen on exploring to enrich our current offering, we launched two highly requested features. One is player segmentation, a tool which helps with the management of the entire database. Operators can set different commission plans for different segments, thus targeting different groups in a tailored way. Another huge step was the launch of the Player Reactivation Reward, which had tremendous success among our clients.

We are happy to see clients that used other affiliate platforms switching to ours. For ones, the reason is flexible commission types, for others, it is automated payments. After integrating PartnerMatrix with MoneyMatrix, we now offer affiliates the possibility to withdraw their commissions directly from the PartnerMatrix system interface. But at the end of a day, it is all the features combined that our customers are interested in.

The original version of this interview has been published by 5 Star Media on November 12, 2019, under the title PartnerMatrix, bridging the gap between operators and players.