Shifting Focus

ReferOn’s development team has been busy with a continual slate of quarterly updates. David Harris, B2B Affiliate Team Lead, explains how ReferOn’s focus has shifted from being predominantly client-centric to one that continually shifts between product needs and market demands.

How do you reflect on 2024?

Last year has brought a lot of changes; we grew our portfolio significantly over the year, introduced our new webinar series as well as winning a few awards. We also released new support packages in the latter part of the year that benefit both us and the client with savings. We also signed some new agreements near the end of the year as resellers, so we’ll have even more brands coming out as we progress into 2025 following these partnerships.

ReferOn recently entered a strategic partnership with MicroGame, Italy’s largest iGaming software and services provider. This feels like a significant agreement to land.

Microgame has a lot of the market share in Italy, so it was a good one to connect with. We should hopefully be having much more of a large market share in Italy as we move forward as well. All good news and we have other agreements in the pipeline, but Microgame should be our biggest agreement to date as we move forward into the future.

What’s the scope of the collaboration?

We identified an area in the market that we could target which basically allows a large brand provider in Italy to be almost exclusive with ReferOn. As this brand provider launches more brands in Italy than almost any other, they are much more likely to go with ReferOn. At ReferOn we encourage our data transparency and our visibility as we move forward and so if we now have a better foothold in that market, we should hopefully see more affiliates becoming aware of our product which can then lead to these affiliates seeing and having more visibility about our product too which can then ultimately lead to outside of Italy as well.

The next episode of ReferOn Insights will be dedicated to the migration process to ReferOn from other affiliate systems. What are the challenges are of migrating to different affiliate management systems?

My ideas around migration and ultimately the core focus of education are where the concept of ReferOn Insights really came from – any reader can catch up with the other insights via LinkedIn and YouTube. We started the series introducing ReferOn, highlighting our causes, why we’ve done things the way we have. We then moved forward with the Sales Manager who focused on new clients and how we deal with business. 

Our other insights were much more educational and Q&A-based. I saw that our portfolio was growing quite quickly and with that, I decided to do two sides of our seminars and insights where we focused on learning and teaching ReferOn and what it means as an operator and another on what it means to be an affiliate using our system

As ReferOn increases its foothold in the industry it’s no longer just taking what I call ‘clean slate’ brands but ones with a bigger foundation in the market who are seeing that ReferOn is a superior product and want to move. As such, we, and potential clients, must understand what is involved in the migration. This upcoming video goes through all our important milestones; what are the things to remember, and what happens on day one going forwards. You’ll learn more about that as that gets released. 

In Q4, ReferOn had several updates in the technical pipeline including Domain Management, CPA Capping, Player Status, CPA Exclusion, and more. How’s progress been implementing these updates?

Yeah, our dev team has been busy. We’ve had a lot of changes. The biggest one, I would say, that impacted a lot of our clients was our enhancements to postbacks which allowed for much more accessible audits of these real-time events. We’ve had several updates throughout the year as well on the reporting structures, more groupings, more filters, and improved rewarding structures allowing for CPA deals to geo payouts. 

We have further changes to the payout structures and to qualified postbacks coming very soon tying onto the rewarding engine, as well as changing the registration flows to make much nicer designs and flows. Whilst the dev team has been busy, we still encourage feedback. We have our things in mind, but we still like to reprioritise as we move forward and things are always subject to change as the market changes. 

How is ReferOn’s product development timeline balanced between client requests and long-term planning? 

It really is a mixture. The client feedback was important in the early stages to make sure that we made our client base happy. Now it’s become a blend as a product of the market and business development. We want to be there before changes in the market happen and be as proactive as possible. If you’re getting client feedback, you’re getting it when they need it and development takes time. 

We try to have a blend of being product-centric and client-centric and sometimes we may swing one way or the other. It depends on how quick the market’s moving and how we need to reprioritise. About a year ago we were still very much leaning toward the client focus because we want to make them as happy as we can whereas now, we’re in a position where we can dictate the backlog with ideas of our own innovation.

What are your expectations for the business in 2025?

In Q1 we are reprioritising some things based on what I’ve just said on being client and product-focused. We are going to have some changes to notification areas, so they are a bit more alert, changes to the payment process, changes on data ingestion depending on the provider and the version as everything is different. We will roll out further reporting metrics – everyone always wants more data in there. 

We want to keep driving our portfolio, making more external providers and migrations. We’ve done a number this year which scaled up our operations and we’re on a lot more networks. 2025 is going to be a similar trend to late 2024, with growing our client portfolio and meeting the needs of the ever-changing market.

​ReferOn’s development team has been busy with a continual slate of quarterly updates. David Harris, B2B Affiliate Team Lead, explains how ReferOn’s focus has shifted from being predominantly client-centric to one that continually shifts between product needs and market demands. How do you reflect on 2024? Last year has brought a lot of changes; we…