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Important Service Notice:
THE VIRGIN GAMES AFFILIATE WEBSITE WILL BE UNAVAILABLE TODAY, TUESDAY 18TH NOVEMBER 2008.
A full service is expected to return at 9:30am GMT on Wednesday 19th November 2008.
Banner serving, traffic and registration tracking will remain unaffected by this essential maintenance work.
“What’s going :crazy:n?” I hear you ask.
“Nothing but good news!” is the answer! Read on for a full explanation…
What is happening at Virgin Games?Virgin Games is historically a marketing company that has promoted gaming services from three different gaming operators (Wagerworks for Casino, Boss Media for Poker and St Minver for Bingo).
We are now making the big jump and we officially become an operating company in our own right from next month. It’s Woohoo time, for our players, for Virgin Games too, and for you too!
What does it mean for the players?Becoming an operating company not only means we will manage our own unified customer service/call centre in house from Wednesday 19th November 2008, it also means we will own and manage player databases and payment processing systems.
Improved customer experience
Customer service is at the core of the Virgin philosophy. Up to now, this part of our business has been in the capable hands of Wagerworks and St-Minver, but the time has now come to get our hands dirty and leverage what Virgin is best known for. Our plan is simple: inject Virgin’s tradition of great customer care to the world of online gaming, and make sure our visitors are welcomed, entertained and supported the way they deserve to be.
Centralized, owned and managed player database
Each of our gaming products has required individual registration. Until now it was hard for our players to browse seamlessly through our game offerings. This is about to change. No more Virgin Casino, Virgin Poker or Virgin Bingo players, we’re building a happy home where all of our players will become Virgin Games players, regardless of their game-play preferences. Once all our products are integrated, new players will only need to register once, after which they will have access to our full library of games. Whether they prefer slot games, multi-table poker or a quick game of bingo, they’ll only ever be a few clicks away from thrilling entertainment.
Centralized, owned and managed new single wallet
Imagine owning three different wallets for your shopping: one to buy bread, one for vegetables, and a third one for milk. Doesn’t make much sense, does it?
Not to worry: as Bob the builder would put it, our single wallet will fix this! Under the new system, all deposits, awarded bonuses and winnings – regardless of the type of game played – will be safely stored in the new Virgin Games single wallet, which will allow your players to use their funds wherever they want, whenever they want. Just like in real life, only without the queue at the supermarket checkout.
What does it mean for you, the affiliate partner?From increased cross-product revenues and holistic player reports to across-the board prime commission rates, this brings our affiliates nothing but good news!
More cross-product revenue
By making it easier for our players to get in touch directly with us, register, deposit, withdraw and – most importantly – switch quickly and seamlessly between game types, this is guaranteed to generate increased cross-product revenue for the affiliates sending us players.
Only prime commission rates
Our commission structure will adapt to this new system. We will drop the boundaries system, reassess all rates for active affiliates and provide flat revenue-share rates across the board.
Confused? Here’s an example:
You are a new affiliate who sends us a new player from a Cleopatra or Elvis banner from your site. Chances are this player likes playing slot machines. As the affiliate who sent us this player, not only will you get 35% (or whatever rate you’re on) revenue share on his slots game-play, but you will also – should this player decide to play poker a few days later – get a full 35% on his poker rake. Whatever game the player you sent decides to go for, and whatever the software provider, you will receive prime rates for their play, across all games, all the time.
New reporting
Even though most of our promotional strategy through the affiliate system will remain unchanged (we will still provide game specific banners and marketing tools), the boundaries between products and type of players will slowly fade, and we’ll provide you with a holistic view of your player’s activities.
When is this happening?We will rollout single sign-on/single wallet integration over the course of the next few months. First to be made available will be Virgin Poker, on the 19th of November 2008. Virgin Casino will follow after about two months, then Virgin Bingo about two months after that.
What is going to change, and how?Reporting
As soon as Virgin Poker is migrated to the new platform on the 19th of November, you will notice the appearance of a new “Poker ‘New’!” tab in our snapshot and player reports.
Player report
Since all new Virgin Poker registrations and transactions post 19th November will feed our shiny new unified player database, all registrations and transactional activities prior to the 19th November will be relocated to an archived player report, available via a text link on the right of your standard player report page. The archive report will have the exact same functionality of the current report (date range filter, blushing textboxes, etc…)
All Poker activity post 19th November will be available in the new “Poker” tab (you can’t miss it; there’s a “New!” tag on it).
It might get a bit confusing at first since active players will show in both poker reports, but you will soon be able to make sense of it all. In any case, help is – as always – just a click away: affiliates@virgingames.com.
Snapshot report
Same as above.
Creatives report
unchanged.
Payment report
No drastic change here, except for your November payment report: it will show two separate entries, one for payable commission accumulated pre-19th and another one for post 19th November 08.
Payment
No change there, apart from the fact that your Virgin Games affiliate payments will now show on your bank/Neteller statements as coming from “Virgin Games Services Limited” instead of just “Virgin Games”. Guess you would have worked this one out anyway!
Marketing tools
Because of the way new databases work, we will not be able to support the Virgin Poker direct download marketing tool anymore, at least for a few months. We have therefore disabled the category, and ask you to remove any Virgin Poker direct download link we might have provided you with in the past. Direct download will make it back as a marketing tool, and we’ll let you know when this happens.
Tracking
There will be no change to our trackers. We take pride in the backwards compatibility of our system, so you will not need to do anything when switchover happens on the 19th November.
You can keep on using the same tracking links you’ve always used, as we took care of plugging them into our new database.Note: There is however one type of Poker tracking link that we will no longer support: those provided in 2006, long before we launched our own internal cross product affiliate program.
Explanation: before we launched our own affiliate system the Virgin Poker affiliate tags were being generated by the Boss backend system. Since we are switching database, there is no need for our tracking tags to go through the Boss database anymore. If you’re one of a few early affiliates left using a Virgin Poker tracking tag that looks like this: http://travis.bosscasinos.com/re.asp?name=POK&camp=XXX&go=XXX, you should stop using them and replace them with the version that has been generated by our affiliate system since 2007. If you started promoting Virgin Poker through the current affiliate system, there is no need for you to do anything. If however you started promoting Virgin Poker before we built our own affiliate system (thanks for your loyalty!) you might want to check that your tags are up to date.Graphics, Banners, Branding
New structure generally involves new branding, and we won’t be the odd ones out: new logos, new messages and imagery are part of the reshuffling, and that’s exciting news. Again you will not need to move a finger. We’ll make sure our banners, logos and other graphic materials are overwritten with the flashy new version, so the updated versions will show automatically on your site.
Note: if you are hosting the banners locally, it is your responsibility to get the updated version from our site. We understand it may be more practical / reassuring for some affiliates to host the banners themselves; but if you do you will be responsible for the extra work that goes with this decision, i.e. you will need to manually update all of your outdated banners. This is really important as the last thing anyone wants is a visitor getting to our site through an interest for an outdated promotion. This is as bad PR for us as it is for you (the affiliate), as we will have to apologize to the player and explain that you should have updated your site and didn’t.
That’s it for now, but do not hesitate to contact us if you have more questions: affiliates@virgingames.com
Cheers,
Becoming an operating company not only means we will manage our own unified customer service/call centre in house from Wednesday 19th November 2008, it also means we will own and manage player databases and payment processing systems.
Very nice!! This is very cool and exciting especially in these crazy times :hattip:
