Britain is one of the most loyal countries to gambling with a developed legislative regulation in this area. The total gross revenue of gambling operators in 2010, according to the Gambling Commission of Great Britain, amounted about £ 5,7 billion. According to sociological surveys, 68% of British adults gamble in one way or another.
There is a serious struggle for British gamblers among the leading operators, and in this article, we will try to figure out how to work with this audience in conditions of severe competition.
Demographic value of the traffic
For a start, let’s try to identify typical patterns of players and their preferences, depending on various factors.
First, we should consider the dependence of the average total revenue a casino gets from one player (Lifetime Value) based on the gender and gaming preferences, as well as the percentage of game preferences based on gender.
| Casino games | Poker | Sports | Casual games | |
| Female | £500 (6-12 months) | – | – | £400-500 (6-12 months) |
| Male | £200-300 (3-9 months) | £300-400 (6-12 months) | £200 (6-12 months) | £100-200 (6-12 months) |
* Data of hybridinteraction.com
As we can see, the average time of gambling in a single institution is usually not more than six months. This should be taken into account by both casino operators building a system of keeping the players or the players transfer from one brand to another, and the affiliates that have the ability to interact with their audience, for example, using their own email lists.
The attractiveness of the female audience in segments of Casino Games and Casual Games is of particular point. This segment is so interesting that some gambling operators offer special branded online casinos for this audience, for example 888ladies.com, winkbingo.com or meccabingo.com.
Fun and Real Money Players
The overall conversion rates are difficult to outline as such factors as Fun and Real Money players ratio are influenced to a great extent by brand recognition, credibility, usability and other factors.
Nevertheless, it makes sense to remember that about 80% of deposits are made within one minute after the registration. In other words, if a player has not deposited money right away, chances that he will do it later are tiny.
The typical conversion cycle is as follows:
In this process, the player goes through the following steps:
- Comes to the site and looks the content through; decides to download the software;
- Trusts the system enough to leave his personal data, including the e-mail address;
- At this stage (Registration), the player has three options to continue: make his first deposit, play for Fun or not play at all. If a visitor has not played within 24 hours from the time of registration, it is unlikely that he can be converted into a real money player.
- If the gambler does not play or keeps playing for virtual money at the casino for more than 2-3 days, the email marketing system is turned on and automatically sends out letters designed to facilitate the conversion of the user to the real money player.
Having figured out the demographics of the players and their conversion cycle, it is time to turn to the issue of driving traffic.
Search Engine Traffic Attraction: Typical Strategies
Casinos’ choice of traffic sources is usually rather limited, and the search engines play a key role in this issue. The basic strategy for the casino in the UK is search engine optimization and PPC advertising.
Pay Per Click
It is important to note that in order to provide contextual advertising in Google AdWords, you must have a gambling license for this area. Furthermore, even if you have a license, Google AdWords will not be able to place your ads in the context media network – only in the search results.
Average cost per a click is about £ 10. It should be borne in mind that the vast majority of big brands, which will have to be competed in paid search results have the most powerful player retention systems and loyalty schemes.
Therefore, the average revenue they get from a player will be significantly higher and, consequently, much larger amounts can be spent on attracting players and as a result, big brands can afford much higher CPC than new projects.
In this respect, the development strategy of the PPC campaign may require trying to find a narrow niche, with lower competition.
PPC campaign ideas:
- players are most active in the evenings (time targeting);
- men start gambling much more intensively before the football games, about 1-2 hours before the broadcast (time and demographic targeting);
- not all the casinos pay enough attention to the female audience (demographic targeting);
- competition by the narrower queries is much weaker (the structure of PPC campaigns by games), etc.
Search Engine Optimization
In 90% of cases, it is the search engine optimization that makes sense to be focused on if we are talking about a young casino.
Top 10 projects in terms of involved unpaid search traffic in Google.co.uk looks like this:
| 888.com |
| ladbrokes.com |
| williamhill.com |
| betfair.com |
| paddypower.com |
| freeslots.com |
| bet365.com |
| coral.co.uk |
| foxybingo.com |
| spinpalace.com |
The most common strategy is to create a site structure in which each game has a separate page that allows you to promote the game by such queries as “play craps online” or “best online blackjack”.
Even the minimal set of about 15 games (blackjack, roulettes, craps, slots, etc.) gives the output of the semantic core around 1200 search terms. This is a great opportunity for young projects to cling to the relevant search engine traffic with less competition.
Typical link building methods
Large casinos usually work with links according to the standard procedure – there are specialists (staff or freelance) who analyse and explore the links of competitors, and then try to aquire a link from the same project (if the budget allows). There are companies that specialize solely on providing such services, and online casinos form the overwhelming majority of their customers.
The preferred format of placing is a small text (about 150 characters), containing one or two links.
Sometimes there are other options, for example, the famous 32Red casino (operator Microgaming) has the following commercials.
In this case the ad combines the layer with the background image and а simple text link with “bingo online” anchor. This was done apparently in order to not just get the link juice, but also get a certain amount of clicks due to such design.
Another popular method of promoting websites in the industry is the creation and distribution of free WordPress themes with a backlink encoded in the footer. Practice shows that a significant amount of links gets cut later, but even so, quality made theme can give hundreds of natural backlinks to the promoted project.
Takeaways
- Women make very attarctive audience for the segments of Casino games and Casual games;
- The average time of play at the same casino makes around 6 months;
- About 80% of all the deposits are made during the first 60 seconds after the registration;
- It is worth trying to find narrower niches in PPC (by separate games, with time targeting and so on);
- From the SEO point of view it is better to put the games to different pages;
- The most popular pattern of ads the leaders have is a short text with 1 to 2 links incorporated in it;
- A very interesting source of backlinks is WordPress themes sponsoring.
