Affiliate marketing has in recent years proven its effectiveness and generated a lot of revenue. It has become a very popular model and it doesn’t require a huge investment. In an industry with expected revenues of around $458.93 billion in 2022, the gambling industry looks at affiliates as the perfect bridge between players seeking relevant gaming sites and casino providers chasing more traffic sources.
Core to any affiliate’s business are bonuses. Every casino worth its salt offers players a no-deposit bonus to try out the casino. It’s the affiliate’s job to make sure these bonuses do what they say.
But let’s take a deeper look at affiliate marketing and how it works within the casino industry.
What Is Affiliate Marketing and Why Is It Lucrative?
Affiliate marketing is a strategy based on performance, which is used in multiple industries to drive traffic towards business sites and platforms. Affiliates create and publish web content, champion and support other businesses on their sites or social media pages, and then earn a commission once they lead customers towards the promoted business.
How Do Casino Affiliates Work?
Where online gambling is concerned, affiliates create and publish content that players can depend on, in order to build a following. Often, the content is long-form, and educational providing different outlooks and providers. This is usually done through links, adverts, and banner ads.The way this works looks like this:
1.OPERATORPartners with
2.AFFILIATE PARTNERPromotes Casino
3. PLAYER
4. Compensates
Visits Website
Affiliates are at times players themselves, who can understand the players’ points of view and can create content respectively. However, they can also be casino owners, providing the target audience with a different perspective.
Affiliate marketers can vary in the kind of content they provide. Here are a few examples:
- Thematic Websites
- Popular bloggers/influencers
- Video channels
- Streamers
- Email marketing specialists
- Anyone who cooperates through the affiliate commission model.
Search Engine Optimisation marketing is also widely used to increase the online presence of gambling sites. A huge discrepancy, exists though, between SEO marketing and Affiliate marketing. Unlike SEO marketing, setting aside a budget for Affiliate marketing won’t prove enough as the latter’s strategy is mostly performance-based. Online operators actually track, analyze and manage their marketing strategy down to the bottom dollar.
Partnering with the correct affiliates is only half the work; the rest is continuously assessing the strategy and making the necessary tweaks and amendments.
VIP and loyalty programs that help players garner reward systems are necessary to retain players on their gambling platforms. These kinds of players can only be brought in by high amounts of traffic.
Email and SMS marketing campaigns are broadly used but they depend on the casino acquiring potential players’ contact details.
Ads on the other hand can increase and boost brand awareness together with spreading the image of the casino. So, players who might not follow banner ads might come across casino advertisements elsewhere. After all, spreading brand awareness can hardly do any harm!
What kind of partnership models are there?
There are a few varied ways that online gambling sites remunerate their affiliate partners:
Pay per Click-here the affiliate program repays a member every time a user clicks on a link. Rewards here are low as not every click leads to action.
Cost per view-the rewards here are even lower as affiliates are paid when a user sees an ad.
Pay per Sale– these rewards can be high, especially if the user brought to the website via an affiliate link buys the advertised product or service.
The following partnership models are the most frequent in the online gambling industry:
Cost Per Action-is when businesses pay affiliates whenever a user takes a certain action on the web. Some of these actions include filling in a contact form, subscribing to a newsletter, signing up to the casino platform, or making a deposit. Affiliates are paid once a player signs up or makes a deposit.
This is the most commonly used payment model in the world of online gambling. The payment is one-time only so affiliates push hard to drive traffic towards the site as much as possible, which is part of what makes Cost PerAction so attractive.
Publishers resort to a plethora of avenues to engage customers, which include contextual advertising, social networking, newsletters, pop-ups, and applications.
Revenue Share– is very common for online casino affiliate programs.
The way this works is once affiliates lead players to a gambling site, they receive a percentage of the revenue generated by the player throughout the punter’s time playing there; most of the time the operators pay a share of the player’s losses to the affiliate but there are also times when affiliates get a share of the player’s wins.
Hybrid-models are a blend of the revenue share and CPA models. Affiliates receive a one-time payment when the player first signs up together with a commission throughout the player’s time playing on the gambling site. The payment scheme depends on the program selected.
How Can Affiliate Programs Be Successful?
When looking for an affiliate partner to enter into an agreement with, a casino operator should always check the affiliate’s network.
If it isn’t directed towards the same target audience the gambling site’s business is in, then it can be useless. So whatever product is on offer, whether it’s slots, poker, or sports betting, the casino provider needs to ascertain that the affiliate in question is well-known in that community.
Furthermore, a casino provider should make sure that the payment model is mutually beneficial and for that reason, ongoing tracking and observation should be retained to ensure that the affiliate program is running effectively and is not eating the operator’s overall budget.
Tweaks and adjustments should be made to boost the performance of successful affiliates and underperforming affiliates should be made redundant.
