Introduction to the online casino affiliate marketing
What is online casino affiliate marketing? Why you should use it, as a casino owner or runner? What advantages does it have and how effective are affiliate programs compared to other promo tools? We are considering every given question in this article to give a thorough answer.
Who are affiliates?
Let’s start with basics: an affiliate – who is he? An affiliate is a natural person or a legal entity that promotes the product or service of another natural person or legal entity and remunerated with some money for such actions. Sometimes, instead of money, an affiliate can be rewarded with a product or service that he promotes. When it comes to the online casino business, if not money then a reward can be free spins, a VIP account with good benefits, free play, or some money on the gaming account. This type of remuneration (instead of money) can be interesting to affiliates because a large part of them is also gamblers. This is how they gain expertise in the field of online casino gaming and find out about the best casino offers.
What do affiliates do to promote an online casino?
Affiliates can run or own websites, social media accounts, and be owners of various web promotion studios, which they use to do their work.
The affiliate’s main task is to find a client and forward it on the website of an online casino through a number of things:
- Contextual advertising
- Banner ads
- Pop-up ads (they still exist!)
- Links in social media
- SEO promotion
- Expert articles
- Ghost advertising.
The reason why affiliate marketing is effective is that the adverts that a gambler clicks to go to a casino website are placed in niche websites – most often, on those about gambling. To put it simply, you don’t visit a gambling site without an intention to play a bit or to find out how to play better (probably, to find out whether there are any ways of deceiving a casino). So the audience that is redirected to online casinos from casino affiliate gambling sites is of high quality, targeted, and heated to make a purchase. Thus, contextual, banner, and social media ads are considered the most high-quality channels of getting traffic to online casinos. The rest of the listed channels above (as well as googling and direct entrance) are not as effective yet also shall be developed.
For bringing the players, affiliates are paid. We’re considering their payments in more detail below.
What do affiliates get in return?
There exist two basic types of remuneration for affiliates for new clients: money rewards and providing casino services. The second is super rare and, as a rule, is applied only for gamblers who can’t live without gaming. Since they would still spend a fair share of received money to gamble, they negotiate with casino owners about such conditions for their affiliate results.
As for remuneration with money, it can be further split like this:
- This is translated as the Cost Per Action scheme. The goal is to make a client not simply gotten to the casino’s website but making some action, which would be interesting in terms of a financial model: completing the registration, making a deposit, doing a bet, losing some X money in bets… The interest of online casinos in such a scheme is that they receive the best of the incoming traffic, obtaining real money. Otherwise, they would pay for clicks and passages to their pages – which brings nothing but statistics. In fact, the CPC (Cost Per Click) model, once popular, today is fading to zero because there are too many bots online exist, which can do these clicks and other simple actions, designed to deceive. And the casino runners prevent being deceived by switching to a much more real scheme, CPA. Also, in contrast to the next item on the list, revenue sharing, the CPA is alluring because it only gives payment once – for a unique action of a unique client.
- Sharing the revenue. This scheme is not popular among casino owners but very popular among affiliates because it is possible to make yourself a nice lifetime income. The thing is that an affiliate is paid some percentage from the net profits of casinos for a client that an affiliate brought. And that goes on a periodic basis – for as long as a client brings profits to the casino, an affiliate is got paid. Some best companies on the market can give up to 50% of the net profits to their best and most honored affiliates. But such an amount is rather rare – most frequently, the payment is below 1%. Most casinos even have a negative carryover, which allows freezing the payments to affiliates if a client brings net losses instead of net incomes in some period.
- Advance payments. This is a scheme, which mostly works with large established affiliate networks, which guarantee a given result according to a contract or average market indicators. BoomAff is one of the diversified and developed affiliate networks, which offers connection to many great affiliates without the need to find each and every affiliate manually. Our database automatically employs pools of affiliates according to the requirements of each casino owner and each individual marketing campaign. Pretty much the same principles of work are in other affiliate networks (but not all of them are as reliable as BoomAff). So, it works like this – a casino runner finds a good network, starts a campaign in it and the system calculates the constant and variable costs of the campaign depending on many characteristics, taking into account the current market position. An orderer of an affiliate marketing campaign can set up the total budget of the campaign and its goals to control the expenses. Some part of the cost is paid at the beginning of a campaign and the variable part is paid as it goes. Also, if you’re not dealing with an affiliate network but work with individual affiliates, the biggest of them, who have very established names on the market can require some upfront payment. Not every casino runner wishes to operate like that, though, since there are no guaranteed results, even if working on a contractual basis.
- Every affiliate and casino can come up with a mixture of the methods of remuneration mentioned above.
Why is affiliate marketing effective?
The field of online casinos is specific compared to other online services. In some countries, online casinos may be fully or partially restricted. Also, some casinos may specialize in just a part of services (for instance, only slots and card games), whilst others offer a broader range – which would include sports betting, roulette, live games, etc. Also, it is about betting real money with an expectation to win, so it is not just a simple purchase of something – the services of online casinos have an unpredictable outcome.
These contribute to a bulkiness of information, in which affiliates could be experts. When they tell about these things in detail on their websites, people come there to read and, if they trust this information – they visit the promoted casino. Thus, only a heated & highly targeted audience is collected – which is much better than through a number of other channels.
Conclusion
Affiliates can give flows of devoted and targeted audience, which is ready to make a purchase. That’s why it is effective. The costs spend on it are fully compensated with the income that affiliate clients bring.