One of the greatest challenges with any business or money-making website is driving traffic to that site. However, an iGaming site needs to attract visitors to convert them to paying players.
While there are a lot of different techniques to drive traffic, ranging from paid advertising to offline marketing, SEO, and social media marketing, affiliate marketing can be highly effective. It can expose a casino to new sources of potential traffic and with good affiliate marketers, visitors have already been through a presale routine, so they are often poised and ready to sign up.
iGaming has an estimated market size of $70 billion and this is set to continue rising in the coming years. The market has seen improved technologies, as well as new innovations. The introduction and greater accessibility of cryptocurrencies mean that instant withdrawal casinos can now offer payouts in as little as an hour, and this, along with the anonymity and privacy afforded by these sites, is attracting more players to these sites.
According to casino expert Ben Horlock, crypto casinos can also offer bigger bonuses, which makes them even more attractive to new players. But, even with these modern benefits, iGaming websites still need access to reliable sources of traffic. One source of potential traffic is affiliate marketing.
What Is Affiliate Marketing?
Affiliate marketing is essentially a partnership whereby a promoter or user gets paid commissions for successful referrals. The company will usually provide promotional material including items like images, banners, and even videos. They may also offer special deals or promotional offers.
The marketer shares these materials in their website copy, newsletters, emails, social media updates, videos, and other materials, and they include an affiliate email with that content. When one of their viewers clicks a link and visits the affiliate website, a cookie is downloaded that includes the referrer’s affiliate code and, if the visitor then performs a desired action, the marketer is paid according to the terms of the affiliate agreement.
There are a lot of different affiliate programs and the casino owner can choose according to the program details, the size of the affiliate marketing pool on offer, and the types of commission and payment structures on offer.
How Does It Work?
Publishers and influencers are on the lookout for ways to monetize their traffic and affiliate marketing offers this monetization. The publisher joins an affiliate program, either directly through the iGaming website or via an affiliate network. They typically have to provide details of their traffic sources, offer URLs to their websites and social media profiles, and are then either accepted or rejected.
On acceptance, the publisher is given access to marketing materials provided by the casino, as well as a referral URL to use in any marketing. Every affiliate marketer gets their own unique tracking code, which is embedded into their affiliate URL. If a person visits that URL and makes a purchase, it is recorded as a sale for that affiliate, and a commission is noted. Every billing period, all completed affiliate commissions are paid out to the affiliate.
What Does It Offer iGaming Businesses?
Affiliate marketing offers a variety of benefits to casinos:
- No Sales, No Cost – Whether you place ads on Google or Facebook, you effectively pay for the ad placement. If nobody clicks and makes a purchase, you still have to pay to run the ads. With affiliate marketing, this isn’t the case.
No matter how many affiliates sign up for a program, if their efforts don’t lead to any sales, it won’t cost the casino any money. Other forms of marketing typically require some outlay in the hope of driving conversions.
- Automated Marketing – Once an affiliate program is up and running, you can just set it and leave it. Registration and payments are automated, so all you really need to do is publish content that your affiliates can add to their website or share on social media. And with the advance of AI marketing tools, it has gotten even easier to automate your efforts.
In some cases, high-performing affiliates might require additional meetings and could benefit from some personalized affiliate marketing efforts, but if you don’t want to get involved in this, you don’t have to.
- Access To New Sources Of Traffic – If you keep running the same ads on the same sites, you will eventually reach saturation point. The same people, or at least the same demographics of people, will be viewing your ads every time they run.
With affiliate marketing, you have access to potentially thousands of affiliates. Some of them will paste your links on social media, some will offer them through newsletters, and others will publish on their own sites. You can enjoy a diverse list of potential targets for your casino.
- Profit Margins – Affiliate programs can pay per purchase, per signup, or per action, and it is up to you to choose which of these models to use. By this point, you should know how much profit you make, on average, for every new customer and how much of every dollar spent at your casino is profit.
Because the commissions you pay are fixed, you can ensure that you remain profitable while promoting your site using an affiliate network. With other forms of advertising, because you don’t know exactly how many new accounts you will get or how much new customers will spend, you can’t enjoy the same level of control over profit margins.
- Easily Monitored – Affiliate programs have excellent reporting dashboards, and will typically send email updates to keep you informed of how well your affiliate campaigns are running.
This makes it very easy to monitor how well your affiliates are doing. And because affiliate marketing uses unique URLs to track every visitor, you can also calculate how well traffic generated from affiliate marketing is performing compared to other traffic techniques.
- Quick Results – Once a campaign is up and running, you could get your first affiliate marketer within a few hours. And if they run a campaign on social media, that campaign could start generating results in days. There is very little waiting around.
Affiliate Payment Models
When running an affiliate campaign, you can choose from a variety of different payment or commission models and opt for the one that best fits your business model.
- Cost Per Lead – A lead is a potential customer who visits your casino. Not all leads will sign up, but if you have the promotional bonuses and the content to help drive conversions, lead conversion rates should be good.
With a cost-per-lead campaign, you will typically pay for every visitor that an affiliate sends to your site, or for every new signup you get to a promotional newsletter. This is one of the most common forms of affiliate model used in iGaming. However, because there is no guarantee of a conversion, some site owners prefer other models.
- Cost Per Action – Cost per action means the affiliate gets paid whenever somebody performs a specified action after visiting using the affiliate’s designated link. This action might be to sign up with your casino, or it could be to sign up for a newsletter. Other possible actions might include registering for a free no-deposit bet.
This model is preferred by casinos that offer free spins or other free bonuses that don’t require a deposit. Because the player doesn’t have to deposit any money, it can be difficult to operate a revenue share model.
- Revenue Share – Revenue share can offer the best of both worlds to the affiliate and you. In this model, you pay the affiliate a percentage share of the money that their leads deposit at your casino. If you offer a 5% revenue share and an affiliate’s lead deposits and spend $20, they would receive $1.
This method is the easiest for tracking and maintaining profit margins. If you know that you make a $1 profit for every $10 that is spent on your site, you know how much you can afford to give in commissions.
Affiliate Software
You can set up your own affiliate marketing program and run it directly through your website. Essentially, your site needs to create new URLs for every affiliate member, and then track those URLs and any actions taken on them.
However, a simpler and usually more cost-effective way to use this kind of marketing is to join an affiliate marketing program. With these programs, the program does all of the hard work for you. You will have to install some files on your website to run the program.
Affiliate Materials To Offer
How well your casino performs as part of an affiliate program will depend, in part, on the materials you offer your marketers. Some may want to create the content themselves. In this case, all you need to provide is a unique URL for every member.
However, many will want marketing material and other affiliate materials to help them promote your products.
Visuals
Most companies offer a wide range of banner ads for their affiliates. These should be well branded according to your brand identity, and they should offer details of promotions you’re running or features you offer. Provide access to banners of different sizes and designs. That way, your affiliates can choose those that best suit the style and design of their sites.
You can even establish different banners for the different casino games you offer, and have some for seasonal events and upcoming bonuses. As well as static banner ads, you can also produce dynamic banners, flash ads, pop-up and pop-under banners, and video banners. When you do offer banner ads, ensure you provide all the code required to embed the ad, as well as links to the visual files.
Links
Some affiliates will prefer to write or create their own content. They might want to create short video clips playing the games you offer or take screenshots of games. They may want to create a blog post detailing the experience they’ve had on your website.
In these cases, they will just want the tracking URL so they can use their own content and still get the credit and receive the commissions they are due. Provide raw links as well as embed code for some popular link text.
Landing Pages
Landing pages are pages on a website that are not directly linked to the home page. These are more common in other industries, including product and service industries, but some affiliates might want to use your landing pages that include forms, videos, images, and text.
By creating the landing pages yourself, you have total control over what is included, as well as the design of the page. Your affiliates will expect well-designed landing pages that convert.
Emails
Newsletters are a great promotional tool that can be used very effectively in an affiliate marketing campaign. Create email templates for offers, highlighting the games or betting opportunities you have to offer, and include personalization fields, such as recipient name and sender name.
This saves the affiliate from having to do the hard work of writing and compiling the email newsletter, and you could have access to a ready-made list of email readers so you can enjoy the benefits of email marketing without the effort of having to build an email list.
Videos
Videos are engaging and personal, and they are popular on websites like YouTube, Facebook, and other social media sites. It can be difficult to get video affiliate content right, but you can publish videos that show games or describe the signup process for your casino, for example.
One of the points of sharing promotional material with your affiliates is that it saves them the work of making the content themselves. But it also enables you to control the message that potential visitors are exposed to.
Special Promotions
Promotions are effective marketing tools for casinos, and one way to help affiliates is to give them access to special promotional deals they can offer their viewers or readers.
Consider extending a special promotion you’ve run previously, or give your affiliate leads some free spins on your best slots. The promotion needs to be relevant and it should offer value, but it could be a great way to drive new customers to your site, so it is worth the effort.
Vetting Affiliates
Not everybody is an ideal affiliate for your casino, and while ineffective affiliates likely won’t cost you anything, you do need to protect your brand. As such, you should avoid any affiliates that might be popular with minors, for example, and you need to ensure that social media influencers do publish the fact that they are getting paid for clicks and sign-ups.
If you run your affiliate marketing program yourself, through your own website, make sure to ask for details of where and how the affiliate will market your products. Ask for social media channel details, website addresses, and marketing techniques. If necessary, stipulate that the affiliate is only permitted to use your marketing materials or raw links and that they can only market your products on the agreed websites.
Communicate
Affiliate marketing can be a hands-off method of driving new customers to a casino website, but if you do put in time and effort, you can foster strong relationships with some of your biggest affiliates.
These relationships can really pay off as your affiliates will become your biggest brand ambassadors. Communicate with them, offer support when it is needed, and even consider creating some targeted marketing materials or promotional offers for your biggest affiliates. The extra time you put in will be rewarded with improved results.
Monitoring Results
The key to effective ongoing marketing is monitoring and improving that marketing. When you run paid ads, you monitor results and optimize the ads, as well as their placement, to ensure you get the best possible returns. The same should also be true of your affiliate marketing efforts.
Use the reporting features that are offered by the affiliate marketing software you use, but combine this with your website analytics and sales data. Your affiliates all have their own unique tracking IDs.
As well as being able to tell which of your affiliates are sending you the most new customers, you can also see whether those customers keep coming back, how much they spend, and even what their favorite games are. And, using this information, you can further improve the results of your campaign.
Conclusion
Affiliate marketing can be a very powerful tool. According to some estimates, 16% of all orders placed online in the US came as a result of affiliate marketing. Depending on the infrastructure and technical knowledge you have in place, you may be able to run an affiliate marketing program directly on your site, or you can sign up with an established affiliate marketing network.
Using a network means you don’t have to market to affiliates and their software will manage everything from signups to payments and can also help minimize the communication and administrative work required to run an affiliate marketing campaign.
Last Updated on September 11, 2024
