Gambling attracts with its high ROIs, higher payouts and still a bit less competition. This vertical got many interesting and fresh products and no call center that affect the webmaster’s income in the commodity vertical. In addition, advertisers funnel is well-developed in gambling – Bookmakers and casinos constantly remind users of themselves via SMS and emails.
Today we will take a closer look at the features of this vertical: top regions, sources, approaches to work and trends.
Gambling Budgets
Gambling is a large vertical that includes several components, the main ones are Casino and Betting. The casino is more profitable vertical, however, during major sport, sports betting becomes very profitable too.
But Gambling is one of the most difficult vertical to entry in. You will need strong technical preparedness: cloaking, farming, spying, and of course serious budgets.
The average budget you can start within this vertical is $ 500-800 sometimes about $ 1000. This is an approximate amount for a webmaster who starts from scratch, with one source, one geo, and one offer. It is enough to understand how everything works and maybe go from minus or plus. It is important to understand that this amount does not include all the tools you will need like cloaking, proxies, or farming accounts, this is just an advertising budget.
Offers Features
Rates per lead in vertical are about 100-150 $. The hold is often higher than in other verticals, which is associated with a more complex system for checking the quality of traffic and fraud. However, if you are already a trusted partner, CPA networks can reduce the hold to a minimum. The more traffic you have, the more willingly advertisers communicate with you and it is much easier to get special conditions on offers.
All advertisers are interested in the most solvent traffic, therefore, the offers in the vertical have strict KPIs, which players must fulfill in order for the casino or Books to make payments to you.
Registration is one of the simplest targeted actions when you receive payments for each registered player. It is a quite rare method today. The registration fee most often is $ 1 to $5 at most. Advertisers usually set up additional KPIs that a registered user must complete, so most likely you will never see a simple registration offer.
Deposit – payment is made only if the referred player deposits a certain amount to the account. Minimum deposits are about 20$ average among offers.
Qualification – the player must fulfill several conditions to qualify. For example, register, deposit $ 40 and wager $ 80.
However, you need to understand that the level of income is much higher than in other verticals, so you should not be afraid of too complicated KPIs. Usually this type of condition paid by the RevShare (Revenue Share) system – a payment model where a casino shares its income with the webmaster throughout the player’s “active life”. This payment model is beneficial for affiliates who are confident in the quality of their traffic, especially if they don’t buy it but get it organically. RevShare is generally much more profitable, but it’s a long-term game. There is a chance to “catch” a couple of high rollers and make a lot of money of them, for example, partners attracted players who brought monthly serious income for more than five years. Moreover, it can be just a few people, thanks to which the casino on RevShare pays you 10-20K dollars.
There are also hybrid payments (CPA + RevShare), where the payout is smaller, but the webmaster receives money on CPA, which compensates him for the cost of traffic, plus for a long time he receives payments on RevShare, usually, you have to request this type of payouts.
Best Sources of traffic
The biggest interest among advertisers in the Gambling vertical is traffic from SEO, context, applications, and especially Facebook.
Context is considered a premium source of traffic – the audience there is as hot and interested as it can possibly be. Webmasters who forward traffic from this source receive the highest rates that CPA networks can provide to them at the test stage.
Google search is a real gold mine. However, today it’s quite difficult to go there with high-frequency keywords due to the strictest Google policies. And the more complex the source, the less competition in it and the greater the possible income of the webmaster.
The main difficulties in work are cloaking and farming accounts. Despite the fact that accounts do not last long, we recommend that you do not forget about the initial optimization of campaigns: compiling a list of negative keywords, creating relevant ads, optimizing the quality of ads.
Be sure to consider that not all advertisers accept the context on the brand, because they believe that webmasters resell their own traffic to them. Of the possible sanctions on the part of advertisers: a ban or low payments. If branded traffic is prohibited, this will be indicated in the offer description, so read the conditions carefully.
Facebook is also a premium source, as its audience is considered very solvent. Today, videos are considered the most converting format, and it’s easier to get past moderation.
One of the most profitable and working methods in 2019 is a bunch of Facebook accounts with business cabinets + application. The application contains the web view of the advertiser’s site with a native part, which allows you to visualize the casino as if it were a real casino application. In the campaign on Facebook, you specify a link to the application, and in the ad, you are inviting users to try it out. Our user goes to Google Play and downloads the application.
This method is good not only because the user has the application on the smartphone and might use it more often, but also because it allows you to optimize campaigns and reduce costs. In addition, by sending traffic to the application, FB makes it possible to start with easier moderation than usual.
SEO
There is a stereotype that SEO is a complex and inaccessible source. However, it is even easier to get into the issue with the “black” topic, since the competition here is lower than in the “white” niche.
The principle of work is as follows: the webmaster creates a branded or non-branded one-page or website with several articles under the offer. Next, you need to optimize it (the principles are the same as in “white” SEO: titles, descriptions, headings, lists, alts to images, etc.), purchase links, and then fill it regularly with more news and brand new articles.
Push and Pop up ads
This source is easier for beginners to enter the vertical since there is no need for cloaking and farming accounts. When working with this source, it is important to consider three points:
- look at the quality of the push grid;
- make up White sheets and Black sheets;
- repeatedly test prelendings.
In most cases, when working with Push and Pop up traffic, you can’t set up detailed targeting. A campaign can be optimized only by compiling White- and Blacklists: sites from which there is non-converting traffic must be sent to the Blacklist, and, conversely, sites showing the best result should be entered in the Whitelist.
Top Regions
Traditionally, Gambling niche brings high profits in Tier 1 countries, including Germany, the Scandinavian countries and Canada. Currently, the vertical is rapidly gaining momentum in Latin America (in particular, in Mexico and Brazil), so we recommend that you pay attention to these geos.
Trends
One of the most important trends in the vertical is the desire of webmasters to enter the international market. We are sure that in the upcoming year it will be possible to see a huge number of arbitrageurs working with international offers all around the world. This is not only about Europe or North America, soon webmasters will need to “find ways” to Asia (India, China, and other regions), as well as to Africa.
The UAC (Universal App Campaign) ad format for Google is gaining tremendous popularity. It is easy to launch and optimally fits the Gambling vertical. The main advantage of UAC is the ability to configure targeted actions, for example repeated deposits and automatically optimize the campaign for these actions. Ads created using this format will be shown on Youtube, on Google search, and on the Display Network. After starting the system, you need to collect a certain amount of statistics – approximately 70-80 conversions. After that, the system will begin to work as efficiently as possible due to own optimization.