iGaming Business magazine iGB 112 Sept/Oct 2018 | Page 114

Marketing & Affiliates
IGB AFFILIATE SURVEY:
WHAT YOU MISSED
Here we summarise some key findings from the second annual
iGB Affiliate Survey, revealing the marketing channels most favoured
by affiliates over the past year
Affiliates are increasingly turning to email marketing
and PR in a bid to generate web traffic, according to
an exclusive survey of 160 affiliates and 97 operators
carried out for iGaming Business.
While affiliates said SEO continues to be the most
effective tool to generate website traffic, they viewed
email marketing as the next most effective method
this year in our second annual survey of affiliates in
the igaming industry. Last year, affiliates put social
media in second place.
Although PR remained only in seventh place in
affiliates’ opinions, there was a slight increase in
the number of those who viewed it as an effective
tool. This could perhaps reflect the increasing
consolidation in the sector, with the large brands
that now own huge chunks of the affiliate market
likely to be more PR savvy than smaller setups.
Indeed, the survey revealed that the average
number of domains owned by affiliates had risen
to 117 this year, a big jump from 81 last year.
However, 70% of those surveyed owned between
one and 50 domains.
Social shuffle
When it comes to social media, Facebook still reigns
supreme, with just over 80% of affiliates using it to
target players. Interestingly, though Facebook is the
most used by affiliates, more respondents this year
thought YouTube was actually the most effective social
media channel, a significant change from last year
when it was in third place and Facebook in first.
Twitter, on the other hand, seems to have fallen out
of favour as a player acquisition tool. While last year
it was seen as the second most effective social media
channel, this year it fell to fifth place behind Facebook,
YouTube, LinkedIn and Instagram. There has also
been a significant drop in the number of affiliates
using Twitter to target players, with just 55% doing
so this year compared with 63% last year.
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iGamingBusiness | Issue 112 | September/October 2018
The use of Twitter by operators marketing to
affiliates has fallen even more significantly over
the past year, with just 27% saying they used the
social media platform to attract affiliates this year,
compared with 42% last year.
Although pay-per-click (PPC) remained in
fourth place in terms of what affiliates saw as the
most effective tools in driving web traffic, there was
an increase in the number of affiliates using PPC
to promote sites, with the percentage rising to 39%
from 36%.
Spending rises
This perhaps goes some way towards explaining the
slight rise in the percentage of their commissions that
affiliates are spending driving web traffic. This year
affiliates spent, on average, 30% of their commissions
driving traffic, up from an average of 28% last year.
Of course another reason affiliates are spending
more could be that they are earning more – the mean
monthly amount earned by affiliates this year was
$148,003, a significant increase on last year’s
$115,920. The numbers are, however, heavily skewed
by the 14% of respondents who said they earned
more than $400,000, and for the majority of smaller
affiliates these numbers likely seem far removed
from their own figures.
But while there may be wild variations in the total
amount of commissions earned, there does seem to
be a trend towards a rise in the actual commission
level itself across the board. Almost half — 48% —
of affiliates reported that their commissions increased
last year, while 14% said they remained stable and
29% reported a decrease. Of those 48% that reported
an increase in commissions, the average rise was
42%, up from 37% in 2016.
More than half of the affiliates surveyed — 61%
— reported that they had successfully negotiated a
commission increase from an affiliate manager.