INTERVIEW
“The World Cup is a fundamental priority for the affiliate industry in 2014,
and this is expected to have an extremely positive influence over sportsbetting
for the foreseeable future.”
of retention and conversion rates. Other
channels to market have therefore
become increasingly important for our
affiliates; and as mentioned earlier,
two main developments being
social media and mobile.
Social media has been a great
way of securing retention and word-ofmouth publicity, helping to boost
player communities where on-going
dialogue can be informally promoted.
Whilst social media usage in this sense
has been developing for years, 2013 has
supplied a growing sense of importance
surrounding mobile optimisation.
Reflecting further back than 2013,
how has the affiliate market changed
over the last five years? It has had to
deal with plenty of operational, regulatory
and technical challenges, but do you
think that iGaming affiliates are now
more astute and mature marketers?
Affiliates have certainly come a very long
way in the last five years. The affiliate
industry in itself is now a much more
challenging environment with a greater
sense of competition. Affiliates need to be
more astute marketers in order to relate
to the end user and provide them with
something that is not only associated
to betting, a particular product or sport,
but is also well presented, trustworthy,
compelling and personable.
In some senses, that’s the simple
part as gaining traffic via natural search
rankings is far from easy and without
paying for PPC campaigns, a niche site
component and strategy are of great
importance. Such industry knowledge
and information takes time to develop, so
it’s no longer a simple case of relying on
standalone banner advertisements, as such
forms of promotion have long since been
discouraged by Google.
In order to compete, affiliates now
need to be well informed in the product
area and the industry, as well as being
technologically savvy and intelligent content
writers. An abundance of dedication and
patience is also desirable, particularly for
newer affiliates who will need to remain
one step ahead in this industry in order
to secure a real chance of success. Over
the last few years, we have seen several
high profile regulatory challenges,