INSIGHT
that competes with you, or to a Google
employee. Another useful test is to ask,
“Does this help my users? Would I do
this if search engines didn’t exist?”
●●
Think about what makes your website
unique, valuable, or engaging. Make
your website stand out from others
in your field.
That’s a problem if there is nothing very
unique, valuable or engaging to make
your website stand out. And, in fact, if you
do follow guidelines, you probably won’t
encourage traffic to just pass through your
site and convert. This is why most affiliates
are at odds with Google and why they will
never be a brand and why reputation will
never matter to them.
There are a few sites where this rule of
thumb does not apply, assuming you care
about maximising affiliate commissions.
Odds comparison sites
By their nature they are about comparing
one operator with another on the value of
a bet, so naturally it makes sense to look
there for value. Oddschecker is the biggest
and most renowned of these sites, yet its
biggest traffic phrase is ‘bet calculator’,
with ‘odds checker’ coming third. So, in
many ways no matter how you look at it,
brand and affiliate don’t really go together,
therefore reputation by default isn’t a
significant consideration for you.
Reputation because
its a ranking signal
Google is pushing Google Plus and
authorship in a huge way. The idea is:
rank based on who wrote the content, not
what site. It’s a very hard signal to game
and so you will see far more reliance
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on this and other social signals helping
Google understand what sites and pages
are worth ranking because people care.
Without getting into a long discussion about
Google, it’s in the company’s interest to
promote useful, relevant content that helps
form buying decisions, and use AdWords
to bring users directly to commercial sites.
Therefore, promoting content written by real
trusted people is huge.
comparison to iGaming: five percent versus
iGaming’s 20 to 34 percent, so generally
there isn’t a huge commercial incentive
to dominate the consideration search
results. Therefore, the information is more
trustworthy and life carries on.
When you add ‘most money making
operator’ and ‘domination of consideration
phrases’ together, you end up with
something almost unique to iGaming: a
broken reputation ecosystem that works.
Operators
Affiliates do play one very important part
in the reputation ecosystem. They can
make huge operators sink or swim on
reputation. As we know, affiliates will
promote the operators who earn them the
most commission. This happens because
the operator can keep converted customers
gambling for longer with more sustained
losses. If an operator does a good job at
keeping the customer happy and losing,
then the affiliate is happy.
There are constraints, however. For
instance, if an operator is cheating punters
on margins and odds or if customer
services are terrible, then these customers
will leave and gamble elsewhere. This
means less revenue for the affiliate and so
they will drop the operator and use one that
does actually do a good job for them.
Consideration
As we know, affiliates can do something
operators don’t usually do: price compare.
This is why keywords like ‘bookmaker
reviews’, ‘free bets’, and ‘casino offers’ are
so attractive to affiliates. These phrases
are known as consideration phrases; i.e.
you are considering who to go with before
making a buying decision. In other industry
sectors, affiliate commissions are tiny in
Finally
To conclude, in my opinion, affiliates
should not worry about reputation in
the ‘brand’ sense, but should pay a lot of
attention to either genuinely winning or
nicely faking good social signals to show
‘reputation’, so Google is happy with you.
And collectively, you hold the cards for
operators’ reputations, even though they
may not appreciate that fact.
Nick Garner is CEO of 90
Digital, the iGaming Search and
Reputation agency. He has been
in iGaming since 2006 where he
began as Search Manager for Betfair and
subsequently became Head of Search for
Unibet. At 90 Digital his team of 44 works
with brands like Betfair and PokerStars. If
you are interested in seeing a conference
presentation I have done on reputation
management, check out:
http://90digital.com/blog/nick-speaking/
reputation-5368.html