TRAFFIC
DOMINATING EURO 2016
With the year’s biggest betting event nearly upon us, Roy Coughlan of The Media Image provides an
invaluable guide to getting the best out of your PPC activity this summer.
AFTER FOUR LONG YEARS, the wait
for one of the world’s largest football
competitions are finally over. The 2016
UEFA European Championship is only
weeks away, and operators are getting their
houses in order to cater for the masses of
punters looking to take advantage of the
summer tournament markets. After crazy
domestic seasons in and around Europe
coming to a close, inspiration can be taken
from some rather improbable outcomes,
and the momentum is steadily building.
The last financial year saw a serious
lull during the months of June and July,
yet with the Euro 2016, the opportunity
to drive players through well-oiled PPC
strategies bodes well for operators and
affiliates alike. The following are tips in
guaranteeing a successful campaign.
Grow longer tail terms and enter
earlier
Bidding for the short-tail head terms will
always be expensive, not only due to the
potential to drive acquisition, heightened
by the size of the tournament, but the
likelihood that yearly budget has long in
advance been planned around the event,
and the SERPs will be cluttered with
entities, both large and small, trying to gain
their share of the market.
Since the 2014 World Cup, there have
been a number of changes to the Google
AdWords platform and algorithm, yet the
most notable change has been Google’s
decision to remove right hand-side ads
from the SERPs. This seismic change was
rolled out very recently and the full impact
is still being measured. However, bidding
on the core tournament terms and short-tail
keywords will be highly aggressive.
Capturing players through long-tail
terms becomes more of a necessity than
ever before, and building out an extensive
keyword set covering multiple categories
helps drive traffic and expand reach and
visibility. The longer tail terms can be
Figure 1: World Cup 2014 search volumes
snapped up at cost-effective prices and lead
to lower costs per conversion (CPA).
While most operators will look to drive
traffic through “betting” focused keywords,
there are always great opportunities around
research terms such as odds, tips and
predictions, with these being far cheaper
and less competitive. Affiliates usually run
this space, yet their activity can often be
sporadic as a result of lower budgets and
time-related offers.
Using the World Cup as a proxy for
analysis, it is evident that search volume
was at its highest during the first few days
of the tournament (see Figure 1)
Going live early is key to building quality
score and gaining a significant position.
With a broader set of terms, it will provide
a better understanding of customers’
search trends and patterns around certain
terms. Growing a keyword build focusing
on the various markets on offer allows for
targeting interests at different stages of the
tournament too, as pre-tournament search
behaviour will differ from that during the
group stages, and into the knockouts.
Tag it, track it, measure it
One of the most important elements
of your paid search campaigns should
be ensuring that tracking has been
implemented correctly and also created
in conjunction with other channels. With
the correct tracking in place, decisions can
be made quickly and effectively, which is
crucial to optimisation in real-time.
The resulting data will be extremely useful
in measuring the success of the campaign
against targets. It will also add value by
helping justify future decisions pertaining to
events in both the short and long-term.
From an attribution perspective, clarity
regarding how the various channels work
together is pivotal in understanding the
effect of running activities in conjunction.
For instance, promoting an offer for the
tournament across one channel can be tied
to the uplift of search and acquisition on
another, and can help justify investment.
Do it yourself, or leave it to a robot?
For a sports betting operator, whether to
automate bidding or optimise manually
iGB Affiliate Issue 57 JUN/JUL 2016
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