INSIGHT
● ●Then you have game provider fees which come to 15 %
● ●Then you have bonus costs which are typically about 20-25 % of revenue
● ●Return to player percentage seems to be around 96 %
Projections I think projections are important in order to give you some sense of what success looks like , but there ’ s always a risk of making projections too positive and being lulled into a sense of false security .
My best advice is to always watch how much money you ’ re spending , make sure that you ’ re financially stable and that you have enough money to keep you going for at least twice as long as you initially expected .
Acquiring traffic for the right price SEO is a good place to start , except for one big thing . You either have to be very good at black hat SEO to have a chance of ranking , or you have to have an engaging website . Today , Google is massively driven by engagement , rather than just links .
If you don ’ t have a website people like , they ’ re not going to click on it , you ’ re not going to get engagement , you don ’ t rank . It ’ s harsh . So I wouldn ’ t bank on SEO to begin with . But , if you do want to give it a go …
●●Black hat SEO Go and learn all about SAPE links . Be able to set up several disposable websites and get to it . Because you ’ re going to end up with ‘ no brand ’ sites , equivalent to payday loan websites , and the only people who are going to convert will be either very naive , or very desperate . So you might get the traffic , but conversions aren ’ t going to be great . Cost per acquisition ? A very rough estimate is £ 300 . This assumes you finally rank , burn through a lot of cash on some very powerful links and get relatively few conversions .
●Engagement-driven ●
SEO This assumes you ’ ve got a site worth engaging with . In other words , you have a brand . Cost of building a brand ? If you don ’ t account for the cost of building a brand , then this is going to be your cheapest source of conversions . Generally , if you ’ ve got a site worth ranking , you spend some money on a few good links and the rest of the rankings are driven by engagement , then you could be looking at £ 60 per acquisition .
●Affiliates
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Many of you demand tenancies and payment per acquisition . From what my affiliate manager tells me , we ’ re looking at $ 200 per acquisition . And then with revenue share , it seems to range from 25 % all the way up to a maximum of 55 %.
Just on the theme of risk , paying affiliates a fixed amount per acquired customer is very risky in my opinion . If you ’ re asking $ 200 per acquisition and the acquisition is defined as a person who places a minimum deposit , one big affiliate can turn on the tap and smash you financially . This is why I ’ ve stayed away from such deals , because there is not enough financial control . Also , it ’ s really open to abuse by an unscrupulous affiliate .
The problem with being another ‘ me too ’ white-label casino and working with affiliates is that you are just the same as the other 20 casinos that they ’ ve dealt with in the last month . So the real question is what you ’ ve got that gives them confidence in you converting and delivering them revenue ?
Paid media ●Banner ● ads When I was at Betfair for four years , I used to sit beside the paid media manager , now a fairly senior executive in Google . I noticed how many times he would be pitched by companies offering banner space . In order for him to work out who was actually a good source of traffic , he would have to rely on a mixture of his own experience and small-scale tests to see how the results came back .
The catch with people selling banners is that most often they ’ ve got no evidence to prove that your brand will convert on their network . Other brands might , but what about yours ? If a homepage takeover on a big site is £ 100,000 for a day , it doesn ’ t take many days to just end up with nothing .
In my own case , because we specialise in a niche , we ’ ve done a lot of research using tools like Alexa , SimilarWeb and SEMrush to get some idea of who is advertising and for how long and also where the traffic has come from to that particular website . Then , you have to have creative that ’ s engaging which converts . Difficult . Why ? If you have another cookie cutter casino offering , then what on earth can be engaging about that ?
Typically in my experience you ’ re looking at £ 400 per acquisition on banners . If you find a good niche , you can get it down £ 150 per acquisition .
●PPC ●
No local licence ? No advertising on Google . Saying that , there are a few specialists in black hat PPC who could take your money and help you . But it ’ s not an area I know much about and the last time I looked into all of this was around two years ago , where I did find a few people making some money on this . The catch is that Google is very sophisticated when it comes to filtering out certain advertisers , so therefore the people who do this kind of black hat PPC are equally sophisticated and so therefore expensive .
The other thing to remember is that PPC is an auction and the price per click is mostly affected by the competition within that auction . I say mostly , because Google have something called a Quality Score which they can manipulate to adjust the price-perclick upwards across a whole segment if they want to . I ’ ve seen this in the past .
Typical cost-per-click is around £ 60 for good casino phrases . If you have a converting brand but a low quality score , you should be able to get one conversion out of 20 clicks = cost per acquisition of £ 1,200 . If you don ’ t have the right licences , you ’ re going to spend another couple of hundred pounds per acquisition to pay for the blackout specialist and then it all gets very loss-making .
Social I ’ ve never come across a casino which has made social really work for acquisition . I ’ m
44 iGB Affiliate Issue 57 JUN / JUL 2016