FEATURE
AFFILIATE PROFILE:
MATHEW SYMONDS,
WINDRAWWIN.COM AND
PREDICTZ.COM
Mathew Symonds has built a thriving affiliate business targeting sportsbook traffic from countries such
as Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania, in recent years turning his attention to advertising the growing
number of local brands there. Here he provides iGB Affiliate with the lowdown on operating and
marketing across the region, including ongoing challenges around acquisition and conversion and the
differences with more mature markets such as the UK.
You’ve been developing African
(Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Tanzania,
and others) affiliate traffic for
14 years now, with a focus on
advertising local brands in the last
two years. How did you get into
these markets and how do you
specifically cater for these bettors?
We receive traffic from almost every
country in the world, and have always
attracted a lot of organic traffic from
Africa without specifically targeting
the region through SEO or paid search.
When we started our websites we took the
philosophy that we were going to produce
good content and useful statistics that
would help sports bettors – of the kind
both teams to score data for more than 100
football leagues around the world. We have
not chased SEO strategies and methods to
try build traffic quickly and unsustainably.
Our sites are also African-friendly in
that we have always tried to keep our
technology suited to some of the lowest
common denominators when it comes
to bandwidth, screen size, browser
functionality and other factors that
widen your customer reach. We try to
not do anything that over-complicates
our proposition. Users primarily visit our
websites for upcoming football predictions,
statistics and analysis, as well as the odds
on those games, and we provide these in
format that is easy to read and access on
“ In the past two years, our mobile traffic has risen from
50% to 80% in Nigeria. In Kenya our mobile traffic
exceeds 90%, and for all Africa our websites average
82% mobile traffic”
that we ourselves would use to analyse and
determine our own bets - and secondly
to keep them coming back to us each
week for that information. We approach
all developments on our websites from a
user-led, customer perspective, and over
time this strategy has worked really well
for us. Take for example our popular stats
sections at WinDrawWin.com that detail
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both desktop and mobile, in a format that
people have become familiar with and rely
on. Other websites do some very clever
things that we do not, but our proposition
has always remained focused and clear.
We have tried not to become a “jack of all
trades” and a master of none.
Our view on being an affiliate is
that player retention is one of the most
important success factors above and
beyond the number of registrations or
number of depositors generated. Other
affiliates might register thousands of
players through various methods, but if
you want to build a sustainable business as
an affiliate and relationship with operators
then you have to cater for, and refer players
that are going to be retained and deliver
higher value, especially if working on a
revenue share model. Retention is also
the responsibility of the affiliate, not just
the operator.
Because of our consistent proposition
over the past 13 years, more than 80%
of our traffic is return visits and we have
some of the highest player lifetime values
of any affiliate in the industry with some
operators. This is due to the player loyalty
we generate and the fact that our websites
keep players playing, unlike lower player
value that you might expect from a free bets
website, a pay-per-click affiliate or other
one-time referral type websites.
In general we do not do much different
to cater for the African market than we do
for all of our visitors. The only things we
might do differently is to geo-target very
efficiently. All of our website technology,
including our geo-targeting, has been built
in-house, so we are largely unrestricted and
unbound from the restraints that bought-in
software solutions might introduce