FEATURE
How can operators and affiliates work together better to encourage greater retention, stickiness and loyalty of punters beyond the World Cup? Richard Moffat: Quite simply by working more closely with those affiliates that are actually willing and able to help, and by recognising that these partners can offer huge value long term. So many of the larger players in the affiliate space now literally just ping players on without offering any value at all. While the numbers are much wanted by operators, there is rarely any relationship or value to the customer. Yet from that one visit they are often paid the same or more as the affiliate that helps customers with their betting on a daily basis over many years. You only need to look at the major players in other industries to see this will change at some point. Large affiliate partners in these industries offer real customer value in addition to generating leads. If you look at UK sports betting affiliates there aren’ t many of us in a good position to fill that space, so I see this as a real opportunity for OLBG. Gavin Moore: Affiliate products built around punter communities and continuous content( such as our bettingexpert. com) tend to be pivotal in assisting operators to retain players. These community sites are becoming truly integrated into the betting experience and facilitate the process of a user going from a tournament player to a recreational punter. Therefore, in years with major tournaments, such as the World Cup, the strong partnerships between operators and affiliates become even more important. Oshri Kostiner: Depending on the nature of each affiliate’ s business, we’ ve found hybrid revenue share to be the most productive model for sustaining mutual profitability. We also collaborate closely with our partners, encouraging them to gain a deep understanding of our offering to get the best out of our product and
affiliate platform and achieve the highest possible conversion rates. We co-create content for their sites, gather feedback from their players about bonuses, features, odds, KYC and payments, and work to build value wherever we can. And since most players already hold accounts with the top three bookmakers, it’ s often in an affiliate’ s best interest to use their real estate promoting an up-and-coming brand like 10Bet.
Affiliates are arguably better at building communities in the form of, for example, betting forums and tipster sites. Do you think retention would improve if new punters were encouraged to stick around within the affiliate ecosystem as widgets now allow, rather than just being bounced off to an operator? Richard Moffat: Absolutely. We have thousands of sports bettors visiting our products every day and we can help them with their decision over where to place each and every bet. Every bet placed is a sale for a bookmaker, something that is rarely recognised in the current operator-affiliate relationship. Some of our users tell us that they place 100 % of their bets through our app, never going direct to a bookmaker site. That shows the sort of value that sites like ourselves, other community sites and odds comparison sites can provide over and above pure lead generation.
“ For this World Cup, operators will be working with fewer affiliates – those that still maintain their global demand for traffic but have more control of how their brands are being promoted and presented to the end users” Gavin Moore, Better Collective
Gavin Moore: Absolutely, yes. A key point to stickiness is giving the users the best experience possible. Third party affiliate community sites, ones that are unbiased in presenting information in a way that operators inherently never can, help shift the power back to the user. The freedom to discuss operators and sports in a pressure-free environment is what keeps them coming back. It’ s this sort of environment that creates a level of transparency.
Staying in that environment creates freedom of choice, but as soon as you move through to a bookmaker page then the user loses their power. By integrating a bet slip straight onto the affiliate platform( like we have on SmartBets) the user remains in the driver’ s seat and can easily shop around with different bookmakers. We’ ve found that this strategy ensures all stakeholders win in the long run. Oshri Kostiner: The short answer is yes. While some affiliates remain overly focused on CPA it’ s clearly wise to embrace the multi-account reality whereby players choose the brand they bet with according to specific events, features and promotions. We have learnt that by sponsoring and contributing directly to relevant forums and communities, we increase our exposure, while our affiliate managers learn more about player demands and expectations.
42 iGB Affiliate Issue 68 APR / MAY 2018