TRAFFIC
Top 10k
by traffic
Top 100k
budgets as Google Analytics is free as
opposed to, say, Omniture or Adobe
Marketing Cloud. As a result, all six
affiliate sites included in my study use
it, whereas out of the 11 brands, two
prefer other solutions. This is pretty
much in line with overall Google
Analytics usage trends (Figure 3)
5. Google Tag Manager (GTM)
is another technology that casino
sites seem to readily embrace: five
out of the six affiliate sites and nine
out of 11 brand sites use it. This
shows their dedication to extracting
and analysing user data – and in
the case of brands, perhaps also
proves that large companies’ analysts
want to rely less on developers for
tags implementation.
Top 1m
700,000
650,000
600,000
550,000
500,000
450,000
400,000
350,000
300,000
250,000
200,000
150,000
100,000
50,000
0
JAN 2011
OCT 2011
JUN 2013
MAR 2015
APR 2016
MAR 2017
SEP 2018
Period
Figure 3: Google Analytics usage (data source: BuiltWith.com)
URL SERP
count Type
of site SSL Page
speed
score Google
GTM
Analytics Framework
/CMS 21.co.uk 9 brand yes 20 yes yes Laravel pinkcasino.co.uk 9 brand yes 22 yes yes Laravel 32red.com 6 brand yes 12 yes yes CakePHP ukcasino.com 6 brand yes 33 yes yes core-js casino.netbet.co.uk 5 brand yes 25 no no Angular JS monstercasino.co.uk 5 brand yes 42 yes no PHP unibet.co.uk 5 brand yes 19 no yes React 888casino.com 4 brand yes 12 yes yes Drupal admiralcasino.co.uk 4 brand yes 4 yes yes Angular JS aspers.com 4 brand yes 22 yes yes PHP betuk.com 4 brand yes 18 yes yes Laravel bojoko.com 4 affiliate yes 77 yes yes n/a casinotopsonline.com 4 affiliate yes 51 yes yes PHP JULIA LOGAN
gambling.com 4 affiliate yes 36 yes yes n/a kingcasinobonus.co.uk 4 affiliate yes 55 yes yes PHP newnodepositcasino.co.uk 4 affiliate yes 30 yes no Wordpress 4 affiliate yes 44 yes yes Wordpress is an SEO consultant at
irishwonder.com. Her
specialties include on-site/
technical SEO and SEO
security audits, link profile audits,
online reputation management,
negative SEO investigations and
private network consulting.
slotsia.com
Figure 4: Percentage of sites using Google Analytics,
(data source: BuiltWith.com)
14
6. Across the 17 sites that I examined
there was no real consensus when it
came to the use of frameworks and
content management systems. Sites
belonging to the same company
frequently use the same platform/
framework, which isn’t surprising
as their developer teams probably
just stick to what’s most familiar
to them. Affiliates tend to stick to
simpler, more manageable solutions
such as Wordpress.
7. Interestingly, one of the top ranking
sites, appearing in the SERPs four
times, is Swedish! Why Slotsia.
com appeared in the UK SERPs is
anyone’s guess: it isn’t superior to the
other sites in terms of page speed and,
being a Swedish-language site, it’s
definitely not the most relevant one for
the queries studied. Has Google not
got enough worthy UK sites to rank?
iGB Affiliate Issue 72 DEC 2018 / JAN 2019