iGB Affiliate 19 Feb/Mar by iGaming Business

Feb/mar 2010

2010 - Product VerticalÂ Landscape Video Optimisation What You Should be Testing Social Media Monitoring Super Competitive SEO

Content vs Links In Search of the King

INFORMATION, INSIGHT AND ANALYSIS FOR THE BUSINESS OF INTERACTIVE GAMING

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An industry first.

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CONTENTS 04 Affiliate Events Calendar 08 Webmaster News 10 In Search of the King – Content Vs Links 15 Super Competitive SEO 18 Social Media Monitoring 20 Video Optimisation – a Testing Process 24 Multiplayer Mobile and Social Media 27 Affiliate Interview – the ‘Cat’ 28 Affiliate Manager Interview – Henrik Granlund 30 Google and Microsoft Catch Twitter Bug 32 Traditional Gaming Products – the 2010 Landscape 39 Pan-Continent Games and Localised Products 42 Improving Loyalty and ROI in Challenging Times 45 Maximising Profit Opportunities for New Affiliate Sites 46 Social Media Marketing – a Guaranteed Success? 47 Growth Amidst Chaos and Evolution 48 Free Tools Vs Expert Advice 50 Google’s China Crisis IGE and the LAC have just ended and I am looking for photos of my pygmy goat, “Pixie”. If you don’t know what I am talking about you clearly missed the best party of the year and you will have a lot of making up to do at the Prague Super Show in May. One thing that rang clear from the LAC is that the iGaming affiliate market is getting supersophisticated. With more and more affiliates entering the market, people are upping their games, becoming more and more niche and finding ever more ingenious ways to deliver players. Because of that, this magazine is upping its game too. You will notice that the articles in 2010 will address sophisticated affiliates and cover more technical ground. That’s not to say we don’t like to have fun and keep you abreast of the gossip (we will continue to do that) but it is to say that the iGaming affiliate sector is maturing at a rate that outpaces even that of the iGaming operators. For 2010, expect iGaming Business Affiliate Magazine to dazzle you with tech, bowl you over with new ideas and tips, and entertain you at an awesome series of terrestrial affiliate events.

52 Exploring Google Wave 54 Why Your Traffic is not Converting 56 The Importance of Colour in Website Design 58 Relationships are Key to Expanding Your Business 60 Market Place 62 Affiliate Practices in a Maturing Industry

Michael Caselli, Editor in Chief Editor in Chief: Michael Caselli

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iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

affiliate events calendar Due to their popularity and wealth of information, analysis and discussion, conferences have become an integral part of the affiliate industry and a key communications bridge between affiliates and affiliate managers. Whether used for networking, education or just an excuse to meet up with friends, the affiliate conferences listed below provide all the tools you need to improve your business. The Social Media World Forum London, UK March 15 – 16, 2010 Summary: The two day social media conference and exhibition taking place on the March 15 and 16 at Olympia London will provide a focused platform for the global social media industry. The conference aims to address core issues such as monetisation, future technologies/services, engaging social groups with brands and how businesses can get the most out of social and business networks. The event is also co-hosted with Mobile Social Media, Social TV, Enterprise Social Media and Cloud Computing Congress. www.socialmedia-forum.com

iGaming Asia Congress Macau, China February 23 – 25, 2010

A4UExpo Europe Munich, Germany May 18 – 19, 2010 Summary: A4U Expo will be bringing together the very best players and affiliate marketing specialists from across Germany, UK, USA and Mainland Europe to discuss the latest trends and opportunities within Affiliate Marketing today. The opportunities within affiliate marketing are so diverse and exciting right now and this will be reflected in our cutting edge agenda with 40 strategy led presentations and panel debates that you won’t want to miss

Summary: Macau’s only dedicated iGaming congress will feature over 50 leading speakers highlighting the key developments and opportunities for iGaming businesses operating in or looking to operate in Asia. The event is set to attract over 200 attendees and 20+ exhibitors to the brand new City of Dreams complex in Macau. www.beaconevents.com

www.a4uexpo.com

iGaming Super Show Prague, Czech Republic May 25 - 27, 2010 Summary: The iGaming Super Show is the newest event on the gaming calendar and will be the biggest event ever organised by iGaming Business. The show will feature exhibition spaces for interactive gaming suppliers looking for new and existing operators as well as operators looking to attract affiliates and marketing partners. The conference will be two-tracked. The first will focus on global regulation, the legal landscape, best practices in operations and marketing and the convergence between interactive and land-based gaming. The second track will focus on affiliate marketing and will feature SEO professionals, super-affiliates and topics dedicated to introducing affiliates from other industries to iGaming. www.iGamingSuperShow.com

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

iGB Down Under Sydney, Australia March 24 – 25, 2010 Summary: iGaming Business returns down under following the success of last year’s event and with the Australian iGaming market in the news almost on a daily basis, this show is essential to attend if you are marketing to the Australian market or looking for an additional niche to target. iGB Down Under guarantees up to date and informative content on the Asian and Australian iGaming market, a new look expo, the Affiliate Series of Poker, as well as some of the best networking parties in the affiliate calendar www.iGBDownUnder.com

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webmaster news

UK inches oUT of lonGesT ever recession The BriTish economy has finally emerged from the longest recession on record after experiencing a 0.1 percent growth between October and December (according to the first of three readings of GDP for the fourth quarter by the Office for National Statistics [ONS]). However, the rate of growth is way below the expected 0.4 percent rebound causing some analysts to warn of a potential ‘double dip’ recession. Britain is the last major economy to emerge from the downturn, with the United States, Japan, China, Germany and France all climbing out of recession in the third quarter, between July and September, 2009. The 0.1 percent figure is the first of three that will be revised by the ONS, with the publication of the final reading due in March. Previous revisions have been known to vary as much as 0.1 – 0.2 percent, so with two revisions still to come the UK’s emergence from

recession is far from guaranteed. Indeed, a change in GDP could coattail on this year’s general election, which must be held before June 3, although Gordon Brown is facing the very real prospect of an earlier date, making the government’s task of sustaining the economy that much harder. The main drivers of the minimal growth in the economy came from the retail and motor sector, both of which have been propped up by government intervention. Speaking to the BBC, Colin Ellis, European economist with Daiwa Capital Markets, said: “These sectors will have been boosted by the pre-announced VAT rise in January and the car scrappage scheme — suggesting that, on an underlying basis, the economy only stagnated at best.” Fears have been raised over the strength of the recovery as the VAT rise and the dire

weather this month are likely to have hurt high street spending, and the scrappage scheme is soon scheduled to come to an end. The Pound tumbled almost a full cent against the Dollar on the figure, falling 0.6 percent on the day to $1.611. In 2009, the economy fell by 4.8 percent, the quickest rate of decline in a single year for 88 years, and more than in any other 12-month period since the Great Depression of the 1930s. According to forecasts by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the US market is expected to grow by 2.7 percent in 2010, Japan by 1.7 percent with French and German GDP expected to rise by 1.4 percent and 1.5 percent respectively. There is a rosier picture in 2011, with the IMF predicting that the UK economy will grow by 2.7 percent, up from a previous forecast of 2.5 percent.

GooGle considers china BoycoTT inTerneT GianT GooGle has threatened to end its operations in China following a “sophisticated and targeted” cyber attack originating from the country. According to various reports, the company did not accuse the Chinese government directly, but said it was no longer willing to censor its Chinese search engine, google.cn. The fallout from any boycott could result in the closure of the site and of the company’s China offices although the chief of Baidu, Google’s closest

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

competitor in China has called the move “hypocritical and financially motivated”. According to sources at the BBC, Google stated that email accounts of Chinese human rights activists were the primary target of the December attack, and that it will now hold talks with the government to look at operating an unfiltered search engine within the law in the country (though no changes to filtering have yet been made). The Chinese Government has categorically denied any involvement in the

attacks and has gone as far as to announce that it would welcome Google Android without any restrictions to ease relations with the search giant. Google launched google.cn in 2006, agreeing to some censorship of the search results, as required by the Chinese government. It currently holds around a third of the Chinese search market, yet remains significantly behind Baidu which owns more than 60% of the market share.

GooGle, yahoo! and faceBooK To face french Taxman never Too far away from the news at present, Google, in addition to a number of other Internet properties could face taxation under plans being considered by the French government. A report, commissioned by the government, suggests firms such as Google, Yahoo! and Facebook should pay a new tax on their online ad revenues to fund legal alternatives for buying books, films and music on the Internet. France, and particularly its President, Nicolas Sarkozy, has adopted a hard line against the increasing dominance of digital content and has just introduced tough new legislation targeting those who persistently download illegal content from the net. It has also taken offence to Google’s

intention to digitalise the world’s books, and is financing a project to create its own digital library. The tax proposals are still at a preliminary stage with many issues to be decided before any thoughts can turn to implementation. Google, as you would imagine, is among those to have voiced opposition to the plan. “We don’t think introducing an additional tax on Internet advertising is the right way forward as it could slow down innovation,” explained Olivier Esper, Senior Policy Manager for Google France. “The better way to support content creation is to find new business models that help consumers find great content and reward artists and publishers for their work.”

virGin Games siGns UP To PlayTech GTs PlaTform PlayTech has annoUnced a partnership agreement with Virgin Games that will see its soft gaming solutions developer, Gaming Technology Solutions Limited (GTS), acquired in December 2009, license its EdGE software platform to Virgin as well as delivering a brand new selection of game products to Virgin’s established offering. The EdGE platform is designed as a cost effective and easily integrated games engine that in this instance, will allow Virgin to better manage and operate its games. Warren Eloff of Virgin Games said: “We are looking forward to working with GTS and through the delivery of the

platform, we have access to a variety of leading games content from world class developers. ICE (ICE Back Office) is a comprehensive management suite and we are confident that the added level of control we will have over our games content will have a very positive effect on our growth.” Playtech CEO, Mor Weizer, added: “We are delighted that Virgin Games, a well-established and leading operator has chosen Playtech’s GTS as its games integration partner and EdGE as its software solution. Virgin is setting new benchmarks in terms of player promotion and marketing activities and we look forward to a successful partnership in 2010 and beyond.”

seGa Games laUnches GaminG siTes yoU’ve already read about the hows, whys and wherefores in our exclusive interview last issue, but now you can see the real thing for yourself with the launch of SEGA Games’ online casino and poker rooms. Both sites will be taking advantage of the might of SEGA’s iconic games brands in tandem with some of the more successful

of today’s branded slots games, such as Gladiator, The Incredible Hulk and Iron Man. Affiliates are also catered for at SEGA Partners with the program currently offering numerous promotion, marketing and reporting tools as well as offering grand opening specials.

isle of man Unveils new reGUlaTions The Isle of Man Government used the recent International Gaming Exhibition in London as the platform to announce changes to its gambling regulations which make it possible for an iGaming company to base its non-gambling related activities and operations in the Isle of Man without needing an OGRA gambling licence. Under the new regulations, the exclusions from licensing include activities such as marketing, administration, software downloads, customer support and relay servers, allowing iGaming companies and other related businesses to base their non-gambling allied activities in a jurisdiction which supports all aspects of the industry. Companies will still need an OGRA gambling licence for core activities including striking the bet and player fund activity. Garth Kimber, head of IOM e-Gaming development explained, “Our new streamlined regulations further demonstrate our commitment to growing the iGaming industry on the Isle of Man. The Isle of Man is developing a multi-faceted iGaming industry and activities such as marketing, administration and customer support are an important part of this. Moreover, in the last 12 months we have worked to ensure our regulatory environment is compatible for a variety of iGaming companies and changes to our gambling regulations further highlight the flexible approach the Isle of Man Government takes in order to accommodate the needs of new and existing businesses.” rocKeTsPin Goes easT wiTh moBile casino Microgaming-powered Mobile gaming solutions provider Spin3 has announced that RocketSpin will launch a new mobile casino in Eastern Europe using its GameWireTM suite of interactive, real money casino games. The launch of the RocketSpin mobile casino owes much to Spin3’s implementation of NetWallet, the first secured WAP mobile billing solution for the Eastern European market. “Eastern Europe is a hugely exciting region offering great potential for growth. The market is virtually untouched with a strong

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

webmaster news

desire from consumers for mobile casino games and entertainment,” said Matti Zinder, Head of Spin3. NetWallet is a WAP-based direct and secure mobile billing solution unique for the Eastern European market. The system enables players to deposit money into a virtual ‘purse’ using Premium SMS where the player is billed through the operator. Alternatively, integration with WebMoney allows players to buy pre-paid credits online or at a WebMoney terminal. A player’s payments will then be processed and transferred directly to their mobile casino account and can be used to play at any time. Matti Zinder continued, “It is only through innovation and technological development that we can enable our clients, like RocketSpin, to access new and lucrative markets. We are the only mobile casino solutions provider to offer a secured WAP mobile payment solution specifically for Eastern Europe. Our mix of expert consultancy, leading technology and comprehensive back-office support sets us apart, and makes us the natural choice for brands to expand into new and promising markets like Eastern Europe.” iGaminG indUsTry PUlls ToGeTher for haiTi vicTims The iGaming Business Affiliate awards took on an extra sense of charity this year as the industry showed its respect to the victims of the earthquake disaster in Haiti. The awards raised an impressive £65,000, a figure that was matched by the Calvin Ayre foundation, taking the total to £130,000. The donation will go to Oxfam, which is spearheading the relief effort on the Caribbean island. The money will be used to fly out water, sanitation, health and shelter equipment from Oxfam’s emergency warehouse in Oxfordshire. Oxfam will also use the cash to employ people to clean up their makeshift camps and improve their living conditions by removing rubble, clearing market spaces and helping to dig latrines. Bodog founder Calvin Ayre has challenged the gaming industry to raise $1 million for the Haiti relief effort and the iGaming Business Affiliate Awards has gone a good way to achieving that target.

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

sPorTech acqUires scienTific Games racinG The oPeraTor of The New Football Pools, Sportech, has announced its intention to acquire pari-mutuel and venue management business Scientific Games Racing for up to $83 million from American firm Scientific Games Corporation. The London-based company stated that it would pay an initial $65 million for Scientific Games Racing followed by a further $10 million dollars at the end of September, 2013 while an additional $8 million dollars could be due if the purchase meets set targets over the next three years. Sportech stated that its initial payment would be met by issuing 39,742,179 shares to Scientific Games Corporation at a price of 50 pence each, which represents 19.99 percent of the British firm’s enlarged issued share capital, alongside approximately $32.9 million in cash. In addition, Sportech revealed that

it intends to raise an additional $36.23 million by issuing a further 58,415,520 shares at a price of 50 pence each and that it would use these funds to finance the cash consideration payable to Scientific Games Corporation upon completion of the acquisition. Software developer Playtech has already agreed to purchase 19,881,020 of these new shares, which represent 9.99 percent of Sportech, and will be given the right to nominate one Non-Executive Director to the board. “This is a transformational transaction for Sportech,” said Piers Pottinger, Chairman for Sportech. “It catapults the business onto the international stage. I am delighted to welcome two new cornerstone investors, both international gaming and strategic partners for Sportech, into the enlarged group. Their support is testament to the great potential of the Sportech business.”

a new dawn for comPUTinG or JUsT a GianT iPhone? The relenTless march of technology continues apace in 2010 as Apple unveils its new iPad tablet which has been lauded as the saviour of the PC tablet industry. Microsoft had previously tried and failed in this arena, when it introduced a tablet computer in 2001, but according to industry analysts new

advances in touchscreens and wireless technology mean that the market could now be right for products such as the iPad. Apple has stated that its aim was to create a third category of product that sits between a laptop and a smartphone, which is the traditional interpretation of a tablet computer.

32red BUys nedPlay.com sTrUGGlinG online casino NedPlay.com has been bought by 32Red. The acquisition will include its player database and intellectual property. 32Red stated that the purchase would bring players at NedPlay.com the ‘same high level of service and support and exciting promotions’ enjoyed by clients at its 32Red.com and DashCasino.com sites. “We are pleased to have NedPlay. com join our group and look forward to delivering the same high standards we apply across our existing operations to NedPlay.com,” said Ed Ware, Chief Executive Officer for 32Red. Ware revealed that the NedPlay.com brand would continue as it is ‘for the time being’ as it assesses the domain’s future over the coming weeks. He stated that

players with outstanding approved pending withdrawals should expect payment ‘shortly’ while unresolved compensation to the site’s affiliate partners would be settled ‘in the short-term’. 32Red’s flagship 32Red.com online casino was recently awarded with the Casino of the Decade accolade from industry watchdog and player advocacy site Casinomeister. “NedPlay.com players join 32Red at a time when our efforts over the past seven years have accumulated in us receiving the first ever Casino of the Decade accolade,” continued Ware. “They can now look forward to the same award-winning service and online casino experience that 32Red regulars have enjoyed since the casino’s launch in 2002.”

traffic

In Search of the King In the world of search marketing, just what is ‘King’: Content or Links? The question occurred having presided over a number of analyses on the matter over the past 18 months – many differing in opinion. To shed some light on why these two prime SEO components are often vying for the same throne, iGB Affiliate Magazine consulted a panel of search specialists. Bob Rains, Founder, Let’s Make it Awesome Who’s the King, content or links? It’s a little like asking what’s more important, the spokes or the wheel – one without the other just doesn’t work the same. The masterminds at the big ‘G’, aka Google, just launched two significant changes in the way the search giant displays results to the user, and this little mash-up impacts the way I’m going to answer this question. The first change dropped on Friday, November 27, when the nerds at Google decided your behavior as a user should have more impact on the results it displays for your queries, than the quality of the content, or the links. So the answer is you – you’re the king, and what you do determines as much (if not more) on the search results you see, than any of the voodoo my SEO brethren or I cook up in our little labs. So what does this mean for you the Internet marketer? Time to put on your big boy pants and get down to the serious business of strategic Internet marketing. You now not only need timely and relevant content, but you need authority links as well, and here’s the kicker. You need the content to be buzz worthy and attract users that will not only recommend, but advocate your brand or offering in the communities in which they are active online. You need to get the user to grasp an impression at least once every

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

180 days to stay in their line of sight. I’m not saying throw away your keyword list, but suffice it to say the long tail just grew another dimension… time. Did your face just melt? This brings me to the second significant change the eggheads at the ‘Googlefarm’ dropped a few days later, Real-Time Search (cue violins). Well, not the romantic awesome download karate instructions straight to your brain matrix green hued idea of REAL-TIME SEARCH, but a little box of blog, Facebook, friend feed, twitter goodness to enhance your superpersonalized SERPs. Because, after all, you’re the King now, live it up. The new dogma for SEO, nay Online Marketing, may just end up being ABM – Always Be Marketing. Now that the latest results from various parts of the web are being pushed into page one results, you need to stay on top of your messaging 24/7/365 as part of your search engine strategy. Don’t even think about spamming, as Google claims it knows what you’re going to do before you event do it. These weren’t the only recent changes at Google, and a couple will challenge most iGaming industry definitions of content. Google Goggles will allow the user to search by sight. With Google Goggles you can take pictures of physical landmarks, bottles of wine, CD covers, bar codes – it

will try to recognize the image (do OCR on text in images) and tell you what it is. Is that searching content? It’s finding content that’s for sure. Search by location, or even by voice for mobile devices. Wrap your head around how you will need to optimize for the sound of your brand being spoken, or an image, any image, even down to where the user is at the moment they search. Indeed a new day, and more than just a new dimension for your long tail.

Andreas Pouros, Chief Operating Officer, Greenlight If one is ‘King’, then the other is invariably ‘Queen’, as both are of exceptional importance and in competitive sectors one is useless without the other. Links, however, are inarguably King. Matt Cutts, a Google Engineer, made this point very succinctly with a story he told at Search Engine Strategies (SES) several years ago that goes something like this... On his first trip to the UK, Matt passed a sign that read ‘The Best Fish & Chips in London’, so being in the UK for the first time he was compelled to try the ‘best fish and chips in London’. He stopped, had some of these self-declared best fish and chips in London and, alas, they were not the best fish and chips in London at all. If Matt had referred to respectable and authoritative third party sources like Timeout magazine, TopTable.com and others, he would have discovered this well ahead of parting with his money. TimeOut. com would have directed him to Comptoir Gascon, ten minutes from Greenlight’s London offices, for the most deserving of that accolade, as voted for by their highly respected critics (the fish and chips are fried

in duck fat, which undoubtedly helped). The moral of the story is that anyone can say they are the best about anything they want to claim authority for, but it takes third party sources to confidently confirm and verify the truth of a statement. Equally, a website can purport to be an authority on something and want to rank top of Google for a search for it, i.e. through its content. However, search engines use links to determine whether you are in fact a credible player. Only then will you be able to rank in visible positions within their search results for what you are textually relevant for. In a world where everyone is doing at least a little bit of SEO, and content relevancy across competing sites is equalising in terms of quality, links become the final arbitrator. A good indicator that links are King and will continue to be for the foreseeable future is the quantity and quality of academic developments focused on improving link analysis, as opposed to improving content analysis, which hasn’t really advanced since the inclusion of applied semantics in search engine algorithms in 2003/4. The last 12 months alone have seen significant advances in link based algorithmic methods like TrustRank, SocialRank, topical link analysis and methods to combat link spam, all of which are improvements to how links are assessed and rankings determined. The importance of links is also far greater if you are within an industry that is highly competitive (because decent onpage SEO would be commonplace), in an industry that has a relatively small number of major search terms (again, competition would be greater and therefore, levels of SEO higher) and the industry is an area that doesn’t lend itself to content-based improvement (some subjects just can’t be talked about as much as others). The gaming industry has all three of these characteristics, demonstrating that for the gaming industry, not only are links King, but they are also the Ace up your sleeve.

Liat Fuchs, Affiliate Director, AffiliatePLY.com Content is King! There is no doubt that links are a very important component of search engine success. Search engines consider backlinks a vote of confidence; a high number of links from trusted sites will lead to a higher ranking. But what determines the quantity and the quality of the links a site has? The

answer is content (but not solely). Quality links are one of the most inﬂuential factors in determining search engine rank. The search engine ranks pages higher, if many authoritative pages link to it. Quality content affects both the quality and quantity of back-links. Also, with the rise of social media sites, a site’s content is more important than ever. The readers have the power to submit a copy of the content to these sites with links back to your page for all to see. As for links, are they the ﬁrst parameter considered by search engines when ranking a site? Not anymore. One of the biggest transformations seen in search engine results over the last few years is the considerable preference for pages with quality content. Quality content is critical to achieving top rankings. Stepping out of the SEO discussion, content is King because it serves all the other targets of the typical website owner. Every website owner wants to appeal to their target audience, get targeted traffic, and a lot of it. Once traffic is there (using good content as well), he now wants to make the audience spend time on the site, purchase/take action and, of course, return to the site. Again, content is getting into the picture, and it should have specific appeal to the target audience and should be original, different, unique, interesting and informative. In summary, content and more specifically, well written content is important for three primary reasons: ● It engages, entertains, informs and entices the reader/customer to action. ● It increases search engine rankings and traffic. ● It promotes the likelihood of quality links from other sites

John Wright, Marketing Manager, Rockbet.com Everybody says that content is king and I think this should always be the focus. I see many affiliates that are focusing too much on things like word count, keyword density and as a human, some of these articles are not as interesting. If you focus on a quality article then not only will your user be interested but they might click on what you have to offer. Better yet, they might send this to their friends. Writing filler content might be better than no content at all but if you put more

time into a quality article then karma will come back around and reward you in the bank account. Just think of some great articles or blogs you have read where you actively posted the link on your Facebook or twitter and told all your friends about it. Most content out there isn’t worthy of this treatment yet people think that is what they have to write. Content is king but I think more should be said for quality content. I believe search engines are going to keep evolving and find ways to track the value that websites have to offer. Things that will be taken into consideration will be the average time a user spends on a website or page, your conversion rates and whether the person left quickly or decided to navigate your links and site further. Are links irrelevant then? Not exactly, but when people read up on SEO they think link building campaigns are the keys to success and I would take that statement with a pinch of salt. Search engines are going to see your link building campaigns in action and if they see that you have farmed your links then they won’t put much weight into that link. Sites like joeant.com and dmoz.com might have high PRs but most search engines won’t care whether you have these links or not. Before I conclude that content beats links there is something that many people seem to either overlook or just not hear about – link baiting. Link baiting isn’t something you to do trick someone into giving you a link, so perhaps the terminology is a little misleading. Link baiting is a means of doing something for the purpose of getting people and websites to link and write about your site or article. As I mentioned earlier, when you write a great article and people start ‘re-tweeting’ your article and sharing it with their friends, that is natural link baiting. When your article is so good that the BBC mentions your website, that means not only is your content King but you’re the King as well. To conclude, if you stick to SEO basics and write quality content then you shouldn’t have to think about links. If you do want quality links then why not consider writing some articles for a major media company like the BBC or CNN. If you give them a free article or write something that compels them to link back to you that link will not only give you plenty of traffic but the search engines will know that your site is worth respecting. If you have quality content then you have already focused on link baiting.

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

TRAFFIC

IMPROVING SEARCH ENGINE presence is undoubtedly a key priority for marketers as well as afﬁliates in the gaming industry. While content and links play a huge role driving rankings and trafﬁc, domain names are arguably more important.

Domain names boost online presence and brand Domain names are the bedrock of an organisation’s web presence and an important element of a fully protected online brand image. But, aside from this, they are an essential marketing tool. The strategic use of existing and related URLs can improve search rankings and search engine optimisation (SEO) and conversions on search engine marketing campaigns (SEM). Owning a quality product-related domain not only improves the ranking in search results and boosts online presence, but also sends customers a message of authority, helping your brand stand out from the competition in a crowded industry.

Multiple URLs enhance search presence Domain names are a vital part of an organisation’s online advertising strategy, enhancing conversions on pay-per-click (PPC) campaigns in particular. Building a portfolio of relevant keyword domains maximises representation in natural search listings while improving conversions on paid listings. This increases the number of listings for the brand in search engines and assists with link building. In fact, studies show that keyword domain names can perform better than branded advertising in search marketing campaigns. Another advantage is Google search highlights the keywords in results, building click through rates. A full domain portfolio minimises

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

brand damage and hinders competitors’ online standing.

One in every six searches is browser-driven Acquiring generic gaming keyword domain names offers a number of benefits. Studies show more than one in six searches are performed by Internet users directly typing a domain into their browser, accounting for more than ten percent of Google’s search revenues. Furthermore, a keyword plus a .com or .co.uk extension are frequently the starting point for searches from an Internet browser. Consumers recognise these domains as a trustworthy source of information, helping your brand to establish market authority. For example, a quality, generic domain like UKcasinos. co.uk offers a high search engine ranking and gives its owner instant brand recognition with consumers looking to find online casinos in the UK. Given the current economic climate, domain prices are the lowest they’ve been in years, making it an ideal time to invest. A quick search on Sedo’s domain name auction site reveals a range of non-brand specific domains available for purchase at a variety of price points. Drawing a comparison from another industry, a good example of investing in generic domains effectively is Toys ‘R’ Us. The toy retailer recently purchased toys.com for USD $5 million. Toys.com subsequently put Toys ‘R’ Us in the top search ranking for the market, considerably improving its digital brand recognition. However, for most organisations, the cost of a domain is rarely as high. The current average price for a .co.uk domain is £1,004 and £1,757 for a .com. In addition, research shows domains often see a return on their investment within two years.

Developing a domain strategy Registering domains steers traffic and brands in the right direction online. By identifying top market keywords and developing a list of target domains, a brand can start registering available URLs. Companies can look to add variations of brand names to their domain portfolio, including domains with abbreviations and typos. This ensures traffic intended for a brand is redirected to a home page or used as a secondary domain filled with targeted advertising. For specific domains, a domain marketplace or domain broker can help gaming companies acquire addresses already registered. When it comes to search, content and links aren’t the only aspect to consider. Domain names can improve natural and sponsored search rankings as well as online returns on investment. If gaming companies want to truly compete in a dynamic and fast-moving industry domain names should be a key consideration in any online strategy. GAMING DOMAIN NAMES CURRENTLY FOR SALE AT SEDO.COM Domain

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SUPER COMPETITIVE SEO YOU’RE GOING TO NEED A BIGGER BOAT! Gaming SEO is as tough as it is monetizable. Top positions for big keywords can be worth millions in new player revenues. Attempting to compete for these positions requires scalability, efficiencies and budget. This article looks at a few aspects of delivering top rankings in the most competitive markets, including budgeting, financial justification, risk mitigation and most importantly; knowing when you need a bigger boat. David the Affiliate Vs Goliath the Operator Both sides of the fence have distinct advantages, these can be summarised as follows: Affiliate

Operator

Agility

Equity

Flexibility

Inertia

Adaptability

Strength

It’s critical before engaging in any SEO that you understand your strengths, and play to them, in your selection of keywords. This article will focus on the affiliate’s strengths.

Agility ●● New afﬁliate opportunities to explore

inexpensively – if you’re a poker or bingo affiliate you might want to cross-sell to the rummy market, or dip a toe in the forex market. ●● New self-service techniques to deploy – testing a new social ad platform is simple, for example. ●●To take a punt based on gut instinct – smaller affiliates have the freedom to experiment; use this to your advantage.

Flexibility

your home page’s authority and rank for ‘Cheltenham betting’ for three weeks every year? (See figure 1). ●● A single product afﬁliate may diversify easily – adding poker, bingo, and niche casino games to your casino tips is quick and easy with most modern CMS systems. Going international is also relatively simple with a little local iGaming knowledge (note: always speak to an experienced multilingual search specialist beforehand).

Adaptability ●● Greater freedom to adapt to Google

changes – e.g. June 26, 2009 (Vince) - if you were displaced by larger brands who (let’s face it) deserve to be there, regaining position may be costly. Vince only impacted a very small number of queries; it may be the case that a more mid-tail term should be targeted, while you regain the position on the larger generic term. ●● Greater freedom to respond to competitor activity – unlike a typical Plc marketing budget which is usually agreed and

Figure 1 INTEREST OVER TIME

signed off in the previous year, the affiliate has the flexibility to adapt based on changes in the competitor landscape. ●● Greater freedom to respond to wide market changes – the adoption of new gaming behaviour, driven by mainstream advertising may be pre-empted and form part of an affiliate’s medium to long term game plan. All in all, the affiliate has a number of aces they can play to their advantage, but when it comes down to it: “Picking a Keyword is Picking a Fight” No one likes to get hurt, and picking a fight that cannot be won is one way to guarantee a painful defeat. Don’t think that because you are an affiliate, you cannot compete for big keywords. If your site is optimised correctly and you have link history, you could still be in the running for a page number one ranking for one or more of the big terms. Never fight a battle on more than one front unless you are very well resourced – target one keyword at a time (mixing up

March 2005  odds comparison 25  chettenham betting 62

●● Different commercial models to operators

– an experienced SEO with self belief and confidence in their art will be happy to share the risk, providing there is a reward for over-delivery. ●● Deploy both long and short term strategies – Let’s say you run an odds comparison site with a home page (the most powerful page of the site) optimised for ‘compare odds’/’odds comparison’. You might want to leverage

View full report in Google Insights for Search

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

traffic

the anchor text, but ensuring your target keywords occur in the link anchor text mix). The following tables (see figure 2) show the estimated click through rate for a typical Google results page. The table on the left is applicable when there are three sponsored results at the top of page on; the table on the right was published by AOL and more closely represents the click though rates where there are no sponsored results, i.e. in markets where gambling is prohibited by Google. Basic revenue modelling for a given position is as simple as... Monthly Search Volume X CTR X Conversion to Active X Lifetime Value “If ignorant both of your enemy and yourself, you are certain to be in trouble” Sun Tzu Note: If you’re planning to displace the brand in position number three for a big keyword, you need to be adequately resourced; not only to achieve the position, but also to deal with the backlash that will occur once the position has been achieved – don’t expect your competitor to step down without a fight. Here’s loosely how it will play out: ●● Marketing Exec reports Google organic

player volumes to his boss. ●● Marketing Manager completes his report

and sends to his boss. ●● Marketing Director asks “WTF happened

to our player volumes this month?” ●● Marketing Manager responds “let me get

back to you with the figures”. ●● Marketing Manager asks Marketing Exec

“WTF happened to our player volumes this month?” ●● Marketing Exec replies “let me get back to you with the figures”. ●● Marketing Exec reports a one position loss which has pushed the result below the fold at a cost of ‘x’ players per month. I’m sure you can imagine the rest... Result: escalating aggression! If you don’t have the required resource to deal with the escalation, the victory will be fleeting and expensive, particularly if you’ve only moved from position number four to number three. This becomes even more apparent when battling for top position. Given the significant increase in traffic volumes when moving from number two and number one, it’s important to anticipate an escalation in aggression. This retaliation will be proportional to the loss incurred by the brand you’re planning to displace. When budgeting for SEO at this level: 1) Ensure that you have sufficient resource to get there.

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

“Don’t think that because you are an affiliate, you cannot compete for big keywords.” Estimated CTR by Rank Position (Stickyeyes)

Estimated CTR by Rank Position (AOL)

Position

CTR

Position

CTR

26.75%

42.30%

11.20%

11.92%

8.44%

6.03%

4.86%

3.99%

3.37%

2.98%

2.83%

2.97%

Figure 2 2) If your agency or in-house guy suggests £25K/per month in budget – allocate an additional 10% to cover margin of error. 3) Don’t haggle them down and expect the same results. 4) Ensure you have additional budget to defend the position once achieved. Victorian social thinker, John Ruskin, once wrote: “It is unwise to pay too much, but it is unwise to pay too little. When you pay too much you lose a little money, that is all. When you pay too little you sometimes lose everything, because the thing you bought was incapable of doing the thing you bought it to do.” Nowhere is this more applicable than in iGaming SEO. SEO budgets in the most competitive markets can leave an affiliate financially exposed, so you would be advised to take a measured, progressive approach, fighting one battle at a time and incrementally up-scaling once your figures justify increased activity.

say, your brand is delivering traffic. Some degree of risk mitigation is recommended if you’re planning to undertake any activity outside of what Google finds acceptable. Your Google search traffic will dictate this level of risk. If you have a long term mission involving any level of brand equity, then I would advise you avoid offshoring any link building activity to the lowest bidder. One way to protect your brand traffic is to create a new micro-site or use an existing web property which could be optimised for your brand. This would ensure that should you run into trouble, you’re alternative site will protect your business from the loss of brand traffic. Strong affiliate relationships can also help to some degree. While a solid contingency plan can mitigate a risky strategy, the long term impact of burning a domain for financial gain could still bring about your downfall for a number of reasons which we won’t go into here.

In summary... believe... Assessing and mitigating risk At Stickyeyes, we operate a White Hat approach and operate ethically and within Google guidelines both on-page and off. That said, given Google’s dominance in the search market – having all your eggs in one basket carries risk. It’s no one’s God given right to rank in Google, and if you’re operating outside of what is acceptable then you’re running a potential risk to your traffic, revenue or even your future employment prospects. It’s important to know what’s at stake and factor this into your project. If you’re currently only ranking for brand terms, let’s

In SEO, as per all endeavours in life, our limitations are entirely self-imposed as Shakespeare put it: “Our doubts are traitors, and make us lose the good we oft might win by fearing to attempt.” With an executable plan and adequate resource and budget, there’s no reason why you cannot outrank the big boys. Good luck!

Paul Reilly Follow on twitter: @paulreilly email me at paul.reilly@stickyeyes.com

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While the move towards social media optimization in iGaming industry at large has been slow, brands are jumping on the social media bandwagon in hoards. However, even the most forward thinking operators and affiliates often fail to implement a monitoring tool to measure campaign success. SEO expert and Founder of Let’s Make it Awesome, Bob Rains investigates.

THE LOGICAL STEP after any social media campaign has been launched is to power up one of the variety of tools and metrics to measure its real impact and what, if any genuine ROI. Even if you are only looking at metrics from a purely SEO-based perspective, you can check for increases in traffic, link popularity, page views, unique visits, views per visit, time on site, time per user, return visits, depth and even conversion. For those marketers truly wishing to dig deep into real-time social media metrics, they can even track social bookmarking, content consumption, contribution, email, profile engagement and overall influence amongst micro bloggers, forums and portals. Only once you’ve considered all of these factors will you start to gain a genuine understanding of the success of social media campaigns and engagements.

websites and provide real time reports. If you can’t expend the level of resources for budgetary constraints then you may ﬁnd solace in one of the free aggregation sites such as Addictomatic or Surchur. These free sites will provide you with generic data relating to search querys, but will not aggregate and export the data presented in their websites. Pooling the data from the magnitude of social media is a major time suck and should be automated as much as possible. Data can then be examined across blogs (Google Blog Search and Technorati) social bookmarking sites (Del. icio.us and Ma.gnolia), social media portals (MySpace and Facebook), video sharing sites (YouTube, Dailymotion, Metacafe), image resources (Flickr, Picasa), and micro-blogging communities (Twitter and Friendfeed), as well as forums (Twing, Boardreader, GPWA, CAP).

Social Influence

Social Bookmarking

The best way to ensure you are listening to the chatter about you and your brand in social media is to work with someone who has the capacity to aggregate data over potentially hundreds of thousands of

Do your users at popular bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, Ma.gonlia, or Stumbleupon tag your pages? If so how many do so monthly, daily, weekly? Is there a signiﬁcant increase after you’ve executed marketing

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

campaigns targeted at social media? A quick way to to track this level of attention is to set up an account with AddThis.com and get somewhat detailed info on who is bookmarking your pages. It takes only a few moments to set up an account and get a snippet of code to start monitoring the social media aspects of your site.

Consumption and Contribution It’s vitally important to monitor who is reading and contributing to your content before, during and after you launch a social media engagment, in order to gauge success or failure. You will want to ﬁnd out where the user came from, what pages they viewed and how long they were viewing, to gather valuable insight for expanding your net on future campaigns. It is also important to measure spikes over time to make comparisons with past efforts to determine what you should and shouldn’t be doing.

someone thinks you haven’t, it’s up to you to monitor and protect your reputation online. Unless you are super generic, when someone writes something about you or your brand the chances of that blog, comment, or page being displayed on the ﬁrst few pages in Google increases within a matter of hours or days. Now, this is awesome if it’s good news, but if Gambling911 just chucked you under the bus it could have a considerably negative social and economic impact. Think back to the last time you made the call to hire a consultant, or buy a product. Most likely, you went to Google and typed in that product or brand name to get a feel for the reliability of that product or service. If all you saw was great stuff, it may have tipped you in the ‘go’ position. However, if all you found were bad remarks, then you probably passed on the offering. Just another example of how far reputation goes.

What should you do? Email If you allow your site’s content to be emailed to others then you are missing a valuable piece of the picture if you do not track and dice that data as well. As crazy as it may sound, this metric is a strong indicator as to whether or not your content is being portrayed by your user as vital or viral.

Social Media Engagement Proﬁles at sites like MySpace, Facebook or LinkedIn can be used to gauge traction amongst other genral or professional networking portals. Each of these very different social media sites has it own metrics you should be viewing – proﬁle visits, comments, networking requests, friend adds, fans, etc. These metrics will help you fully understand how much exposure your brand has in these socially geared environments. Additionally you may also make some great connections by actively having an online presence and consistently monitoring these social portals. Social media monitoring will allow marketers to spend more time analyzing data and making sound decisions for your brands and offerings.

Reputation Management As the age old saying goes, ﬁrst impressions are everything. While this means you must put your best foot forward, thanks to search engine saturation and an even greater numbers of critics and bloggers, if you don’t or

First step is build a good defense. It’s only a matter of time before something is written that finds its way to the front page. If you have already built and created everything you could before you are attacked, you will likely maintain the better reputation. The most recommended approach is to build enough authority on several pages to weed out and control the first three pages of Serps. In order to do this, you’ll need to find and create fifty-plus pages about you or your brand, I recommend profiles as they tend to hold greater authority in the eyes of Google. An easy first step is to hit the following ten sites pronto, and start to build and optimize. ● Digg ● StumbleUpon ● Facebook ● Twitter ● YouTube ● Propeller ● Reddit ● Mixx ● LinkedIn ● Orkut Gaining a genuine understanding of your social media marketing campaigns can be a reality if you use the right tools and spend enough time understanding the unique landscapes of social media. Conducting social media activities without data to back it up is total inertia. Social media marketing and monitoring should be collectively conducted to ensure true penetration, one should not exist without the other.

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Optimizing conversion for your online visitors should never be about guesswork. It’s not enough to build a campaign based on previous success stories for other people’s sites. TESTING IS THE KEY to optimizing your website. When you test, you remove the influence of guesswork on your business model and replace it with real data. The results of your tests will inform the decisions you make with far greater authenticity than any supposition or anecdotal impression you may have. This article will suggest the first ten tests you should carry out to ensure that your video is performing to the best of its ability and converting your visitors into customers.

1. Video or No Video The most basic control test means comparing your site without video to the same site with a video in place. But that doesn’t mean it can be passed over or forgotten. As soon as you have a video that you’re happy with you want to post it to your site. You spent time agonizing over the script and now you want to show your masterpiece to the world. You want everyone who visits your site to watch your video and be so convinced by the added value you have demonstrated that they are instantly converted to lifelong customers. But before you do that, there are some things you need to know. What’s your current conversion rate? Your conversion

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

rate is defined as the number of visitors to your site who reach your conversion goal divided by the total number of visitors to your site expressed as a percentage. Being able to define your conversion rate assumes you have clearly defined your conversion goal. Let’s assume that you know your current conversion rate. The only way to be sure that your video is increasing your conversion rate is to test a version of the page with the video against a version of the page as it existed before the video. It’s not enough to use last month’s figures and compare them to this month’s rate with the new video. Comparing old data with new data is inconclusive. There are too many other factors that might have contributed to the changes. Once you have proof that adding video increases conversion and you can accurately measure the size of the increase, it is easy to calculate how soon you will achieve a return on your investment in the video.

2. Auto Play or Press to Play It’s a simple question with a complicated answer. Should your video have a trigger requiring visitors to click somewhere in order to initiate the video or should the video begin playing automatically the first

time a visitor arrives at the site? There are arguments to be made for both sides. Many website owners believe that users find auto play intrusive and pushy. You may feel it’s too much of a ‘hard sell’ to begin playing the video without a specific request from the visitors to your site. Yet, once you know that it increases conversion, you might want as many people to see it as possible, regardless of whether that comes across as pushy or not. Before you can make an intelligent decision one way or the other, you need to know what the impact on your conversion would be. Ultimately, you have to decide what is right for your site and your users. Different play options will work in different scenarios and only by testing will you know for sure whether the advantages to be gained by having the video play automatically outweigh the disturbance it causes. At EyeView we saw one of our customers increase conversion by an additional 20% when their video was allowed to auto play. Conversely, we also saw a case where having the video auto play reduced conversion indicating a negative impact.

3. Call to Action Everyone knows how important the Call to Action is. Bryan and Jeffery Eisenberg wrote extensively about this important element of online marketing in their bestselling book, “Call To Action: Secret Formulas To Improve Online Results”. They describe online marketers as Customer Acquisition Managers driving incoming traffic into the right funnel. The Call to Action is a crucial part of their arsenal and key to building and maintaining conversion goals. When it comes to scripting a video, the question arises as to where to place the Call to Action. A video is a more linear experience than viewing a web page. On a static page, the user may jump around sampling different paragraphs distracted by various bells and whistles until he or she alights on the Call to Action and is suddenly inspired to perform the required action. Watching a video is a different experience entirely, as are the viewer’s expectations. Unlike a web page, a video has a start, a middle and an end. If the goal of the video is to increase conversion and get the visitor to do something, it has to include a compelling Call to Action – there are good arguments for doing so at the start, at the finish and anywhere in between. There is even an argument for making the Call to Action visible and accessible to the viewer throughout the running time of the video. Following the principle of ‘See it, Hear it, Click it,’ Viewers will be more likely to respond to the Call to Action if they are explicitly told about it and can find it immediately.

4. How Long Should My Video Be? There is no definitive answer for this oldest and most baffling of questions. The latest statistics show that the average length of an online video is three and a half minutes, but this average includes everything from full length episodes of TV on Hulu to the silliest short clips on YouTube and makes no concession towards marketing videos that are precisely designed to boost conversion. There are some fundamental adages such as ‘less is more’ and reminders about how easily bored viewers can click away from your content, but on the whole, no one can say for sure, how much is too much or how little is not enough. Every video we have published to date has shown a drop off graph of viewers over time. You must expect that not everyone who starts watching your video will make it to the end.

The solution, as always, is to test and test again. Once you have completed your video and seen it work, why not re-cut it and reduce it in length by 30%. Pay close attention to the drop off graphs for each version and see how many people make it through to the end. The more people are engaged with your video, the more likely they are to convert.

5. The Wonderful Thing about Triggers Triggers are wonderful things. The trigger is the element on your page that lets visitors know that there is a video to be watched. It might be a rectangle in the ad column with a play button in the middle or it might be a giant square with all kinds of animated shenanigans encouraging you to click on it. The trigger acts as a miniature Call to Action for your video. If you know that your video works and you know that it is converting browsers into customers then you want as many people to discover the video as possible. Of course, your video’s trigger may have to compete with some other page elements for attention. You have to find the balance between sending people to watch the video versus people who would convert anyway finding the Call to Action straight away. Previous tests should have convinced you that video viewers are more likely to convert, now you have to turn casual browsers into video viewers without cannibalizing the ones that would have converted regardless. Once you start looking at triggers, there is a remarkable variety to choose from. Do you want an animated trigger or a one that sits quietly on the page waiting for people to discover it? What are you going to write on your trigger to encourage people to click on it? Is “Click Here” more effective than “Play Movie” or “Watch Demo” or “Take Tour”? Where on the page should your trigger sit? It seems obvious that above the fold is going to have more impact than below the fold, but is there a difference between the right-hand side and the left-hand side? Trigger definition should never be taken for granted while testing offers the necessary flexibility to ensure your site is optimized.

the expectations of a user watching a video in the comfort of their home or office are very different. While every video engagement graph shows some drop off of viewers during the first few seconds, the drop off among nonnative speakers watching a video in English is significantly higher. If you want your video to have the same considerable impact in non-English speaking markets, you should consider offering the voiceover in multiple languages and aligning the default language with the geo-location of visitor. You might also want to test the use of subtitles on your conversion rates. Without knowing the proportion of your visitors who watch your site with speakers turned on, you have no way of being sure how many people are hearing your message. Use your traffic source analysis to determine where in the world the visitors to your site are based and test different combinations of voiceover and subtitles to achieve optimum conversion.

7. What Kind of Voiceover Works Best? Do we respond differently to messages delivered by a female voice than by a male voice? Do we have different expectations in terms of trust, authority and technical understanding? Do these questions elicit different answers depending on whether you are a man or a woman? In their classic book ‘Gender Voices’, David Graddol and Joan Swann discuss in detail the differences between male and female speaking voices and our responses to them. Most people can easily identify whether or not a voice belongs to a man or a woman. What is harder to determine is whether that voice influences the listener in any direction. If your product is aimed predominantly at one gender more than another or one age group over another, you may want to test different voiceovers to measure their impact on your conversion rate. There are other voiceover issues that are harder to track such as regional accents. Culturally, some populations are more sensitive to non-standard accents although even the BBC has long moved away from only allowing presenters to use Received Pronunciation.

6. Parlez-Vous Video?

8. Is Animation The Best Option?

You may not be fluent in multiple languages but your potential customer base is. While English has become the lingua franca for international business meetings,

Gone are the days when animators would painstakingly draw every frame of a film separated by minute changes and photographed in succession to give the

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

TRAFFIC

illusion of movement. Today’s animators have a wide range of images and effects available at the click of a mouse. You can go from storyboard to completed animation within hours. You can change your mind and implement those changes with very little fuss to produce professional looking and stylish animation that delivers your message and engages your viewers. Animation is attractive, flexible and quick. But is it more effective than recording a human being talking to camera or interviewing someone on camera? In other words, is there a trust issue here that may impact your conversion? The question doesn’t have to binary. There are ways of combining the flexibility of animation for the parts of the video that may change over time with the authority of a human face delivering a message to camera with sincerity and integrity. Also, the answer is not going to be the same for every site. If you are a lawyer should you let an animated avatar tell your story? If you are a medical practitioner should you have an actor say your lines? If you are a service provider, how important is a live testimony to your message? What are your options if you are a gaming provider? If you already know for sure which of these approaches works best for your target market then there is no reason to run a test. But if you don’t want to look like a ‘Mickey Mouse’ marketer, you need to understand the power and the risk of using animation in your video.

9. How Important is Music to my Video? Where would Norman Bates be without screeching violins to accompany his killer moves? How menacing would a mechanical shark named Bruce have seemed without

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

the chromatic rumblings of the double bass in John Williams’ score? How does music enhance or interfere with the messaging in your video? As with many of the earlier tests, there can be no definitive answer to this question. Different viewers in different markets may have different expectations for background music. Licensing professional music is timeconsuming and expensive. It’s even harder to determine the ROI for such an investment. Creating your own sounds or using a copyright-free loop is usually the cheapest option, but is it the most effective? Have you ever tried watching your video without music? Was it clearer or less clear? Will your viewers notice a difference and how will it make them feel? You may be absolutely positive that the video is better with a stirring score, but how can you know for certain without trying the alternative?

10. How Important are First Impressions? First impressions are undeniably important. But second impressions can be important too. If the gods of the Internet didn’t want us to deal in second impressions, they wouldn’t have created cookies. Your site probably knows when a visitor arrives for the second time. It’s up to you what you do with that information. Do you use it to change the way video is presented? If a visitor has already seen your video once, do you offer him the same thing again or do you use the real estate to try a different approach? You may even take it further by developing a second video for repeat visitors – maybe just the highlights with a different Call to Action. A second visit is a

second opportunity to achieve the goals you have set for your visitors. Perhaps the best way to do this is by experimenting with the video you show. Depending on the market you work in, it may be perfectly acceptable for visitors to convert after more than one visit. Make sure your video does not become an obstacle for returning prospects.

Summary The reality is that you might never know for sure whether a tiny tweak here or an extra word there will make a difference to the conversion rate of your site. But that doesn’t mean you should do nothing. If you start with the tests laid out in this article you should be well on the way to understanding the impact of video on your conversion rate and better informed about how video can help grow your revenue. In an Internet world of infinite variety you cannot say that what works for one will work for another, but you absolutely can say that what should be tested for one site should be tested for others. The tests listed here are just examples of variables that could have significant impact on your conversion rate and, therefore, on your revenue.

TAL RIESENFELD is the cofounder and VP of Marketing and Business Development of EyeView. Prior to EyeView, Tal worked as an online sales manager in Google (YouTube) and before that served as a Strategic Marketing Product Manager at Hewlett- Packard. Tal has an MBA with distinction from Harvard Business School and a B.Sc. degree in Computer Science with distinction from Ben Gurion University in Israel.

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6/11/09 12:44:12

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Is MultIplayer MobIle and socIal MedIa the new FrontIer For 2010? GoBetYa Gaming’s Founder, Patrick McKay, provides insight into why he thinks multiplayer mobile gaming and social media is the new frontier in the 2010 market. With tWo Words I can give you my reasoning on why we will see significant movement into mobile and social media in 2010: Zynga and Smartphones. Zynga recently claimed to get more than a 100 million unique users every month, and that the company generates 90 percent of its revenue by selling those people ‘virtual goods’ at anywhere from $1 to $20, with most priced from $5 to $10. It also claims to have 20 million concurrent users across two platforms (web and iPhone users). That’s an enormous number in anyone’s language. Just ask the big three poker networks how big a number that is. And with approximately three billion connected mobile handsets in the world for which Apple has reportedly sold 35 million in just a few years, then surely the interactive gaming industry must be aiming for a slice of this market in 2010. As the founder of a multiplayer gaming and poker business that has been developing in this sector for the last five years, I can tell you that my focus will be on this booming market in 2010.

But why would mainstream interactive gaming companies want to get involved in this market? Not only would they make money and increase their database but the cost to acquire new players from social media and mobile players is much cheaper and quicker. Technology has allowed for that. Wherever you are in the world right now

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

you will either have a mobile or a PC with you. The cost to send a text message with content attached is as little as 0.02p.

the old hurdles The main obstacle that has been restricting mobile poker from any real growth is technology, not liquidity. Most previous hurdles, like porting to different handsets and screen resolutions, are no longer the problems they once were. Developing for the different operating systems used by each different manufacturer is also much simpler. The iPhone and Blackberry are perfect examples – both gadgets have different operating systems and are completely differently in the way they are built. However, once they are stripped down and you understand how they operate, then you can build compelling and innovative mobile gaming content that’s as good as what is currently available online. I believe that the runaway success of the games and content that are offered on the iPhone’s ‘App Store’ proves that there is now a mass market mobile audience for entertaining games and that consumers are willing to spend large amounts of money purchasing or playing those games. In the past, in terms of mobile gaming, the technology hadn’t caught up with the idea and in this case, the connectivity issue between players has always been the problem, whether that is mobile to mobile or mobile to web game play. This is no longer the case, as current mobile devices are as powerful and reliable as some PCs and the connectivity or middleware that

deals with disconnection has largely been solved. You will always get disconnections on mobile – that’s just the nature of the beast, but that doesn’t mean that interrupted play cannot be managed.

Untapped Market While play for fun poker is massive, play for cash poker on mobile is literally an untapped market, but not for much longer. Companies (GoBetYa Gaming included) have developed cash poker platforms specifically for mobile devices and are, consequently, receiving a lot of interest from most of the big poker brands and networks that are all actively looking at sharing the liquidity between web and mobile poker players. If the market is indeed now ready for mobile, how do you build liquidity? Well, you could start a mobile brand from scratch but that’s very risky and expensive, especially in these risk averse times. Without going into specific details, the direct-to-market approach has already been unsuccessfully attempted by private equity backed (WPT Ventures and Bessemer Ventures) Cecure Gaming, which recently went into administration and has now been purchased by PokerStars. I believe that the easiest and least risky way is to partner and piggy back with poker networks and gambling operators. You allow web to web gaming, web to mobile and mobile to mobile. You also make sure that the application and platform has been built to cope with the mobile disconnection issue. In other words, if a mobile player is having

“The runaway success of games and content on the iPhone’s ‘App Store’ proves that there is now a mass market mobile audience for entertaining games.” a connection issue then you MUST make all other players at the table aware of that. Give him or her 15 or 20 seconds to make his or her move and if no move, then treat the lack of response or disconnection as a fold. Moreover, the disconnection option can be modified to allow different outcomes… it doesn’t have to be an automatic fold. Whilst I agree that the disconnection problem will reduce the attractiveness of the mobile poker product to players, especially those who play larger blinds, I do not see it as a major factor in affecting the attractiveness of the product for players who play micro, small and medium blinds.

scope of opportunity There are two examples here. The first is that Zynga sources reported that the company’s revenue was coming in at an annual rate of over $200 million. The second is that another big social gaming company, Playfish, was acquired

by Electronic Arts (ERTS.O) for $275 million. Now those numbers would get anyone’s attention. Before the Internet, where did all current online poker players play poker? Most of them didn’t. It’s the fact that new technology allowed them to play from the comfort of their own homes that created the demand. Mobile allows that, and more. The advantage of mobile is the ‘whenever and wherever’ capability, as long as you can get a reliable network signal. Think back ten years and consider the shift in technology that’s now available to us in terms of just placing a wager on any type of gaming and gambling. The ideas haven’t changed; rather, the technology has finally caught up with the idea. Did the retail divisions of traditional gambling companies of the 1990s think that the Internet would come along and dwarf what was happening in betting shops and casinos across the land? The answer

is no. They didn’t see it coming and most of them got caught cold with the whole Internet bubble. When you think back to those days and look at the obstacles that the early Internet gambling companies had to overcome – everyone had 56k modem Internet connections to contend with, consumers had to get access to a floppy disc that you picked up at the bookies or you got sent through the post. Then trying to install and run the floppy disc on your PC and play using that 56k modem… it is astounding how far we have come in a decade! My New Year’s resolution in 2010 will be more mobile and social media. Patrick Mckay is Founder and cEO, GoBetya Gaming Limited and is the main shareholder within the business. Patrick has in-depth mobile gaming and technical gambling experience and has been instrumental in the design and functionality of the entire platform. Patrick was also named Scotland young Businessmen of the year in 2003-2004 for his first business which was sold before starting GoBetya. contact: info@gobetya.com

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

INTERVIEW

2010 – THE YEAR OF THE CAT? iGB Affiliate kicks off the New Year by speaking to the man behind the CAP user name: Cat.

Firstly, how long have you been an affiliate and what got you started? I have been an affiliate since 2001. The prospect of creating and developing websites in the manner of my choosing was one of the main reasons behind my entrance to affiliate marketing. Naturally, tied in with this was the opportunity to promote the products that I am interested in, so it was a double edged sword. Did you start in gaming or did you progress from another sector? I began promoting core webmaster products such as hosting and software and then, in 2002, I came across a casino affiliate program. The idea of getting a percentage of players’ losses attracted me a lot. So I joined and in the years after, the majority of my time was spent promoting online casinos – I hardly did anything else! What product verticals do you work with and which one would you say was the most rewarding to promote? I predominantly work with online casinos – they are the most rewarding for me. Over the past few years I have joined around 20 programs but nowadays, I focus my time on the handful that have proved the best in terms of conversions. Many affiliates claim that to be an affiliate is the finest job in the world… do you subscribe to this notion? For me, being an affiliate is the best I can do and I really enjoy my job. I enjoy the freedom of working with who I want to. The role of an affiliate (both within the gaming industry and generally) has changed – what would you say are the prime differences between how an affiliate operated in the early days of the gaming industry and the practices of today’s successful gaming affiliate? In truth, I haven’t seen many changes over

the years. It’s still about quality content, on and off-page SEO. One thing that has happened is that the sources from where one can harvest links have increased. Also, the Web 2.0 sites didn’t really exist in the early 2000s, so there are differences but much has remained the same. How important is a sense of community for affiliates, considering that the job can at times be a very individual pursuit? Are conferences and forums as popular and necessary as ever? Forums were, are and will continue to be a very helpful tool for affiliates and those involved in the pursuits of Internet marketing. They provide a vital resource for those webmasters seeking help, and those webmasters seeking to provide help for others. In terms of conferences, I enjoy attending them to deepen business relationships and to start new ones. Besides, they are a lot of fun and it’s good to talk to other webmasters about business and, indeed, to party with them afterwards. 2010 marks the start of a new decade and has prompted many to look forward to the anticipated progression of the industry. What do you see changing over the coming years with regards to how affiliates (specifically gaming affiliates) do business, their relationships with their AMs and each other, and their importance to the growth of the wider industries in which they are prevalent? Affiliates will continue to play a very important role in affiliate and Internet marketing. Because online gambling is already regulated in many countries the amount of webmasters joining programs will definitely increase. I am looking forward to a clear legalisation and regulation of online gambling and its advertising on an international scale. This will be for the good of us all.

THE MAN BEHIND THE USER NAME… Who is “Cat”? He is an open and friendly person who can get along with almost everybody. Being successful in my job is very important to me but I never forget that life isn’t just about working and money. Favourite holiday destination Maybe the area around Munich where I was born and raised. I’ve never been to a Caribbean island with white sandy beaches, turquoise water and colourful fish, but I definitely aim to spend a holiday on such an island, someday. Favourite film Rocky Hobbies Working out, billiards, poker and going out. Desert island disc Best of Madonna What animal are you? I am an animal. I am a lion. Fondest memory from your youth Playing soccer with friends and for my club, and all the house and youth centre parties.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

interview

2010 – Slots to Look Forward to… iGB Affiliate looks ahead to the new decade in the company of Henrik Granlund, Founder of Pafpartners.com. Henrik, give us some background on your history within the gaming industry. I have been in the gaming industry since 2006, and basically started right after I received my marketing degree from university. I used to play poker during my time at university which later got me interested in the gaming industry. I was initially based in Gibraltar for nearly two years, but have now relocated back to Sweden where I have created Paf.com’s first partner program, Pafpartners.com The AM is a specialised role but what would you say were the most important attributes an affiliate manager should possess, particularly where it concerns the gaming industry? Even though the AM role in the gaming industry is specialised as you say, I still think the core attributes that make a successful AM are the same that make any thriving entrepreneur successful. You need to be flexible, think outside the box and have a constant communication with your affiliates and also with the affiliate community at large. To become a successful AM you need to be able to work well within a team – a team that consists of external parities (affiliates) and internal ones (Country Organizations, Graphic Departments and Customer Support to mention a few). How has the AM’s role changed as the gaming industry has matured? Affiliate marketing as a whole has moved from an experimental marketing niche to an accepted standalone marketing option. In today’s business, there are companies that run their entire customer recruitment through affiliate and partner collaborations. This has put more pressure on affiliate managers, but has also given them a more central and important role within their organisations. At Pafpartners.com we are a part of an extensive marketing organisation that focuses on offering solutions for our affiliates in our key markets which are Scandinavia and Spain, with more countries to come. What this means for an AM at Pafpartners.com is that they need to work

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

closely with the different team members. Another aspect to consider is that affiliate marketing is also used for market entry in countries where the organisation has had no prior foothold. Then, the AM has to help analyze the market and come up with creative ideas on how to make an impact. What is the most rewarding aspect of your job? I like to see a business grow, and to handle relations. Since launching Pafpartners.com in August/September of 2009 it has been a thrill to see how it has been accepted by the affiliate community and has also given me the chance of explaining the uniqueness of who we are. There is a great community feeling that I believe is unique and that we really have to build on. Just think of the ‘non working’ gatherings where both affiliates and AMs meet up to talk about everything that is not work related – these meetings builds true friendships, even if you are not working together. Not many jobs that can offer that! What aspects of affiliate management, be it process or other, do you think could be improved to make the role easier/more effective? I think we need to find a different focus and take a larger responsibility in the whole process. The focus today is to attract as many signups as possible and then let the CRM team handle the conversion. I think that the affiliate team should be able to focus more on converting the signups to depositing and regular playing members. As mentioned earlier, a team focus, with the help from the affiliate can create better and more effective campaigns to convert signups to deposits and to keep depositing players happy with our services. The goal is to offer a fun and enjoyable place for the player to entertain themselves together with friends. What about the role of the affiliate – what could be improved from their side of wthe relationship? I think it is important for affiliates to get in contact with us and let us know what

“I still see casino being the main product for any affiliate to promote if they want to see big numbers.” they have done and to date, that has proved successful. It is impossible for an AM to know every affiliate’s player base or where they get their traffic from. I know one of our affiliates that shared his keyword rankings, and how many visits they got on each one, and we adapted our marketing efforts to suit what the visitors searched for. We ended up with amazing results. So in short – better communication and feedback from the affiliates. What product verticals do you see affiliates having the most success with in the coming months? In the coming months I still see casino, especially slots, being the main product for any affiliate to promote if they want to see big numbers. With the big suppliers such as NetEnt releasing new games at a rapid pace and exclusive slots being made in-house (by Paf for instance), it will still be the number one product in the near future. Also with new and better features around slot tournaments and the huge progressive jackpots that are out there to promote, slots is the way to go. As we enter a new decade – is the industry set fair for further growth with the prospect of regulation in Europe and possibly the US? Working for a governmentally controlled company myself, I strongly believe that regulation will only help us all to be able to offer a solid product for the end user. If we can offer better products within an environment the customers feel safe in, it will absolutely boost growth. So no matter if it is in Europe or the US, a fair and regulated market will benefit both the operators and players.

The Show The InduSTry ASked For

PRAGUE

2,000+ Delegates from CEO’s to Affiliates Conference tracks ranging from marketing to business strategy Invite only roundtable for tier one operators and suppliers with heads of regulations from Europe and America Two distinct zones for iGaming Business and iGB Affiliate Free entry for all delegates Networking that doesn’t stop when the confernce closes

PRAGUE – JUNE 10th-13th 2010 www.iGamingSuperShow.com supershow_A4.indd 1

9/12/09 12:44:27

interview

Search Giants Catch Twitter-Bug First it was Microsoft, then Google. Both search giants have signed deals with ‘micro blogging’ phenomenon Twitter to mine its vast repository of data for their own use. iGB Affiliate speaks to Adam Bunn, Head of SEO at Greenlight, on what impact will this have on sites in the gaming sector. What is the attraction of Twitter for Google and Microsoft? The terms of the deal aren’t known, but it probably represents the first time Twitter has managed to leverage its 5.1 million (approx) strong user base as a major source of income. This has proved a stumbling block for other social media favourites such as YouTube and Facebook, but by acting as a single gathering point for the type of information that search engines can’t typically get at, Twitter has made itself extremely attractive to Google and Microsoft. Search engines exist in part to satisfy a need for what might be termed ‘static’ search; informational or transactional searches where the user isn’t particularly looking for breaking news but merely something useful. On the other hand, time sensitive searches can sometimes dwarf these every day searches. For example, in the 25 minutes following the reported death of Michael Jackson in June, so great was the surge in searches for news of the singer that Google interpreted the spike as a denial of service attack. The search for the ability to respond usefully to users looking for more or less real-time information in this way has been part of the search engines’ raison d’être ever since the early 2000s when they were barely able to maintain monthly updates to their indexes (the pool of data from which search results are drawn). Past answers to this problem have included the introduction of news and blog search results, and modifying their algorithms to allow some brand new content a short term ranking boost (popularly known as QDF for ‘query deserves freshness’) – but these have been half measures at best. With news and blog results being drawn from a wide range of disparate sources it’s difficult for search engines to get a consensus opinion of what’s really newsworthy, and despite the speed with which many bloggers and news

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

“In essence, Twitter brings search engines as close to ‘real-time’ search as they’ve ever been able to get.” websites can publish new content, it’s not always fast enough. Twitter suffers neither of these drawbacks, essentially bringing millions of bloggers under one roof where a news story can be picked up and ‘retweeted’ thousands of times within a matter of minutes. In essence, Twitter brings search engines as close to ‘real-time’ search as they’ve ever been able to get. Is this the main selling point for these brands? There’s another facet to this, and that’s what search engines can infer about the popularity and usefulness of other websites by looking at the frequency with which they are mentioned in Twitter tweets – information that has until now been off limits to them. This is a new spin on the old idea of link citation analysis, some variation of which forms an important part of all modern search engine algorithms, the idea being that a link is treated as a vote in favour of the site it points to. The problem with using links in this way is that as time goes on, many of the types of links search engines used to rely on have become subverted by companies looking to manipulate search results in their favour. This has left search engines fighting a constant rearguard battle in an attempt to ignore manipulative links while concealing which factors they really take into account. So, any new source of information about what real users like will be a welcome weapon in search engine arsenals. But will the same thing happen to Twitter now it’s open to search engines? Only time will tell, but one thing is for certain: with the increased exposure that Twitter itself will receive from Bing and Google, and the intriguing possibility

that Twitter users could wind up directly influencing the search results, Twitter is looking like a much more attractive proposition for online marketers. What is the impact for gaming operators? Gaming websites are in a good position to capitalise on this move by the major search engines. For many industries, the growing importance of social media online is a problem because they simply don’t have an interesting or compelling offering that people want to discuss, or that lends itself to creative, newsworthy ideas that will have legs with Twitter and Facebook users. Not so with gaming, where sports and casino games represent a virtually bottomless well of ideas for leveraging the huge user bases these sites have. For example, one Facebook Texas Hold’em application (created by social gaming company Zynga) has almost 19.8 million active monthly users and 4.8 million fans. Lottery games and slots have proved incredibly popular too, regularly featuring in lists of top Facebook applications. Meanwhile, Twitter is the perfect forum for blow by blow accounts of sports matches, through so called ‘live blogging’. Of course, simply signing up to Twitter and Facebook is not sufficient. The key to success with any social media platform is being able to invest a significant amount of time into actively maintaining the account, contributing meaningfully to the community and, therefore, encouraging interaction with your social network. The idea is to build up a reputation as a trusted member of the community with an active history so that when you do need to promote yourself people are more ready to listen to what you’ve got to say and contribute to the ensuing discussion.

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Feature - Traditional Gaming Products

SPORTSBETTING

This issue we explore the landscape for each of the traditional gaming products as we enter a new decade and try to ascertain which holds the most potential for affiliates in the short to mid-term. We start with the vertical arguably in the sharpest ascendency, sportsbetting. If the last few years of the ‘Noughties’ saw sportsbook’s market leaders shifting their focus towards the cutting edge technologies of in-play betting and live streaming, the first few years of this decade should see affiliates reap the rewards. Since online sportsbetting first evolved, betting affiliates have never received the same levels of respect and support as their poker and casino counterparts. However, this should all be about to change. As businesses look to diversify, adding a sportsbook to their product suite is an ever appealing option. Affiliates find themselves in precisely the same position. Opportunities in the casino space are becoming far more competitive and we’ve all heard more than enough poker affiliates state the claim that “there’s no money in poker anymore”. Whether you agree with the latter, what is certain is that extending sideways by adding a sportsbook, is certainly more appealing to businesses on both sides of the fence. Whilst the likes of the operator Mangas and the affiliate PokerListings are striving down the acquisition route, it simply isn’t an option for most operators and affiliates at the moment. This has led to an increased focus and success of the white label solution, such as those offered by the B2B arms of 888, Bwin, Paddy Power and PartyGaming, as well as the rapid emergence of specialist sportsbetting solutions available through the likes of OddsMatrix. Affiliates are doing precisely the same thing. They are seeing the need to not only diversify, but to lower costs in the short to medium term as they fight for space in ever competitive markets. It is no secret that the acquisition cost of a sports bettor is significantly lower than that of acquiring a casino or, even still, a poker player.

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

Traditionally, sportsbetting-centric operators have been reluctant to share lifetime rewards of their cross promotion strategies, but with the growing international success of fair, cross product paying, sportsbettingfocused affiliate programs, such as bet365, Victor Chandler, Stan James and Ladbrokes, this landscape is changing. This means the affiliate is being rewarded, over the lifetime of a player with a brand, across the entire product suite. In essence, lower acquisition costs for increased returns and this means the rise of sportsbetting as a viable affiliate marketing channel. This has taken a while to come to fruition. Sportsbetting affiliates have long been viewed with suspicion by many bookmakers and betting groups, particularly those whose margins are tightened by high overheads and unreliable trading patterns. This is largely due to the large amount of quality information affiliates can provide players via odds comparison feeds, quality content or tipster forums, pushing such margins to the brink. Poker rooms and casinos have nearly always welcomed the education of players and affiliates in those arenas have reaped the rewards. Sportsbetting is not ready for a PokerStrategy.com-type model just yet, but there are a number of projects on the horizon that seek to bridge the ‘education Vs margin’ conundrum. Tipster forums have long been havens for groups of serious ‘bookie breakers’ and survived on a fragile equilibrium between bookmaker and affiliate. Now, some highly innovative groups of affiliates are looking to take on social media and take a tipster-like conversational model from a finely-tuned group of professional bettors to the masses, and this should massively appeal to the bookmaker concerned about his margins.

Bingo has grown hugely on the back of its social connotations in a past life, but the next few years should see betting become the first mainstream online gaming channel to conquer the social network and monetize it effectively. As an event driven hobby, betting is far more contextual and naturally reaches out to more people than any other form of gaming, with the result of one person’s bet carrying significant importance, albeit more in an emotional sense than anything else, to many others in his or her network of friends. People brag about winning far more and bemoan a loss on a far greater scale than a poker player on the end of a bad beat and nowadays, their first habitual venue for a brag or a whinge will be via a social network, where they will not always be met with an appropriate congratulation or commiseration. It’s the responsibility of the affiliate of the 2010s to monetize sportsbetting’s emotional drivers and social networks are where affiliates such as Flutr.co.uk seek to tap into people’s unerring passion for sport and entertainment. With the FIFA World Cup 2010, the largest ever betting event approaching in June this year, now is the time for sportsbetting affiliates to take the lead in cracking social media.

Tom Galanis is a Director at GameOn Affiliates, a specialist iGaming affiliate management agency. GameOn Affiliates works alongside clients and affiliates to develop new or emerging products and markets. Previously, Tom was Marketing Manager at bet365 and managed the affiliate program at Victor Chandler. To find out more, visit www.GameOnAffiliates.com, or you can reach Tom at tom@gameon-affiliates.com or on +44 (0)7805 638742.

POKER

To get the lowdown on the online poker environment, iGB Affiliate sat down with Bluff Europe Magazine Editor, Philip Conneller, for his thoughts on why the poker plateau is a myth. What would you say to those who claim that online poker has hit a plateau and is currently in stasis? Well I would point to the fact that the online poker industry grew by 30% in 2009. Ever since the poker boom people have been saying that poker will plateau or fall into decline, but it hasn’t – it’s a myth. You just need to look at the seven million real money players worldwide. So where has this myth syndrome come from? Good question. I guess people assume that it’s a fad and good things come to an end. Could it have something to do with the sharpness of its initial boom? I’m not an economist, but I guess people assumed that the recession would damage poker, but it hasn’t. It’s recession proof, much like the movie industry. Isn’t the term “recession proof” a myth? Has poker been completely unaffected? Well, like I say, online poker grew 30% (according to PokerTableRatings.com) in 2009, so if those figures are accurate, then yes… it has been unaffected… online poker, at least. What about poker in terms of development? Bingo, casino (live dealer gaming) and sports (in-play) are all in a phase of development technically – what about poker? Does it need the same technical adaptations as these other pursuits? I don’t think so necessarily, the beauty of online poker is that it’s pretty simple: deal cards, flop, turn and river and everyone’s happy. Companies like PKR are doing groundbreaking stuff technology-wise, and it’s great that people have the choice to play in 3D interactive environments, but most people are just happy to see that flop come out as quickly as possible.

Having said that, online poker companies are still looking at new ways to attract people to the game – and that means innovating... for example, ‘Rush’ poker has just launched on Full Tilt, which I guess you could call a technological development. Does that also involve offering poker players more action – such as side games (casino) etc? Well, Rush poker is a good example here, because it’s essentially doing just that – people are seeing more cards and not having to wait their turn to play; increasing the action. I don’t know if casino games are so important – I think poker players are concerned with liquidity and the amount of games on offer, that’s why the big sites are doing well and getting even bigger because they have more players, they can offer more action and also a wider variety of games – sit-n-go’s, tournaments, etc. It’s a snowball thing. So poker players are still only interested in poker predominantly? There was another train of thought that suggested their heads are being turned by casino, skill games and sportsbetting... I’m sure they are to an extent. I haven’t seen any figures on that. I know a lot of people who are interested in poker, and no other gambling game, because of the skill and strategy factor and they feel they can muscle their own edge as opposed to giving it up to the house. I also know a lot of players who play poker because they just love to gamble and would be happy to gamble on anything. It would be interesting to know the stats, but I suspect the latter category form the majority. So, in your opinion, for affiliates working in the poker field, would your advice be “don’t believe the ‘truth’”, so to speak, that

poker is actually in rude health in terms of promoting it to new players? Yes, absolutely, at least in the sense that more people are playing than ever before, although the landscape seems to be that the big sites are getting bigger, and we may start to see smaller sites merging to compete, so while the market grows, it thins, paradoxically. What are your thoughts on the newer entrants to the market, such as SEGA (segapoker.com)? I suppose their brand helps them being such a late entrant? Yes, I’m sure they’ll be OK; it’s the smaller companies that will find it tough. With the poker boom we saw an explosion of poker sites – people thought it was a gold rush, a license to print money, but many of those sites no longer exist. Is the poker player loyal to his sites? Does the keen poker player (and therefore regular depositor) stay at his selection of top sites (PokerStars, Full Tilt) or does he shop around? Yes, I think he is. He may shop around for bonuses from time to time, play the occasional freeroll, but ultimately he’s a creature of habit. Any final thoughts for the year ahead? Just that the online poker space shouldn’t be regarded as being in stasis – if you look at the statistics, it is still a gaming product (as you’d call it) experiencing significant growth and it’s certainly an area where affiliates already in the space, or those looking to enter, can take advantage.

PhiliP Conneller is editor of Bluff europe, europe’s leading poker magazine.

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

Feature - traditional GaminG Products

BINGO In order to dIscuss the possible

future of online bingo it’s necessary to acknowledge what has been accomplished to date. So far, bingo has unquestionably proved to be a profitable and solid business venture for affiliates. Due to the rising number of bingo sites being launched onto the Internet, competition has skyrocketed and thus, each bingo site is racing to outdo the next. This leads each operator to improve their standards, offer bigger and better promotions and make themselves more appealing to potential players. In today’s market, you can find sites like BingoHall. com, for example, that has, in the past ten years, accumulated over a million members. The popularity and density of a site’s membership usually has a positive chain reaction; online casino and bingo players will be more likely to sign up at a site which already has a large member community and reputation. For affiliates, this has been a booming business opportunity; those affiliates that take advantage of casino traffic and maximize this while also promoting bingo, will soon recognize that bingo revenue is highly competitive to that generated in casino, and is in fact directly associated because bingo players love to play slots and other casino games. Once affiliates recognize this prospect, it is only a matter of adequately identifying and selecting the best bingo site to promote, and their revenue will grow remarkably.

side Games The fact that good bingo sites also incorporate casino through their side games presents an extra promotional platform for affiliates which is currently accounting for a significant amount of action and revenue at many leading bingo sites. The key factor to understand here is that when an affiliate promotes a bingo site, she/he is effectively cross promoting casino games as well. Affiliates face the challenge of finding the most reputable, lucrative and innovative bingo sites to partner with and finding a respectable affiliate program is only part of the equation; the bingo site chosen to

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

promote will directly affect earnings made. The attraction of bingo sites is largely their clientele; the longer the bingo site is live the more player membership it shall have. It’s crucial to have an effective bingo orientated retention team to take care of players, making sure they feel secure at the site, that their opinions matter and most importantly, that they are consistently amused and entertained in refreshing ways. Bingo players are actively part of a community, and they often play with their family and friends. This makes them very loyal customers of their preferred site and so affiliates can also rest assured that once their players are part of a reputable bingo site, their earnings will continue to increase over the years.

the Future So what more could happen with bingo to enhance this already well-oiled machine? Well, within the industry there has been speculation and talk of technological innovations in online bingo and casino sites such as a virtual reality game in which players will be wearing headsets and playing as if the game were actually going on in front of them. There is also buzz about organized inter-site tournaments and international championships which would most certainly bring online bingo sites into a whole new level; and although these are new ideas being thrown around with many details needing to be fine-tuned before they could come into effect, the economic potential they would have on the bingo sites themselves and thus, their affiliates, would be considerable. However, taking these possible future opportunities into perspective does leave one thing clear: that there remains a whole un-explored world of possibilities for bingo and their respective affiliates and at the stunning rate activity and revenues have escalated so far, we can only expect greater things to come.

scope for growth As bingo sites expand their horizons and general public outreach, they will be able to sustain larger player communities; this

means that there will always be room for their affiliates to bring in more and more players. By working together, bingo sites and affiliates can maximize their profits. It is possible for a bingo site to maintain an acceptable, steady revenue without the aid of affiliation, however, there is unquestionable evidence that a solid partnership with an affiliate can increase this revenue emphatically, and without neglecting to observe that an affiliate’s commission is valid for the entire lifetime of a bingo player as is the case with most affiliate programs. Nowadays, affiliates play a significant role in the reviews and reputation a bingo site has and as a result, bingo sites will always be looking for improved ways to market themselves to affiliates who in turn will constantly be on the lookout for bingo sites that are always moving forward in terms of service and technology. The future may not be entirely written in stone, but 2010 looks promising – the only direction to go is forward. Perhaps we will see bingo sites taking baby steps at first, offering a more varied selection of casino games, integrating roulette, blackjack and craps into their game itineraries. Perhaps we will be seeing larger scale advances mentioned earlier such as World Series Championships. There is also a new trend of live bingo emerging in the industry, and although it has yet to be fully recognized and player preference determined, innovative options such as enabling players to access bingo from their mobile phones are giant steps in progressive development for bingo. Escalating trends such as these will hopefully take online bingo to a new level for 2010, and although the profitability for affiliates may already be evident, the full potential of this is expected to improve dramatically. Malci is affiliates and Marketing Director at Revenue Giants. Malci@revenuegiants. com, www.revenuegiants.com.

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FEATURE - TRADITIONAL GAMING PRODUCTS

CASINO “Live casino will most likely be the next big thing for our industry as it is becomes more advanced and operators become more experienced in its delivery.”

What are your thoughts on the health of the wider online casino sector as we enter a new decade? Casino will be the number one product for us going into 2010, both live dealer and traditional RNG casino. Compared to poker, the margins are higher both for operators and affiliates whilst retention is much easier. On the product side, we can expect to see bigger games with much more advanced graphics than we experience today which will no doubt attract a wider audience. We have seen the industry undergo a rapid evolution in just a couple of years, and I think the rate of advancement will continue to impress us all in the coming years. The technology will continue to evolve becoming more refined and inventive – suppliers from the software industry have learnt what actually interests the players and what makes them come back time and again. As a result, on the product side, we can expect a lot of new experiences, features and tools. We also believe that the audience will expand as Internet usage becomes more widely adopted in emerging markets in tandem with the launch of bigger and graphically advanced games. On the other hand, I think there will be a much tougher competitive challenge that will demand us to be one step ahead of other operators, suppliers and affiliate programs. The next couple of years represents a key growth period for the online casino sector

as the adoption of live gaming becomes more prevalent – your thoughts on this notion. We totally agree; live casino will most likely be the next big thing for our industry as it is becoming more and more advanced and operators are becoming more experienced in its delivery – we are really excited to be on that train as it’s leaving the station. We are among the very first Nordic operators to launch this game category and we are also investing heavily in marketing to drive awareness for this product. The feeling of playing against a real dealer in this interactive visual experience tied in with the ability to chat with the live dealer is a new experience that personalises and captures the social elements of visiting a physical casino. Is live dealer gaming the future for the casino product? Yes – together with increased broadband penetration in emerging markets, live casino is among the most (if not the most) important driving forces for online casinos for the years to come. What new opportunities will befall affiliates operating in this space? We think that the affiliates that understand the potential of live casino and its growth will have a huge first mover advantage since no one is really doing anything in this space at the moment. And we also know that players are looking for something new to play having become tired of the same games

being offered by the same suppliers. Live games can attract a whole new audience. Can the casino affiliate of the future realistically function without promoting live gaming products?’ Yes, absolutely. There is still growth in the traditional RNG segment and particularly with new 3D style games. However, live casino is definitely a new revenue stream that will be a good addition for any casino affiliate out there. Why is now a good time to become a casino affiliate if you aren’t already? New games such as live casino will broaden the target group, opening it up for new players who, perhaps, are used to a live environment but are not yet comfortable online. This gives a great opportunity to enter this high margin segment within the online gaming world.

ANNA SOFIA is Director of Affiliate Sales at Redbet Affiliates. She has been working in the online gaming affiliate industry since 2006, starting at Betsson.com as Affiliate Sales Manager. Anna Sofia has a University degree in Marketing and Sales and also had an earlier carrier as a Sales Officer in Private Banking before moving to Redbet to build up the affiliate program. Redbet was founded in 2004 by a group of entrepreneurs and players and today offers casino, live casino, poker and betting on Redbet.com.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

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INSIGHT

DEVELOPING PAN-CONTINENT GAMES INTO SUCCESSFUL LOCALIZED PRODUCTS

THE MOMENT I SAW the James Bond movie, Casino Royale in 2006, I had a gut feeling that Texas Hold’em would become the next big gambling talking point in Asia. Co-incidentally, or not, the embryo of the poker boom in Asia began in 2007 and 2008; casinos like Grand Lisboa, Star World and Grand Waldo had been introducing poker tables to the gaming ﬂoor. They started small with one or two tables, however, by late 2009 these small first steps have mushroomed to over 100 poker tables in Macau’s land based casinos. Why is poker becoming more popular in land based casino, and how does it impact online developers and operators? First, let’s dissect the game itself and see why it is a skill game suitable for Asian players: 1. It is a fair, simple game, with strategy integral to decision making. Unlike baccarat players, poker players relish the opportunity to win big money where strategic decision making is involved. Historically, we have found that these two types of players do not mix, but the number of Asian poker players is growing at a rapid pace. 2. As more leisure gamblers are converted into poker players by exposure to the game through distribution channels like poker on Facebook, ChinaGame and OurGame, the old barrier to entry, liquidity, is becoming less of an issue for operations

like Play for Fun Poker network. Conversion between fun and cash player is yet to catch fire but it is only a matter of time before it ﬂourishes. 3. Collusion management is easy to handle, unless you are in a tournament where it would be hard to gang up on individual players. The beauty of cash poker is that you can always stand up and leave the table when you feel unlucky, unlike mahjong, where you might be stuck at the table for another four to sixteen hands. 4. If the pot is big enough, players are easily tempted to play (at land based poker tables). 5. Currently, we are not seeing any poker network with a large number of Asian players, although poker software is now available in Chinese languages. These are not insurmountable barriers to overcome, as poker players are normally in a socio group with a higher educational background, plus, there are only four or five keyboard stokes to remember to be able to play the game online, which means even non-English readers can learn how to play effectively within a few hands. 6. The game itself is very compulsive and players can play for hours whilst maintaining full concentration, especially when playing in a physical event. It is quite unlikely you will leave the event halfway through – a player will either leave the table empty handed or with a large portion of the pool.

Whilst the game itself is ready to be dealt, which operators are likely to take the ﬁrst mover advantage in Asia? Companies like PokerStars and Asian Logic are among the first operators to bring poker games to Asian players, both online and to land based casinos. The PokerStars’ Macau Poker Room was launched in 2008 with the Asia Pacific Poker Tour (APPT). As a Macau citizen, I have not seen a great deal of promotion revolving around this event but it attracted 429 poker players from around the world and the prize pool for the third season has reached USD$2million. So, slowly, we began to hear voices from China talking about this game called poker and they began to show some interest in it. In gambling, money always talks! As for Asian Logic, its poker room was located at Star World Hotel, which was recently taken over by Suncity Group. With a movie produced especially to promote this poker room and its software, clearly, Suncity Group is committed and determined to make poker work in Asia. Effective marketing remains very important to poker’s success. If poker operators are ready, the opportunity for growth is here in Asia. We are beginning to see that the success strategies used in the West are taking hold in Asia and delivering results.

iGB Affiliate FebrUArY/mArcH 2010

INSIGHT

Selling Point The marketing strategy on growing the popularity of poker in Asia is, first, to grow the ‘Play for Fun’ platform for players to practice and build confidence levels in the game and where players can play a range of stakes from small to large and also compete in tournament play. The effective education of the poker player is always the key to building scale in the product. The credibility of the game is being forged by poker’s inclusion and headlining in media such as movies, TV shows, celebrity lifestyles, land-based promotion events and online networks, encouraging fun play among friends. Thanks to the likes of Facebook, poker ●● has become a game people will play with friends after work. Another successful distribution channel ●● is TV. In Taiwan, the ‘Dong Fung TV Channel’ works with All_in_Club, broadcasting poker tournaments and inviting celebrities to play poker on TV. Themed cinema with movies produced ●● especially for poker such as ‘Poker King’. Suncity Group has produced a Chinese poker movie which aims to promote the game within Chinese society and I was lucky enough to be invited to watch the premiere. It is somehow stunning to me that Chinese people see a gaming product differently after it is pushed by mass media so unsinfully. Viewers will just take it as a social gathering activity and that it no longer is a gambling event. Poker is becoming so accepted that you can find poker tables in a corner of a Hong Kong snooker club (play for fun of course). This strategy of ‘social activity’ has made the affiliate’s life a lot easier; now, affiliates can just send his link to friends and invite them to play together, unlike sportsbetting, casino or bet-exchange, the action of referral is a lot more welcoming, as you are being asked to join a fun, hip gathering. Will Texas Hold’em ever become a mainstream game in mainland China? We will answer that question later. However, let’s take a look at the situation of poker in China and how it has developed so far.

Poker in China There is a popular saying that poker was invented in Tang Dynasty China some 1,300 years ago. While the claims are debatable, there is no dispute that the country has the largest population of card players in the world. ‘Poker’ in Chinese,

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

in general, refers to any card game that is played with one or more decks of modern day poker cards. By far, the most popular ‘poker’ game in China today is none but ‘Doudizhu’ (aka Fight The Landlord) – a three-player card game whereby two of the players will pose as ‘peasants’ and team up against the single supposed ‘landlord’. Arguably every other Chinese person knows how to play the game and on QQ-games, the country’s largest online casual game platform, Doudizhu draws a jaw-dropping following of 1.5 million concurrent players on average. However, ‘Traktor Poker’, the distant second to ‘Doudizhu’, is, so far, the only poker card game other than bridge that is sanctioned by the National Sports Bureau. In October 2007, World Poker Tour Enterprise reached a breakthrough by partnering with the China Leisure Sports Administrative Council (CLSAC) under the National Sports Bureau to run the first-ever televised poker tournament in China – The National Traktor Poker Championships – in 15 Chinese cities. The total prize pool of 640,000 Chinese Yuan in cash was also the highest collective prize money ever given out in a Chinese poker event. All of this seems to indicate that China has all the right elements for a new form of wave-making, glamorous poker variant from the West to grow and blossom. The question that remains is “when it will happen?” Texas Hold’em first made its way into China when Ongame Network (now part of Bwin Group) launched the world’s first Chinese language portal in June 2005 – the “eCardroom”. Next out of the blocks was Ongame’s then revolutionary Texas Hold’em mobile game in Chinese in September of the same year. For a short while, Ongame did create a niche market of players in China but somehow, the ripples did not go on to make waves and the noise soon died down. The brave and gung-ho PokerStars could have led a Western contingent of gaming giants into Asia by bringing the APPT to Macau in 2008. Whilst eyeballs were drawn to the Special Administrative Region, the noise APPT made failed to reach the mainland in many ways. During this period, efforts to penetrate the China market by foreign poker brands with translated versions appeared nothing more than futile. Texas Hold’em, though naturally slowly gaining popularity in the country, remained a house game to be enjoyed by the expats and overseas-returning students in privacy.

It was not until early 2009 when a completely local version of the online game brought new hope for Texas Hold’em to the world’s largest poker market. Boyaa Interactive, a young Shenzhen-based casual-game developer decided to roll out its fully local-developed Texas Hold’em game on local social-network communities, Xiaonet.com (the quasi-equivalent of Facebook in China) and Kaixin.com. The liquidity of the two sites brought about an almost instant following of the game, and until today, Boyaa’s completely Chinese-focused, newbie-friendly platform had cultivated a loyal base of 100,000 concurrent Hold’em players online. Whether this population of casual online players will eventually convert to play for cash or appear at the tables in Macau remains unknown. The harsh reality, nevertheless, is that it will take some time yet before Texas Hold’em can walk out of the closet and become sanctioned land-based tournaments in Mainland China. The key element of the game, which involves betting and wagering, is still a big ‘no-no’ for the public, which means that Texas Hold’em will still be an eye-sore to the government. Pushing too hard too quickly will only cause the attempt to backfire and force the government into taking more drastic actions to crack down on the game. Operators will just have to be patient as the country slowly accepts that there is a difference between skill-games and hardcore gambling. Educating the market in the right direction and creating the right image for the game will only help the market grow healthily, and we can be certain that the natural appeal of Texas Hold’em will one day take China by storm… sooner or later.

Celia Ho is Sales and Marketing Director at Entertasia Technology Company. Through her deep understanding and knowledge of the cultural requirements of the Asian markets, Celia is now the Sales and Marketing Director and a Senior Management Executive at Entertasia Technology, part of the MACOM Group. Focused on a global perspective she has become a respected and a highly valued expert in the online gaming, leisure and entertainment space. A Graduate from Gold Smith College, University of London 1999, her early career was in Graphic Design working in both London and Hong Kong. Linguistic skills include Cantonese, Mandarin and English.

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INSIGHT

IMPROVING LOYALTY AND ROI IN THE CURRENT ECONOMIC CLIMATE Certain economic indicators such as the GDP growth and inflationary pressure (as reported by the International Monetary Fund – World Economic Outlook Report October 2009) are showing mild signs of economic recovery for this year. This is very good news for operators in most industries as it could mean that business is set for fairer weather. In the marketing world, however, it means competition is set to increase once again. STATISTICS SHOW THAT affiliate marketing, unlike other channels, gained more popularity during the acute periods of the recession as operators became more aware that paying for performance was one of the more effective ways of justifying marketing spend. This has led affiliates, operators and affiliate marketing solution providers to try to innovate their offerings in such a way that their product/service gained more attention as competition for visibility became more acute. The question now is, “What do operators and affiliates have to do to keep ahead of the curve?” First of all, operators and affiliates should recognise that it is the strength of their customer base, and their relationship with their key partners that provide the foundation for sustained, profitable growth. Therefore, knowing customers well and maximising the lifetime value of their relationships should become the main goal of all involved. They must thus:

1. Choose partners with common target customers By analysing their in-house data, operators should be in a position to determine the identities and key characteristics of their best customers. Operators must then make sure that when they recruit affiliates they are screening them correctly and that those chosen are the ones best suited to recruit the customers that the operators wish to target. This will ensure that the correct target audience is being reached with the right message to increase the conversion ratio. The same applies for affiliates. Affiliates should not adopt a shotgun approach and enrol with every operator in the market just so that they can display as many links as possible on their website. They must focus on the needs of their target audience and only enrol in the affiliate programs of operators they know can service their customers well. Giving space to operators that do not match their target market will reduce the space available for the more-effective operators and might

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

negatively impact on the reputation of the afﬁliate’s site as customers could become unsatisﬁed with the suggested offers.

2. Read the market and try to anticipate it This is crucial in any industry and a case in point is the H1N1 (Swine Flu) pandemic. Companies who anticipated the need for particular hygienic products and developed and marketed antibacterial gels and wipes on time, did wonders. The same applies here, in the recession and early post recession period there are trends that need to be observed and acted on. Currently, customers are still priceconscious and enjoy looking out for offers that give them the satisfaction of saving. The boom in voucher/promotional code affiliates is a proof of this. Operators who read the market well and anticipated this trend made changes to their websites to recognise voucher codes and offered these codes to affiliates. Although some are sceptical about the duration of this trend in the market the truth is that right now, customers like them. Therefore, the question to be asked by operators is not whether or not to offer these codes to the affiliates that ask for them, but rather, how to get the most out of them.

3. Harness new technologies to serve your customers well New technologies that enable operators and afﬁliates to better analyse their customer base are now becoming more widespread. The evolution of the Internet sphere, the rise of Web 2.0 and the concept of connectivity have all created new opportunities for operators and afﬁliates alike. Today, with the development of Web 2.0 platforms it is increasingly possible to identify niche markets (and even small niches), analyse the interests of such target markets and be able to customise offers for them. Nowadays, companies are additionally required to put their human side forward; they need to establish a brand personality that customers can feel connected to.

Blogs are a good example of how a company might speak to its customers. Given that affiliates can have smaller niche markets, they need to actively research and find out where and how members of their target niche are communicating with each another. Affiliates should aim to become a part of their customers’ network, and share their interests. This can be done through the use of Web 2.0 community sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Once the right channel is found, companies can invest in it and use it to further strengthen their brand. It is a good idea for both operators and affiliates (especially large ones) to employ the services of an online champion, someone who can speak to the community and give a human face to a brand to increase customer loyalty.

Customer Centric These simple but effective ideas can help operators and afﬁliates to develop a mutually rewarding customer-centric relationship. Such a relationship would signiﬁcantly increase the effectiveness of marketing expenditure and with the achievement of higher customer and partner loyalty, competition can be beaten. Remember that it costs less to keep new customers happy than to attract new ones.

MATTHEW CASTILLO is an MSc International Marketing graduate from the University of Strathclyde (Glasgow). Having gained experience in International Marketing and the iGaming industry, he is now working as Key Client Account Manager at NetRefer. His main duties involve the management of key client accounts and liaising with clients to ensure they make the best use of their Affiliate Management System in growing a strong affiliate base. Matthew can be reached via email at m.castillo@netrefer.com.

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igbaff-full-outline.pdf 29/01/2010 3:00:53 PM

CMY

INSIGHT

Marcus Blakeway, Senior Marketing Manager, BetOnline THERE’S NO DOUBT that the afﬁliate

Brand Differentiation

landscape in our industry is changing; while more operators recognize the value of affiliate partners, the opportunities for affiliates to really partner, and profit, from maturing and often merging brands seem to be diminishing. So when evaluating potential affiliate partnerships, you have to ask yourself, “is this really going to be worth the effort?” We’ve created a quick four-point test that we think can help guide you in evaluating the myriad opportunities and focus on the ones that are most quickly going to drive profits back to you. They are: 1. The opportunity 2. Brand differentiation 3. Player value maximization 4. Communication and cooperation

The next question to ask these late-tomarket guys: how the hell are they going to differentiate themselves from the dozens, hundreds or thousands (depending on the specific market) of others? If the answer is “we’ll differentiate with superior customer service”, RUN. That’ll work on retention values (see next point), but it isn’t how you win players in the first place. Brand differentiation, of course, varies market by market – what you need to consider in North American sportsbetting is very different than a Brazilian online casino. So core to this question is what market expertise do you bring to the table and how does that align with their strategy? Generally, the better programs will bring you opportunities to monetize all of your traffic, not just your ‘UK 24-44 ABC1’ males. With something like half of the world now online, it’s better to have a partner who can service a world-wide audience, even if it is through multiple brands as is often necessary to meet specific market requirements. Promotions and bonuses are still key to this industry when it comes to attracting players; what are they planning in this space? Competitive or repetitive? Demand to see their banner inventory, their promotion plans – these are going to be the vital communication tools, they should have them up and ready for at least the next quarter! Out of date banners make your site look as bad as them – be sure they have their ammunition well stocked.

The Opportunity Just who are you getting into bed with? Sure, if you’re just going to throw up a bunch of banners and go PPC some keywords, the most-recognized brands are going to perform the best for you – the big boys; at least from a sign-up perspective. Ah, but then they tell you they already have that player amongst their millions of registered players, so sorry. Even if it was the result of your efforts that re-activated or re-engaged or even just reminded the player of the brand when they were ﬁnally, actually in the market to do something. Hate that. So smaller, newer programs are often more attractive as they don’t have that massive database of previously acquired players. But nor do they have the name recognition or even competent management behind them. It’s a tough call, but if you’re going to go beyond throwing a banner up and optimizing your trafﬁc, you’ll want to hook up with experienced industry players who know the market with a decent, intelligent brand. So you have to ask your potential suitor: who’s behind this, where are they from, what have they done? Just like a potential investor in the operator, you need to know that there is solid, seasoned management behind the endeavour before you tie yourself into them. A new brand to the market is good for you; a bunch of ‘wanna-be’ newbies, not so good.

Player Value Maximization This is, of course, now imperative to an afﬁliate program’s success; going from a single sign-up/deposit to real player development and value maximization. It’s not an exercise for the meek or understaffed. It takes time and manpower; players of value build relationships with reps, not email or twitter accounts. Players have real needs that the brand must fulﬁl, and that’s often a voice at the end of a phone line – even if it’s a Skype line. As ways to communicate to players proliferate – like through Skype, twitter, Facebook, good old email, even snail mail

– you want an afﬁliate partner who is not afraid to use those channels for one-to-one communication. Anyone can tweet out about a bonus or freeroll; it’s when your player gets a personalized birthday card in the old-fashioned post that a corner is turned in the relationship.

Communication and Cooperation The same rules of engagement for player value maximization really apply to your relationship with the brand’s affiliate manager. Are they there for you, thinking about you, looking at your site, participating, supporting; or do emails go unanswered? Both parties do have to find their place in the relationship, but the only way to do that is to be communicating and working together. The days of dropping into someone’s site, hitting the affiliate text link on the bottom, grabbing some banners and making a pile of cash are over. Forge your relationships with experienced teams, with interesting, innovative brands, who go all lengths to maximize player value and work with you to do what’s best for your site, your traffic and your players. There is still plenty of upside opportunity in our industry; no one has cracked it in every market, for every product. Team up with programs that are moving the goal posts and making a difference.

MARCUS BLAKEWAY is spearheading the new BetOnline affiliate program. This long standing and well respected sportsbetting brand has recently brought in a new ‘dream team’ of industry veterans and senior executives from places like Mansion, Sportsbook. com and CanBet, to take the brand to a new level. Having just moved to new, industry-standard affiliate software and with innovative new promotions like ‘Halftime Surrenders’, ‘Mulligan Bets’, and ‘The Better Bonus Guarantee’, a buzz has already begun in the forums about their new, player-centric, proactive approach. Contact Marcus at m.blakeway@betonline.com for more information.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

INSIGHT

Social Media Marketing – A GuArANteed SucceSS? By Niall O’Malley, Group Account Director, immediate future. 2010 will be the year when social media continues to be embraced by progressive brands. There seems no way of avoiding it – if you want to build brand equity efficiently social media is the favoured option. Not surprisingly, the effect of so many youth-orientated consumer brands implementing social media marketing strategies in some shape or form is that many of these companies are experiencing a social media backlash. Having bitten off more than they can chew, these companies are either unable to cope with the sudden influx of comments they receive from consumers or they suddenly realise that they haven’t truly understood their customer base due to the milquetoast reactions to their campaigns. The gaming industry, on the other hand, stands in a unique position; not only is it catering to a digitally evolved audience, it has years, if not decades of experience communicating with their target base through traditional means. The gaming industry is in a prime position to either set a gold standard for the way in which brands should work within social media or, alternatively, become the poster-boy as an industry that simply does not ‘get it’.

looking before leaping When planning how to use social media to reach an audience it is important not to get caught up in the buzz surrounding any one particular social media platform, such as the much hyped Twitter or Facebook. Despite the possible political pressures to concentrate any initiative around that platform, focussing any activity on a medium rather than the target audience or global campaign will have the effect of reducing the results of the broader business objectives. The bad news for old-school marketing practitioners is that the rise of social media has made life a lot more complicated. But the good news, for those who are prepared to embrace change and take the time to develop their understanding of social media, is that the new world offers the opportunity for far more productive dialogue with their audiences. Worth noting is how Starbucks

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

approached Twitter; engaging with customers by answering questions and ‘re-tweeting’ what people are saying about the brand to create an open communication channel. In addition, on Facebook, Starbucks uploads content to its fan page such as videos, blog posts and photos. With over 700,000 followers on Twitter and over five million fans on Facebook, you couldn’t go too wrong by holding Starbucks up as a blueprint of how gaming brands could use social media to grow their business.

Measuring success With most countries emerging from recession in 2010, the measurement of social media programmes will be a priority of brands spending time and money on social media campaigns. Measurement has traditionally been a weak point for PR, because measuring propensity to purchase and brand favourability is very difficult, and therefore, expensive. The cost of this kind of measurement can often seem disproportionate compared to the overall cost of the campaign. Doing things online makes measurement a little easier and less expensive. While there are still many questions about the best way to measure the ROI of social media campaigns, the simple fact that we are dealing with online interactions means that a wealth of new metrics are available. Some of these are useful, others are just distractions, but they all provide a level of data which is far more robust than the kind of measurement tools that have traditionally been used for offline PR. Setting objectives as a series of illconceived quantitative KPIs will not achieve much. For example, a company might invest some money in a viral video clip and set the objective as ‘achieve one million views on YouTube for our clip’. This objective is easy to fudge as there are plenty of ways to get a lot of people to view a video clip, but there are no guarantees that any of those people are in the relevant audience group or have any degree of influence. In other words, the objective can easily be accomplished without making any progress at all towards the desired business goal.

A new tone to communication Conventional marketing campaigns are often characterised by a single big idea and one overarching message. In social media we have to think about the ‘long tail’ – the idea that large numbers of smaller niche audiences can be more important than a big single audience. What this means is that instead of trying to bludgeon everybody over the head with a headline message, companies need to think of ways to break it down into smaller messages which can be more tightly targeted at all of those smaller audiences. This way, key messages will resonate louder with the people you reach. Instead of focusing on narrowly defined key messages, companies need to think about how they can give their audiences the broader picture about a brand. The days of feeding the public a company’s official line are long gone; consumers in general are savvier and demand a personality to engage with. Essentially, this requires a group of engaged brand ambassadors to become fully immersed in valuable communities. This, of course, means devolution of the traditional ‘command and control’ exerted through spokespeople, but evidence is building that this is a risk worth taking. This approach is one of the most important things that progressive brands should build into their marketing thinking this decade: you can no longer exercise tight control over your message and if you try to, there is a very real danger of things blowing up in your face.

Niall O’Malley is Group Account Director at immediate future. immediate future is an independent PR agency. Launched in 2004, the digital PR company creates new models and methods for managing reputations and amplifying marketing messages online. Working with major brands, immediate future has developed award-winning online and social media initiatives for companies such as Sony Europe, BBC, Diageo, BT, ASOS, Mirror Group, Cancer Research, NSPCC, EMI, Ferraro and Kenwood.

INSIGHT

Expekt’s Lloyd Purser tackles the concept of growing an industry which in its maturing state, is balanced between chaos and order. IT IS A TOUGH one to answer. The issue is not evolution as through increasing Internet penetration and other developments in technology or marketing our customer’s behaviour – in this instance, our marketing efforts continue to evolve. The grey area in the question is whether the industry is currently in chaos and if it is, then it must always have been.

Chaos… The dictionary definition of chaos is “a state of complete disorder and confusion”. Let’s think about it for one moment… it’s not actually that bad. There will always be specific companies that are in chaos but the leading ones set the standards for the industry and in this case, we are in relatively good shape. The key factor creating disorder and confusion is having differing legal situations in different countries and having policy which changes and is unclear. Keeping up with the legal side of the industry in Europe is a tough job and in many European countries even the lawyers and politicians have problems interpreting the law, let alone the marketers. For both operators and affiliates, taking advantage of these different situations is the key to succeeding in Europe. In the main, operators who are in the business for the long term don’t want to antagonize law makers – to do so could have a negative effect on them when/if the market opens up. So with differences in policy come differences in the marketing strategy of operators and understanding these regional differences is important for affiliates in maximizing their earnings as the law will provide them both opportunities and threats. The key is to understand the legal situation in the markets, exploit the opportunities and nullify the threats. Affiliates are imperative in all markets, not just the more open ones. They have a vital role to play in markets where the law is prohibitive to operators as they offer an alternative acquisition channel where otherwise the operator’s hands would be tied.

Evolution… Moving on to the second part of the discussion, the industry is evolving in many

ways. Evolution is natural and should be expected, our industry is maturing, which is especially true from a financial, technical and marketing perspective. Financially, we are starting to see more consolidation between larger companies. The most recent example for me being very close to home as following the conclusion of the deal with Everest Poker, Mangas Gaming (which owns Expekt) will control four iGaming companies within the group covering the key products of sports, casino and poker. This is great news for both the company and its customers, creating stability and driving learning and best practice throughout the organization. As well as for the operators and their customers this is also excellent news for affiliates as they have a financially stable business partner who will develop the best campaigns and products to acquire quality customers and optimise revenues from existing ones, maximising their earnings. Technically, things are moving on, new products are entering the market and as competition increases product development will become a key factor in winning and maintaining market share. Recently, we have seen clear examples of this in sports where the live streaming product is now a feature with most large sports operators. Product development is also key for affiliates – the messaging is fresher and they create a bigger potential player base driving new player acquisition and new revenue streams. From a marketing perspective one of the most talked about channels in terms of evolution is online and how customers are now interacting. New channels are opening for both operators and affiliates and we are starting to experiment in how we can use them to generate revenues. At Expekt, we embarked on our social media programme back in September 2009 deciding to use both our brand and our ambassadors as marketing collateral. We now have both brand and ambassador assets on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and have also developed the Expekt blog which is a mashup of our key activities. Most marketers operating in these channels are looking for a magic formula which can use the huge

coverage and customer engagement offered through social networks to deliver revenue. One of the key factors in considering the future success of the social channels will be how we can cooperate and combine our efforts with our affiliates to drive revenues. As part of our content strategy on the Expektlive YouTube channel we have a video blog updated by a key member of our bookmaking team. This outlines form and predictions for the biggest upcoming fixtures providing great content for affiliates to post on their sites. From YouTube the content is spread out to all relevant social media channels and is also made available for our affiliates through the Expekt affiliate website. Using our social media activity to supply our affiliates with relevant content is a new initiative and we hope to enhance our offer to add poker content in time. Further cooperation between operators and affiliates in social media channels will enable us to evolve further. In summary, in an industry like ours, embracing evolution in all areas of the business is imperative for growth and you will be left behind if you don’t. As to the other part of the question, well you never know – chaos could well be just around the corner, but then again, that’s why we like working in iGaming so much, isn’t it? EXPEKT’S MAIN SOCIAL MEDIA CHANNELS… Expekt company channels, Facebook. com/expektlive, YouTube.com/ expektlive, Twitter.com/expekt, Twitter. com/expektaffiliate, blog.expekt.com, Branded ambassador channels, Facebook.com/princeofpoker, Twitter. com/sjnguyen, Facebook.com/ wikegard, Twitter.com/wikegard, Facebook.com/expektglenn

LLOYD PURSER is Head of Online Marketing at Expekt. With over ten years experience in both traditional and online marketing Lloyd has been managing the team at Expekt since 2007. In his role, Lloyd has responsibility for the affiliate program, media performance and tracking, social media marketing, offsite SEO, campaign management, global media planning/buying and business development.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

WEBMASTER WORLD

AS AN IGAMING AFFILIATE, you want to do whatever you can to increase traffic to your site, and to convert that traffic into acquisitions. Finding the right tools to help analyze your traffic and promote your website can be a daunting task; and could, in some cases, be somewhat costly. The temptation may be to make use of the many free tools that are available. Tools can be found that analyze your site traffic, others that assess the effectiveness of your site design and some that are designed to increase traffic to your site. Some insights can be gleaned from using tools like these, but it is important to remember that they can be somewhat limited in the details that they deliver. In order to really get the details that you need to most effectively market your website, some investment is recommended. When used in conjunction with other, more powerful tools, there are free tools that may help you to assess certain situations, so it is worth

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

taking a look at a few of them so that you can decide for yourself whether or not they’ll be able to help you achieve your goals. Using these tools in conjunction with some expert advice from an SEO specialist may give you the edge you need to gain that extra bit of visibility and higher conversion rates.

Google Analytics (http://www. google.com/analytics/) With Google Analytics, you can track certain areas of your website’s performance. You’ll see reports on how many total visits each page is getting and what keywords visitors used to get there, as well as whether or not they took further action once they arrived at the page. This freebie tool can also tell you if people gave up on multi-stage checkout procedures such as whether a player dropped out of your newsletter sign up form. You can also ﬁnd out how long they were on your site, where they came from and how

often surfers return to your pages. The information available can definitely help to track your human traffic, but will be unable to provide insights into how search engine spiders are viewing your page. Also, there is no support for log files for advanced users. Lastly, Google is in possession of your data and so there is no way for users to archive their own data. It’s a great tool for those looking for information on human traffic, but for deeper analysis, most will require multiple tools.

Feng GUI (http://www.feng-gui.com/) Feng GUI is a tool that runs an algorithm which predicts what people are most likely to look at ﬁrst when they visit your site. This is a tool for designers and helps to predict how well a site is designed, and how well a creative might perform, based on its placement on the site. This would be an ideal tool to use for A/B testing

before a site is launched, and can work towards improving user experience, based on feedback. This tool generates reports that graphically display what the ‘hotspots’ of your site are most likely to be. Feng GUI has done some serious programming to establish these ‘hotspots’ and it may help to assess why some of your creatives are performing better than others, and how you might improve the placement of the ones that aren’t performing as well. This is obviously not a substitute for human intelligence. Its real limitations lie in the fact that it’s a probability algorithm, and cannot report in absolutes or deﬁnite outcomes. It merely states what it believes will be the most eye-catching aspects of your site. And, at this point in its development, it’s not quite sophisticated enough to accurately mimic human eye tracking. Also, if you’re not able to reach a wide enough audience, your A/B testing will not be truly effective.

If you are looking for something more robust, once again, you’ll have to pay for it.

Backlink Watch (www.backlinkwatch.com)

Using SEO Experts as a Resource

This is a tool that crawls the Internet searching for links to your website. It may help you determine which web pages are linking to your site, and perhaps more importantly, what anchor text they are using to do so. It also provides you with the PageRank of the sites that are linking to you, the number of outbound links on that page and any Nofollow links there might be. As backlinks are crucial to website and web page authority, this is very important information to have at your disposal. While the information you get is fairly extensive, the reports here stop at 1,000 links. If your site is on the blogroll of a site that posts regularly, the tool will view each blog post as a link, and you might end up with only that blog’s links on your report.

Survey Monkey (www.surveymonkey.com) Survey Monkey allows you to create surveys that you can post on your website. There are templates that you can use, or you can create your own survey in an effort to glean speciﬁc information from your surfers. You can target the questions towards getting responses that will help you improve your marketing strategy or site design. You can also customize the design of the survey and even upload your own logo onto the interface. Be careful of relying too heavily on tools like this. Not everyone answers surveys honestly, so it can lead you in the wrong direction if you’re not careful. Also, you may only get a small percentage of your visitors to actually ﬁll out the survey, so it’s by no means going to give you a perfect overall picture.

The above tools may give you some extra information that will help you build some traffic, find out more information about your visitors or convert more of your traffic. And while most of them have some great features, counterbalancing the loopholes that exist can be executed with some strategic SEO planning. Those affiliates who are not yet confident building keyword lists, optimizing code and analyzing visitor behavior may greatly benefit from an SEM agency. SEO experts can fill in the gaps that exist in the information you’ll get from free tools and help you to build qualified traffic that is more likely to convert. The first step is to get traffic. This is where SEO experts really shine. They help you to define the keywords you should be

using, optimize your code for compatibility with search engine spiders and advise on how to best align your content for relevancy to keywords you have chosen to reach your audience with specific search terms. Once visitors reach your site, it’s important to understand how they are behaving, what actions they are taking and whether or not they are converting into sales. SEM agencies can help you assess your site’s performance and advise on how better to compose and arrange content, images and calls to action. A good SEM agency will completely analyze your site’s performance and then, from the report generated, show you where you can make improvements and how to implement these changes. Where free tools fail to provide a comprehensive picture, SEM agencies should give you a global depiction of your site’s operation and then advise on best practices for increased traffic and sales. Free tools can be used to accomplish some specific tasks, but should probably not be seen as the quintessential elements for achieving your marketing goals. If your SEO skills are not yet honed to their full potential, an investment in your website’s overall structure can be a wise decision. Use these free tools to give you a little bit of information on how to improve your site, but for a more complete representation of your site’s performance, consult experts who can guide you through the processes necessary to reach the goals you have set for your online business.

CHRISTINA SFORZA is an Affiliate Marketing Coordinator at Income Access. She manages three affiliate programs, and strives to offer iGaming affiliates the best support possible to assist them in meeting their goals.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

INSIGHT

China Crisis Search giant, Google, is reviewing its position in China after its intellectual property was used in ‘calculated’ cyber attacks on human rights activists in the country.

Google has indicated it may cease to operate in China following a cyber attack aimed at gathering information on human rights activists. Whilst the Chinese government has strenuously denied any involvement, even moving to welcome Google Android to the market to appease relations, many believe that the move will lead to the loss of advertising dollars and a greater dependency on foreign operators. The whole episode started when Google reacted to what it termed “a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure” aimed primarily at gaining access to the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists. The search giant stopped short of apportioning blame to the government itself but did announce via David Drummon, its Chief Legal Officer on its official blog that Google will “discuss with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law.” The market from which Google will be removing itself accounts for 340 million (various sources) online users, a huge increase on the ten or so million reported only a decade ago. The search engine market was reported to have been worth $1 billion with many forecasting Google to make profits in the region of $600 million in 2010. However, Google is a very distant second to the market leader Baidu, a fact some commentators say has uncomplicated Google’s decision to flee. So what does this all mean in the wider context? Warren Cowan, CEO, Greenlight, believes that the main upshot will be the loss of advertising dollars and a greater dependency on foreign operators. “If Google quits China, then it leaves Microsoft, Yahoo! and Baidu as the primary sources for accessing the Chinese searching audience. Without Google, assuming Yahoo! and Bing remain, that

iGB Affiliate february/march 2010

30 percent share will re-distribute. Most likely to Baidu, which will further cement its leadership position, and the remainder may not split equally among Bing and Yahoo! users, which would further upset the balance of power for one or the other, and means growing in the Chinese market is likely to make it very difficult for at least one of them. “For advertisers looking to target the Chinese market, it means a greater dependency on foreign operators who are less familiar to them, and less integrated with their ad operations. “For the US and global advertising industry it means ad dollars are going to go overseas into Chinese pockets as opposed to strengthening the US coffers too.” Andreas Pouros, COO, Greenlight, claims that Google has less to lose by pulling out than others although its absence will make affecting any change in China all the more difficult. “In a time where analysts are predicting a US economic decline and China replacing the US as the world’s largest economy by as early as 2020, Google’s review of its presence in the Chinese market is perhaps of greater significance than one might immediately assume. Google has effectively taken the high ground, reviewing its presence in China following cyber attacks, originating from China, targeting various human rights organisations via Google’s intellectual assets. Google has less to lose in the short term from taking such a stance, in comparison to say Microsoft whose existing presence in China is significant and growing. Microsoft is, therefore, downplaying the cyber attacks – essentially happy to play the long-game with China. The revenue opportunity is just too big for it to want to rock the boat, regardless of any discussion of ethics or civil liberties. Google, however, can afford to grand-stand in the short-term, as it makes meagre

Search engine market share

Baidu 59% Google 30% Yahoo 6% Bing 4.5% Others 1% Source: Various (Hitwise, AT Internet Institute, Webhits, Statcounter)

monies from the Chinese market. In the long-term it might lose out in dramatic fashion if China does not become more accommodating to human rights organisations over time. “The short-term winners are Microsoft and Baidu, who will continue to make money in the Chinese market with the reduction in competition without Google snapping at their heels. The Chinese State is also a major short-term benefactor as it now only has compliant search companies in its jurisdiction – companies that aren’t willing to get involved in politics. The Chinese consumer has, of course, less choice without Google and arguably the marketplace will reduce in terms of innovation, particularly those that could create lasting change in China and create the East-West commercial and cultural convergence that many crave. Arguably, Google should remain in China and try to coax change from within the state, something it will find great difficulty achieving from the outside.”

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WEBMASTER WORLD

The following feature shall delve in depth into the recently launched (and much talked about) product from Google. Rene Colin Magri explores the substance behind the hype. AS YOU MIGHT have gathered from the title, the feature is about Google Wave. Why so much fuss and articles about this new product? What is so ‘disruptive’ about it? And, most importantly, how can affiliates, and indeed the iGaming industry benefit from such a product? These are the questions that this article will try to answer. The first section shall be a general overview of what Google Wave is and why, considering the context, it is an innovation worth taking note of. The subsequent parts will deal with the most salient features of the Wave; the Wave in a corporate setting, and potential future outlook.

Google Wave: an Overview In May of 2009, at the famous Google I/0, the Rasmussen brothers (the same siblings that gave us Google Maps) launched the Wave to an audience of bemused technology journalists via the strap line: “What if email were to be invented today, in the Internet era? What would it look like?” Indeed, the ﬁrst and most notable feature (or set thereof) of the Wave is the emaillike UI (User Interface) it employs. Google has already done a lot to innovate email – I don’t think anybody in their right mind can deny the effects Gmail has had on email in general. One could argue that there is email before Gmail, and there is email after. Thus, to continue, Google has asked us to imagine a post-Internet email with all

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

the features we associate with our presence online; email, Instant Messaging (IM), Wiki and a host of innovative features. The Wave concept integrates all of these components into one seamless and tidy (in truth it still needs some work in this department) interface. Below are the top innovations that Google Wave brings to the table:

Google Wave cuts email time Wave kills long email threads, for instance. As opposed to how we traditionally respond to emails, Wave allows the response to be incorporated in the original body of the email, thus making it tidier and less timeconsuming. For example, during the Google I/O presentation, the presenter, Stephanie Hanson, takes the scenario of a dinner meetup at her place. In a normal email context she would have a number of email replies with a ‘yes’ or ‘no’ as response. But with Wave, she just edits the original message, incorporating a section with who can make it or not, and the replies are inputted directly into the space underneath the paragraph.

Playback Function With Google Wave, a new entrant in a thread can play it back to catch up on what has happened at any point in the conversation. It saves hours on conversations and project collaborations and similar Wiki-style functionality that online teams use regularly. With just one click project members (or

entrants in chats) can playback to the beginning and see the contributions of others for immediate brieﬁng.

Real-Time Chats Within Wave users can see chats in realtime. Users can practically see chats being typed in real-time, further cutting down on response times. Only a handful of IMs offer this functionality of the browser, but the Wave (as a platform) promises that this will be an important feature.

Project Wiki This happens to be a major feature. It helps groups of people to:

collaborate more effectively on documents (just like normal Wikis); ● streamline conversations (you can also change the order of the conversation, so that you have the power not just to alter your contributions but also those of others); ● highlight, or write notes within documents that others can play (the playback function comes in handy here) to come to terms with your contributions or thoughts regarding the project in question. ●

This last point is particularly useful for enhancing the collaborative possibilities between afﬁliates and afﬁliate managers. The closer the relationship, the better the results.

“According to the Rasmussen brothers, if email were to be invented in today’s post-Internet age, Google Wave is what it would look like.”

Wave Extensions Wave Extensions are third party applications within Wave. There are two kinds of extensions (at the time of writing): Gadgets and Robots. Gadgets are like apps (imagine the Facebook platform) – third party applications such as games (poker, arcade, etc) on top of the Wave. Robots, on the other hand are automated conversation participants: for example, they can help with real-time conversation translation (useful to manage a multiple, multi-lingual conversation) as well as bringing in outside conversations to the topic, like from Twitter (brings in tweets according to relevance).

version of Wave. Not only this, but they can also add features and customizations to the Wave to make it more valuable to their brand.

The Wave for Companies, Affiliates and Other players. For those that will opt to host and use Wave in a corporate environment, there are some challenges that need to be taken into consideration. Without going into too much detail (as at the time of writing, very few corporate implementations have been documented) there are two main challenges to make Wave a ﬂawless and good addition to a brand.

Wave Embeds As the name implies, you can embed a wave into websites and blogs. This gives the opportunity for blog and website owners to embed waves and enhance their interactivity with their visitors; create customer care channels; enhance conversations instead of comments; and also, create a very good way to bring-in trafﬁc as it helps with creating meaningful conversations, content, and interactivity to the company, afﬁliate, and whoever chooses to embed Wave into his/her online property.

It’s Open Source. This, in my view, offers the most attractive proposition to both afﬁliates and operators. Players in the industry can host (therefore, keeping control) and brand their own

1. Technology/Complexity Installing and maintaining the Wave might prove to be a complex nut to crack. A good System Administrator with the correct infrastructure and resources is needed. This is not a cheap option, therefore, a good understanding of the value of the Wave in the context of the company needs to be ascertained. 2. Give Wave a goal Simple as it might sound, giving a new piece of technology a reason to be there is not that easy. A good strategic goal needs to be set for the Wave to have a proper role to play, and therefore, be a useful addition to the mix of online tools currently used within the organisation. As we saw, the Wave can out-do

any of the communication tools we currently use online, both aggressive (immediate) or passive ones. This will take time, so to teach an organisation to use Wave effectively both internally (workers within an organisation for use in communication, collaboration and sharing) and externally with afﬁliates, customers and partners (which might require a cultural shift). The faster an organisation learns to use Wave for its own beneﬁt (if they choose to) the better the ROI.

Conclusion The article tried to give an overview of the most salient features and potential usage Google Wave brings to the table. I have no doubt that the Wave will be a big gamechanger in online communications, as it possesses all the elements to do so – its innovative features, Open Source and developer programmes and corporate usage potential and inﬁnite extendibility. All this in a framework of Web 2.0 – the ‘participatory web’. As I and others have stressed in previous articles, the Web 2.0 paradigm needs to be incorporated into the corporate marketing strategy of companies, afﬁliates and other players in the industry as, if done correctly, it enhances brand visibility (cheaply), customer engagement (more value) and USG, amongst others. Thus, the Wave - with the features and customization potential it boasts – might become a central tool within the social media strategy for brands in the online game.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

WEBMASTER WORLD

Your Traffic is Not Converting You’re getting traffic to your website, but you’re not converting your impressions into sales. Why?

THERE ARE A NUMBER of factors that can contribute to a lack of converted traffic. There are many different ways of going about getting your traffic to convert, but the goal is always going to be the same: conversions. Converting traffic is simple enough in theory, but a little more complicated in practice. It looks like this: ● Surfer finds site ● Surfer finds information and call to action ● Surfer converts to sale As simple as that looks, conversion is a science that needs to be studied, tested and proven – and those tests need to be done on your website with your exact specifications. What you might find is that you are not approaching your audience in the appropriate manner. There are some simple steps that can be missed when setting up your website. With so much competition and so much at stake, it’s very important that you cover all the bases, so let’s take a look at a few possible reasons why your website is not converting.

1. Poor Design When someone reaches your website, the very first thing they should be able to find is the information that brought them to your site in the first place, and a link to take action. If it takes too long to find what they’re looking for, chances are they’ll leave your site, plain and simple. There is some debate as to how much patience most Internet users have, but suffice it to say that if you don’t get their attention

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

right away, they will simply choose the next option in the search results. And there are enough options available that surfer patience is minimal. In the case of website design, you can definitely have too much of a good thing. If your page is crowded with banner advertisements for all kinds of different games, you may lose your potential depositors before you even get a chance to send your message. Some will argue that your pages need to be a certain length. Some say shorter is better, others will argue for longer pages. The fact is that your page needs to be as long as it needs to be to convey the information your potential players are after. The most important aspect of any webpage is easy access to information. You may find in your analytics that your users are spending a long time on your pages. While this is often interpreted as a good sign, it might just mean that potential players are having a hard time finding the information they want. Don’t overcrowd pages with banners and text links. Just present the information that your players are after.

2. Irrelevant Information Irrelevant information can creep in as early as the search engine level. The teaser is what people see in search engine results about your web page. You are telling people what they can expect to ﬁnd at your website, but if they don’t get that information, that’s one more for the ‘Bounce Rate’ column. In addition, you may be using keywords that

are not relevant to what’s on your webpage. If someone found your site while looking for bingo, because that’s a keyword you have used, and they get to your site and only ﬁnd poker links, they’re likely to give up quickly.

3. Too Many Choices If you are offering your players a chance to exit your sales page, you may be losing sales. Many sites will have numerous links to other content, and whether it’s related or not, if you have offered potential players the opportunity to go anywhere that is not a page where they can convert, you might well be missing out on an opportunity to convert that visitor into a player. Keep it simple. Make your pages focused on one thing: conversion.

4. Not Knowing Your Traffic If you lived in a neighborhood where 95% of the people were vegetarians, then it would not make sense to open a BBQ restaurant specializing in baby-back ribs. The only reason it would happen is because the person opening the restaurant hadn’t researched their neighborhood. In the same way, it is extremely important to have an understanding of who your trafﬁc is in

order to more effectively market to them. For example, if you know that you’re reaching a group of people who are only going to spend a certain amount of money, then advertising products outside of their budget isn’t going to make any sense. Remember that most of the traffic you get, you are asking for by using specific keywords to get them to your site. Using a balance of keyword research and content targeted specifically to your audience will help to bring up those conversion rates.

5. No Calls to Action This can be approached using a four-letter acronym: AIDA. It stands for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action. You’ve attracted people to your site, generated their interest in the products you are selling and, through clever copywriting or attractive banners, you’ve managed to pique their interest. But, without a strong call to action, you are more likely to end up with another missed opportunity. Don’t be afraid to direct your trafﬁc. Use strong calls to action that incite your players to act by using text links or images that give the message you’re trying to convey. Avoid generic calls, such as ‘click here’, as they’re not giving enough information to your

player as to what’s going to happen when they do. Using a strong personal command, such as ‘sign up here’ or ‘play now’ will work more effectively. Draw user attention with size, positioning and coloring. The more obvious your call to action and the stronger the command, the higher your click-through rate will be.

Summary These are just a few of the reasons why your trafﬁc may not be converting. The most important thing to remember is that you want your pages to focus on getting the attention of your target audience and then making it easy for them to take action that results in conversion. Just as how people who go to a comedy club want to laugh, people who are searching for gaming entertainment want to play games. Your job is to make it as easy for them as you possibly can. ADAM VAN VLAARDINGEN is an Affiliate Manager at Income Access. He has an interest in mobile marketing and the future of the affiliate marketing industry. He resides and works in Montreal.

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WEBMASTER WORLD

HOW IMPORTANT IS THE COLOUR OF YOUR WEBSITE? Colour symbolism is very important to the graphic design of a website, and if you choose badly you may affect your visitors in a negative way. There are so many colour choices these days that making the right decisions can be quite difficult. Founder of Games and Casino, Dominique gives us the lowdown. THE VISUAL STIMULATION your web page evokes determines almost instantly whether a visitor will stay or leave. Using the right colours makes your site pleasing to the eye and helps the viewer to determine the purpose of the page and the desired action. The wrong colours may make your visitor leave or read with unease and avoid clicking. Colours are more than a combination of red and blue or yellow and black. They are non-verbal communication. Colours have symbolism and colour meanings that run much deeper than some might think. Research tells us that people form a subconscious opinion about a person, environment, or product within 90 seconds. It is said that between 62% and 90% of that assessment is based simply on colour. On a website, the time you have to capture someone’s attention is much shorter than in a bricks and mortar setting. This makes the effect of your colour choice even more important. Since there is no scent and currently very rare audio stimulation, sight is the most valuable sense online. The colours you use on your site can send your visitor packing instantly, or evoke any number of emotions and actions. There are no rules regarding ‘good’ or ‘bad’ colours since the response to colour is personal. However, age, gender and cultural background will influence the reaction to colour, and every colour has a very basic effect on people, whether they recognize it or not. Choosing the colours that will best motivate your visitors is key to increasing sales. So, it isn’t just the selection of colours in general but also which colours to use with your specifically targeted visitors. Everyone knows that in the US, boys like blue and girls like pink. These sorts of things may not apply globally. For instance, white is often associated with weddings in North America and creates a feeling of innocence. In Eastern cultures, white signifies death. If you export white wedding gowns to China, you’ll go broke.

The way we mix those colours can add interest, enhance the design concept, or convey speciﬁc messages.

Cool, or calming colours are blue, green, turquoise and silver. ● Warm, or exciting colours are red, pink, yellow, gold and orange. ● Mixed, or cool/warm colours are purple, lavender, green and turquoise. ● Neutral, or unifying colours are brown, beige, ivory, grey, black and white. ●

People with different backgrounds and personalities will perceive colour moods somewhat differently. The below attributes may seem a bit contradictory, but one or more attributes will be perceived by certain types of people. Here are the basic colour meanings of individual colours:

Blue Blue represents peace, tranquillity, calm, stability, harmony, unity, trust, truth, conﬁdence, conservatism, security, cleanliness, order, loyalty, sky, water, technology, and on the negative side, cold and depression. Blue is said to slow the pulse rate, lower body temperature and reduce appetite. It is often used in business because it reﬂects reliability.

Black Black stands for power, sexuality, sophistication, formality, depth, style, elegance, wealth and mystery. On the negative side it suggests fear, evil, anonymity, unhappiness, sadness, remorse, anger, underground, mourning and death. Black is often categorized as the ‘technical colour’.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

Purple Purple represents royalty, spirituality, nobility, wealth, ceremony, mystery, transformation, wisdom and enlightenment. On the negative side, it means cruelty, arrogance and mourning. Purple is considered an exotic colour and often associated with sexual ﬂamboyancy and wealth.

Red We associate red with love, desire, speed and strength. On the negative side, red means violence, anger and danger. Red can evoke a ﬁght-or-ﬂight response, raise blood pressure and make the heart beat faster. It is the warmest and most energetic colour in the spectrum. It demands attention.

White White symbolizes reverence, purity, simplicity, cleanliness, peace, humility, precision, innocence, youth, birth, winter, snow, good and marriage. On the negative side, in some parts of the world it stands for death. White is often used as contrast colour.

Yellow Yellow represents joy, happiness, optimism, idealism, imagination, hope, sunshine, summer, gold, philosophy, spirituality and inspiration. The negative connotations are dishonesty, cowardice, betrayal, jealousy, covetousness, deceit, illness and hazard.

Green This colour represents nature, environment, health, good luck, renewal, youth, vigour, spring, generosity and fertility. The negative meanings are jealousy, inexperience, envy and misfortune. The cool quality of green is said to soothe, calm and have great healing powers.

Categories There are three basic colour categories: warm, cool, and neutral, and we’ll add one category for colours that can go either way.

is demanding of attention. Orange is considered a warm colour like red, but to a lesser extent; orange expresses energy.

Orange Orange symbolizes balance, warmth, enthusiasm, vibrancy, ﬂamboyancy and

Hints and tips So you see that all colours have both positive and negative associations, and these will be perceived differently by different people. For the best psychological impact, choose the colour that best describes the association you want to create in your visitor’s ﬁrst impression, and add colours that symbolize similar attributes. Avoid colours that have similar or complimentary negative connotations or you

worlds thrive on colours in the red, orange, blue, soft cream, beige and brown categories. Generation X (25-41 year olds) respond very well to these colours, as do individuals who appreciate a more streamlined, clutter free environment with clean lines.

Information Age colour combinations

will increase the number of people who feel uncomfortable looking at it exponentially. That way, you will increase the number of visitors who feel the way you would like them to feel, and reduce negative reactions. But that’s not all. The appeal of colour also varies with generations. One theory1 based on research describes generational differences are as follows:

Eco-inspired colour combinations These colours symbolize nature, the environment and organic harmony. The colours are light, warm and earthy, including greens, blues and neutrals. Mineral and metallic colours, such as copper, are also included. These colours will target the generation that’s described as responsible and balanced – ‘Generation X’ (25-41 year olds). It also appeals to ‘Boomers’ (42-60 year olds), who pioneered the green movement.

Calming colour combinations These colours have a soothing and luxurious effect. They are often chosen for their ability to balance out the stress and insecurities of everyday life. The colours are rich and saturated, with deep browns, purples, greys and silver. Successful individuals from all age groups respond to these colours. These people appreciate quality, luxury and originality. Many are found in the ‘Boomer’ generation (42-60 year olds), whose members are at their peak ﬁnancial productivity. They also appeal to the ‘Primetime’ generation (60+ year olds), particularly to well-to-do retirees.

This group consists of bold, explosive colours that are often associated with IT, computers and gaming. The colours are bright whites, electric blues, and vivid yellows and aquas. Research indicates that ‘Generation Y’ (ages 3-24, the digital generation) responds strongly to these colours because they grew up or are growing up with computers. Generation Y lives in the moment and multitasks. For this group, life moves fast, even if they don’t: they are the least physically ﬁt generation. Last but not least, we need to consider countries of origin. Colours have different meanings in various countries: Orange Ireland: religious signiﬁcance (Protestant) Yellow China: nourishing, bad luck Egypt: colour of mourning Japan: courage India: merchants Western: hope, hazards, cowardice Red China: good luck, celebration, summoning Cherokees: success, triumph India: purity South Africa: colour of mourning Russia: Bolsheviks and Communism Eastern: worn by brides Western: excitement, danger, love, passion, stop Green China: green hats indicate a man’s wife is cheating on him, exorcism India: Islam Ireland: symbol of the entire country, Catholicism Western: spring, new birth, go, Saint Patrick’s Day, Christmas (with red) France: studies have indicated green is not a good colour choice for packaging In some tropical countries green is associated with danger

Industrial colour combinations These colours are strong, clean, modern and fashionable. The corporate and industrial

Blue Cherokees: defeat, trouble

Iran: colour of heaven and spirituality Western: depression, sadness, conservative, corporate, ‘something blue’ bridal tradition China: blue is associated with immortality Colombia: blue is associated with soap Hindus: blue is the colour of Krishna Jewish: blue symbolizes holiness Middle East: blue is a protective colour. Note: Blue is often considered to be the safest global colour. Purple Thailand: colour of mourning (widows) Western: royalty White Japan: white carnation symbolizes death Eastern: funerals Western: brides, angels, good guys, hospitals, doctors, peace (white dove) Black China: colour for young boys Western: funerals, death, Halloween (with orange), bad guys, rebellion Last but not least, card players may associate colours with the amount of risk, or the amount of wealth, depending on their skill level. Casinos generally have the same chip colours, but there are always exceptions, especially in California: White, $1 Yellow, $2 Red, $5 Blue, $10 Grey, $20 Green, $25 Orange, $50 Black, $100 Pink, $250 Purple, $500 Burgundy, $1,000 Light Blue, $2,000 Brown, $5,000 I hope this article can help you narrow down what colours you want to use on your site. Once you have decided what will work best for your visitor demographic, check out a colour wheel (lots of them in image search online) to make sure your colours harmonize and you’re set. You may be surprised how much you can improve your click-through rate.

1 Reference: Josette Buisson, artistic director for Pittsburgh Paints, at PPG Industries’ ColorShare Forums in Manhattan and Chicago in December 2009.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

WEBMASTER WORLD

IF YOU ONLY ever reached out to your friends when you wanted something, chances are they wouldn’t be your friends much longer. Business relationships really aren’t that different. In fact, if the success of your business, indeed its growth, depends on the quality of your business relationships, then it’s even more crucial that those relationships be symbiotic. For iGaming operators, whether you are expanding your associations with existing afﬁliates, or establishing relationships with new partners, your relationship-building strategies will be key to your business success.

How to Build Better Relationships with Existing Affiliates It often seems like a tremendous amount of effort goes into acquiring new business relationships, and not enough goes into maintaining and improving existing relationships. This approach can be risky in any market, but in the iGaming industry, where competition is especially fierce, neglecting your relationships can be truly detrimental. Here are some tips to consider that can help you create meaningful, long-lasting relationships with affiliates who are already active in your affiliate program. 1. Know Your Affiliates’ Needs An important part of any business strategy is knowing (and marketing!) your Unique Selling Point (USP). It’s the one thing you do better, the one thing that differentiates

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

you in the market – the one specific benefit that affiliates will get out of their partnership with you. But what do your affiliates think is your USP? Knowing this information can be good for two reasons: (1) it tells you what your affiliates expect from you and (2) it gives you the opportunity to tailor your product to better meet their needs. 2. Anticipate Your Affiliates’ Future Needs What your affiliates needed ten years ago is certainly not what they need today. In fact, their needs have probably drastically changed in the last five years, one year – even six months. Needs are continually changing – continually evolving. When you can anticipate your affiliates’ future needs, you can more aptly create long-lasting relationships. This may mean staying on top of industry trends and technological advancements, so that you can offer better tools, improved support structures or features that will help them do their job faster, better or more accurately. When you anticipate these needs, you can work on developing solutions now, so you are ready to deliver when the need actually materializes. And when you do, ahead of all your competitors, it makes a powerful statement. It says you’re committed to being proactive, and to keeping your affiliates happy. And just as a bonus for being ahead of the game, you are in an even better position for attracting other, leadingedge affiliates.

3. Communicate! Whether you stay in contact with your affiliates by phone, email, fax, newsletters, luncheons, or in person, doesn’t really matter. What does matter is the frequency and quality of your communications. If the only time you’re reaching out to your affiliates is to tell them about your recent promotion, or to solve a problem that has arisen, then chances are you’re not communicating to the degree that is needed to make your affiliates feel like they matter, like they’re important. Frequent, short communications can be a very effective way of building stronger relationships with your affiliates. Think of your relationships with your business partners in the same way that you think of your relationships with your friends. Relationships are twoway streets, and they should feel like that. Don’t think of affiliates as working ‘for’ you, but rather ‘with’ you. And remember that communications don’t have to be long, drawn out and time consuming. Affiliates are just as busy as you are, so short and concise is often best. Send them a birthday card, a thank-you note or send them a quick email to let them know they’ve done a great job. Chances are, if you’ve left your affiliate feeling valued, appreciated or informed, you’ve done a solid job communicating.

Building Your Business with New International Relationships A great way to build your business is to develop new relationships with online business owners in different markets. You

“Think of your relationships with your business partners in the same way that you think of your relationships with your friends.” may be interested in expanding your reach to Asia, Eastern Europe, South Africa, or any number of other new locations, and a smart alternative to going into these markets blind is to team up with local partners that are already running successful online businesses. You don’t need to limit yourself to reaching out to people in the iGaming industry, indeed, it may well be in your best interest not to. Look for websites that advertise travel, entertainment or hospitality, and introduce your business to them with the idea of building a partnership. There is a distinct advantage to building relationships with local business partners. They are familiar with the environment, payment processes, geography, demographics, culture, language, environment – and perhaps more importantly, they know what works in terms of marketing. Here are just a few reasons why building international relationships can help you build your business in new markets. 1. Locals Know the Language There’s a big difference between speaking a language and knowing its intricacies and subtleties. General Motors learnt this lesson all too quickly when they introduced the Chevy Nova in Central and South America. In Spanish, ‘No va’ means ‘doesn’t go’, and so despite marketing efforts, sales were abysmal. Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi

generation” translated into “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave” in Chinese. Clairol introduced the “Mist Stick” curling iron into the German market only to ﬁnd out that “Mist” is slang for manure. Don’t lose your marketing and advertising incentives to translation nightmares. These mishaps could easily have been avoided if these companies had included a local partner on their advertising team.

newspaper advertising in a largely illiterate marketplace would be equally ineffective as creating a television campaign where most of the population does not own a TV. Don’t assume that marketing tactics are as effective in one market as another. When you develop relationships with leading business partners, they can help you determine the best possible way to advertise to their speciﬁc market, and help you avoid costly marketing blunders.

2. Locals Know the Culture Many business opportunities are lost overseas simply because the marketer is unfamiliar with the culture. A chocolate bar company that tried to market its weight-loss products in Africa did not take into account that in Africa, the heavier you are, the more money and social status you are considered to have. Had the chocolate bar business owner taken the time to discuss this idea with a partner who was part of the culture, he could have eliminated this ‘opportunity’ right from the get-go and moved on to bigger and better business ventures.

Relationships are Key to Your Success

3. Locals Know Effective Marketing Channels What may be tried and proven as a successful marketing channel in your market may well prove disastrous elsewhere. For example, investing in

Building strong relationships should be at the very core of your business. Promotions come and go; and while they may be an incentive for an afﬁliate to stay on board with you for a limited time, they are not a substitute for knowing your afﬁliates and meeting their needs on a consistent basis. And relationships are also an important stepping stone to developing your business in new markets. No marketing savoir-faire, no industry expertise can replace this. Just ask General Motors.

NICKY SENYARD is CEO of Income Access, overseeing their independent iGaming affiliate network, market-leading affiliate software and expert affiliate management services.

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

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WEBMASTER WORLD

OVER THE PAST five years, the industry has evolved at an incredible rate. Back then, it was very much a case of ‘anything goes’; there were three major search engines as a place to compete and make serious money (MSN, Yahoo! and Google). Email marketing worked pretty well. Rakeback was on the up and up. SEM and Black Hat SEO techniques were more or less the order of the day. The poker craze was taking the world by storm. Money was being thrown at affiliates during conventions, after-parties and, of course, those lavish private affiliate gatherings that operators hosted in exotic places all designed to lure in new affiliates. And, not to forget, the US market was open to all.

How things have matured and changed in the past three years Since the day of the exodus of most operators from the USA, the rush to capture the European market has been on. There has also been great growth in popularity for online sportsbetting and bingo. Numerous mergers and acquisitions both by afﬁliates and operators have taken place and there has been a conveyer belt of new skins entering the market. This, in my opinion, has actually been one of the main catalysts for operators having to install player criteria. The other thing is that with all this competition amongst the operators, player loyalty to speciﬁc sites seems to have disintegrated as their choices for places to play has multiplied. So, as we are left dealing with these changes and facing new industry challenges, there is one thing that remains unchanged;

iGB Affiliate FEBRUARY/MARCH 2010

the very basic dilemma of do you choose a CPA or rev share plan? This has, and I think always will be, a major consideration for any affiliate; today and tomorrow. Of late, many operators have been trying to impose rev share-only offers especially on new affiliates so that they can minimize their risk even further and reduce their cash flow outlay. However, I’ve always been a person that suggests negotiating a good CPA deal for one’s traffic. Why? For one thing, I believe CPA works so much better from a business perspective. How do you budget and set business plans when you might end up with $0 commission (or even a negative one, if your operator has a negative carry over policy)? And even if you built up an excellent player database generating high revenues, you could lose all of that overnight simply because of changes made in policies beyond your control. Like everyone, operators are now being forced to tighten their belts. But many will have little or no hesitation on taking the necessary courses of action to protect themselves first. So you put in the hours, you spend the money and you make it up the rankings. But then another unforeseen event happens and your traffic drops. What then? Wouldn’t it have been better to simply collect on those players upfront? Another thing to consider is who your partners are. Almost every week I get contacted by someone new trying to introduce themselves as the latest operator with the best conversions on this network or that network. All I can say about that is; do your research on every operator. Even

some of the biggest are known for not being particularly ‘afﬁliate friendly’. You get too big and they shut you down. Plus they keep all those registered players that are in the system for themselves.

The long haul So where to next as we start 2010 and look beyond? It’s always all about longevity. Brand yourself. People trust brands. They remember brands. Good brands convert better. Use tools that can deliver information or help to enhance your viewer’s experience. Make your site recognizable. This can be one small step to building and retaining brand and customer loyalty. Be diversiﬁed with your site offering. Offer casino, poker, sports and bingo pages. Not just ‘either or’. If you have only been targeting one language, add more. In fact, add as many as you can. There is still a lot of money to be made out there. Stick to what you do best, keep doing it and keep looking out for your own interests. Remember, it’s your trafﬁc. You own it. You worked to get it. Now it’s time you made the most from it.

EVAN SHEIN has been involved in affiliate marketing for over five years and runs Toptieraffiliates.com. For the last three years he has focused his attention on providing a very niche service in helping affiliates of almost all verticals monetize their website traffic. Evan can be contacted at evan@toptieraffiliates.com

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