Mkodo year in review w/ Will Whitehead, Commercial Director

There are many ways to get high income on iGaming products and actually earn a great deal of money. In the article we’re going to speak about making money specifically on affiliate marketing, our today’s expert is a Chief Commercial Officer at RichAds advertising network — Anastasiya Kazakova.

Our guest surely knows what she’s talking about — the RichAds network has recently been awarded as the best iGaming traffic source by SiGMA. We’ll discuss all the necessary starting points and cover everything from the definition of the industry to the real working tips that help to succeed in it. 

Tell us more about affiliate marketing. What is it and how can it help to earn on iGaming?

Basically, affiliate marketing is a process of earning commission on selling specific goods or services. It’s profitable for online casinos as a way of additional monetization and for marketers as it’s quite an effortless way to increase their income.

It works the following way — there’s a CPA network or a direct publisher, for instance, who provide iGaming offers (online Betting and Gambling programs).

A marketer, also known as an affiliate, in his turn clarifies the conditions (payout, GEO, settings, and desired cost per lead or deposit) and goes to an ad network that provides traffic and promotes the offer.

He just needs to choose the best traffic type for the exact offer and set up a campaign. If you’re a newbie, the best way is to consult a manager or try some automated tools at first.

Can you share what are the best traffic channels for iGaming offers? 

Sure, I’ll explain how each traffic channel works and why they’ll bring leads and deposits for iGaming offers. I’ve been working with Gambling and Betting vertical for about five years now and I see that the top traffic choices are push and pop ads as well as direct click format.

Let me start with push ads and the definition of them. To put it simply, a push ad looks like a personal notification from a website that appears on a user’s phone. It consists of a text, icon and banner (optional) and allows to cover those users who subscribed to such notifications.

There are many advantages of the format, the most crucial ones for iGaming are:

• • Personal approach. As I’ve mentioned, it addresses a user directly and creates a sense of privacy, so this way you can convince him to try a specific casino by providing a bonus or bet on the upcoming game.
    
  • Proven efficiency. Such a format has been showing nice results since its boom — 2018, and the CR of such campaigns is really high. Even if we take the last FIFA Championship in 2018, the outcome for marketers was amazing. This year the results for the World Cup are already skyrocketing which proves its continuous success.
    
• Target audience segmentation. Due to the usage of creatives you can target different people and imply their interests with the help of different headlines and pictures. It allows testing several approaches at once, which is perfect for identifying your potential clients.

One more format is pop ads. This is basically an ad that opens in a new browser or window as soon as you click somewhere on the page you’re browsing.

They are impossible to miss, that’s why it’s a great way to attract Gambling and Betting audience, as they’re very impulsive. Moreover, the traffic amounts are really huge for the format, so you’ll always get enough clients on your landing page.

Last but not least is the direct click format. Those are the ads that drive users to your landing page if they make a small misprint. For example, they look for the “1xbet” website and type something like “1xbed” and get redirected to your site. Obviously, the main advantage is that users are already warm and interested in similar offers, which means they will be more loyal.

How to make eye-catching creatives for iGaming vertical? Any tips from you?

It depends on the time you can and want to spend on making creatives. If you don’t have time to spend on making them, just contact your manager. For instance, at RichAds you can get creatives for a specific offer and GEO for free.

Another way is to use spy tools and research what your competitors create. There are tools for different formats, pay attention which options they provide if you’ve chosen a particular traffic source.

If you’ve decided to make creatives yourself, I can advise several working approaches.

• For Gambling stick to gamification elements, use spin wheels or some loot boxes. This way you’ll create a sense of winning and huge luck.
  
• Make sure you use bonuses both for Gambling and Betting. Everyone loves gifts and prizes, why not take it to your advantage? You can specify exact sum and time limits, for instance.
  
• Keep track of current events. This is the most amazing approach for Betting, if you stick to the hyping events. As for now it’s football, but don’t forget about other sports as well — tennis, cricket and basketball are popular all over the world.
  
• Last but not least, use both men and women on your creatives. Don’t limit your target audience by gender, anything can convert — the key is testing, so both beautiful women and handsome men can work out.

If I’m a newbie in this industry, what’s the most effective way not to waste money? 

Undoubtedly, I’d say that the Performance Mode algorithm is the hack that can help newbies. The thing is that it does all the work for you — just create a usual campaign, and the algorithm will update the best sources daily for you and check if they actually work. What’s more it’ll update blocklist daily as well.

Furthermore, no tracker is required to use the function. So anyone can launch profitable campaigns with it, basically no efforts or prior knowledge are required.

Not to be unfounded, our clients have been testing it for a couple of months already and it works like a clock. If we turn to statistics, it shows that the amount of conversions can increase by 253% while CPA decreases by 79%.

As far as we know there are countries that are a must to test for iGaming. Which ones would you recommend?

I’d advise to start with Asian and African countries, such traffic is not very expensive, and the demand for online casinos is huge. For such regions Gambling and Betting can be considered as an income source, not only entertainment, try to play on it.

What concerns current top GEOs at RichAds for iGaming, they are Brazil, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Africa. If you want to target European countries, try Poland, Germany and Switzerland.

Of course, you can test Tier 1 countries as well, but it requires certain experience to become successful. Though, profits can be bigger as well.

Here I also want to point out that the hottest GEOs change from month to month and it’s important to keep track of it.

You can always consult managers for the best countries for exact verticals and offers. Don’t hesitate to ask for whitelists (list of best traffic sources) for your GEO and traffic channel, this is also free!

Ok, let’s imagine we’ve chosen a GEO and made creatives. How to actually make your campaign work?

The first answer that comes to my mind is optimization. No one wants to waste money and time, that’s why it’s vital to keep track of the campaign results. You need to check the cost of your conversions and source efficiency quite often to achieve a good conversion rate.

In order to speed up the process I’d advise to set up Automated rules. This is the quickest way to cut off traffic sources that are too expensive or don’t bring any results.  You just need to write a simple rule in your settings, for example, if the cost of a conversion is twice as big as the desired one, the source will be blocked. Same with the amount of money spent, if a source spent twice as much money and didn’t bring any leads, it’ll be turned off. This is a great way to avoid overspending and is done automatically!

One more way to succeed is to test a Target CPA algorithm. This is also quite simple, you just choose all the necessary settings, write your desired price per conversion, and the algorithm does all the rest for you. It adds the most converting sources to your campaign while blocking not working ones. Though you need to set up a tracker, it’s crucial for the algorithm to work.

If we speak about overall settings, I’d highly recommend to focus on the following ones:

• Choose only premium group of sources. Those are tested sources that show highest results and guarantee to bring conversions.
  
• Set frequency cap. This is the advice for push ads, frequency cap is the amount of ads a user sees per day. Usually we recommend to set one per user a day, but for some event betting offers you can increase the amount to 2-3 a day.
  
• Test New Subscribers only. Again, a tip for push ads is to have two campaigns at the same time — one for the usual subscribers base, the other one for new ones. Those are users who subscribed to push notifications 7 days ago or less and haven’t seen much of them, so they’re more loyal. If you target two user bases at once, the amount of traffic will be huge and diverse, so the amount of leads will also increase.
  
• Use at least 5-10 creatives. This also applies to pop ads, try different landing pages at once! This way you’ll be able to test multiple approaches and segment your target audience.

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