Launching earlier this year, GamblersPick is aiming to enrich the casino experience by providing players with a community-driven portal that offers the chance to share online gaming experiences and rate casinos and games.
House Tech Ads Director Oren Arizoni spoke to Affiverse about how the launch of the platform has gone, as well as the importance of personalisation in the brand’s approach.
Affiverse : GamblersPick was built to plug a gap in the market, has this been reflected in the opening months of the platform’s launch?
Oren Arizoni: It sure was reflected. Two weeks into the month after launch, we’ve already seen new users signing up and engaging with the site – we’ve seen reviews of casinos and games, as well as brand ratings changing steadily on a daily basis.
Apart from on the site, we’ve had users contacting us directly asking for directions and recommendations. All in all we’ve had a positive reaction to GamblersPick, in a sense that reaffirmed for us the existence of gap that the site came to plug, and its effectiveness in actually doing that.
Have you had any obstacles in the process of building an online community for casino players?
Getting users to sign up is always a challenge for any site, regardless of its subject. For a site that focuses on online casinos and gamblers, it’s even harder. While other sites offer incentives such as bonuses and giveaways in order to encourage players to sign up, we remained quite basic with our approach – the incentive so to speak is to let players say their piece and to have them engage with others.
The foundations of our community are built on sharing, rating, voting, and we believe that with time this dynamic of rating will encourage users to interact with others, creating said community side by side with us improving GamblersPick with new features and optimisations based on authentic feedback. It goes without saying that GamblersPick is closely moderated, to ensure a safe, clean and authentic environment for our users.
How important has the personalisation of your approach been in building the community?
Personalisation has been one of the major ingredients that guided us when we thought up and created GamblersPick. First and foremost, the site is fully geo-targeted and its content is being adjusted correctly according to the user’s location: This covers all the important layers that need to be taken into account when a user logs in from a certain country, that is – regulation status, licensing and so on. We’ve witnessed just how important this is over the many years of our experience with OnlineCasinoReports.com. GamblersPick launched just around the time that the new GDPR regulations set in, so it has also served as a driving force for us to perfect our localisation and privacy fine-tuning.
We’ve tried to reach a perfect balance for how information is relayed to us by the players, doing as much as we can to promise privacy while at the same time maximising players’ personal experiences using info that they choose to give us. Our profiles let players enter optional data such as preferred types of games, casino bonuses and so on, and in future versions of the site this will be cross implemented.
Can you reveal some of the more popular features on your platform?
Our Jackpots Meter has been popular with players and we are very proud of it, in a nutshell it lets you know what, where and when you should play; this has also been the case with our Jackpots Finder app, on which we based our meter. Slot themes have also been very popular – we have a huge directory of slot themes which are broken down into sub-themes; anyone who takes a quick look will quickly realise just how specific we got with these themes.
We’ve also seen a lot of interest in our bonuses by games feature which lets players find available bonuses for the games in which they are interested, and of course, our main casinos section has been popular. In future versions of GamblersPick we will introduce advanced sorting and filtering tools that cross sections. We’ve put great emphasis on filtering and sorting abilities in order to let users fine-tune their search so they will reach precisely what they’ve been looking for.
Another popular feature lets other users interact with each other by rating others’ reviews and also selecting if the review is useful or not, this is also a great feature that lets the community monitor itself, which is important in a community site.
Could you detail to us any plans for expansion or innovation that GamblersPick has in the future?
We’ve got a lot of plans for GamblersPick. We are going to localise the site for more languages, improve our bonus finding tools and filtering options and generally improve the way in which players use the site to find what they’re looking for. We are always working on improving the data we present on the site, making necessary changes and updates and amending any inaccuracies should they appear in such a comprehensive body of information. Improved data includes our vision for Geo-voting – letting players from a specific locale know how others from their region rated a casino.
We will introduce more engaging community tools in order to further encourage our users to share and interact with others and helping each other with tips, sharing of knowledge and so on. We intend to expand this ability to even more aspects more than games, casinos and operators – things such as guides, tips and other useful content.
The aggressive bonus offer has always been a traditional form of marketing to online casino players, how do you think this will change going forward and what marketing tactics should affiliates be using to engage audiences to give them a better experience and get them to convert?
Nowadays, online casino players are to be regarded to as consumers, and as learned consumers they make their research before picking what to go with. Bonuses will always play an important part of the online casino world, but a casino where you have to send endless documents and wait months to claim your “huge bonus” is sometimes not the best choice. So we believe that a good affiliate needs to be able to cater to the smart, learned and informed consumer.
We believe on focusing on the things that make you as a player stay and not only enter, that is – trustworthiness , transparency, security, dedicated customer support, a wide and varied selection of games and payment methods and of course – bonus incentives as well, but the bonuses should not be the focal point. We’ve also done this with our GamblersPick Select seal of approval which marks casinos of the highest qualities which answer these requirements, this is reflected in the categories for which Select casinos qualify – which do not include bonuses. The only important factors of our Select casinos are: Trustworthiness, Customer Experience, Safety, Payments and Games.
