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Have you ever considered making money by expanding into iGaming? We’re going to shed some light on how to gain real profit within the very competitive iGaming industry. To do that, we invited the CCO of RichAds advertising network, Anatasiya Kazakova, to talk about all the peculiarities of successful campaign launches and how marketers should optimise their strategies online.
Q: How long have you been working with iGaming offers?
RichAds has been working in the iGaming industry since 2018. The platform was launched together with the previous FIFA World Cup and saw huge results. The Championship started right at the beginning of the push traffic boom and the results of the campaigns for the 2018 World Cup were amazing due to the novelty of the advertising format. Right now, the FIFA Championship in Qatar also has drawn a lot of attention to the sports betting industry, and we face a great number of new advertisers on the platform who are satisfied with the results. The gambling industry as a whole is in the top three of our best-converting industries this year.
Tell us more about choosing traffic sources for iGaming offers — which ones actually work?
What we’ve seen at RichAds is that push ads, popups, and direct clicks show the highest results. To be more precise, push ads show the best results while pop and direct-click ads can be used for additional monetization. The safest option is push ads, obviously. The concept has proven its efficiency and showed the best conversion rate even back in 2018. Why is it a perfect match for iGaming?
First of all, a push notification addresses the user personally and offers to bet on a specific game or earn money in a particular casino. This ad format is also very noticeable and allows testing a great variety of creatives that allow for the segmentation of the target audience and testing different approaches. We highly recommend paying special attention to pop ads. They’re underrated but guarantee high profits. They’re hard to miss, which is great for the iGaming audience. Players are impulsive and tend to react to loud Calls To Action and bright images, so use them to your advantage.
Last but not least, make sure to test direct-click ads. Their main advantage is that they target only users who are interested in similar offers, so they’re already “warm” and wish to test sports betting or gambling.
Could you share the best GEOs for iGaming with us?
Sure, but first I need to point out that they change constantly depending on events or even seasons, so you need to constantly stay tuned and track the upcoming events. Remember to consult your managers, they can always provide you with a list of converting countries. And don’t forget that there’s more than one niche in each sector. For instance, you can launch not only football offers but also cricket ones, when it comes to sports betting. This sport opens new GEO opportunities such as in India, Pakistan and Australia, for example.
What I personally see now is that there are a prevalence of tier 3 and tier 2 countries in the iGaming industry, especially African ones. When it comes to RichAds, we try to pay special attention to Brazil, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Indonesia, and South Africa. If we speak about Europe, we choose Germany, Switzerland and Poland.
The thing is that traffic in tiers 3 and 2 is cheaper, while the amount of gamblers is significant and it only grows. To be honest, tier 1 countries can convert as well, but that’s not the best choice for new businesses.
There are many approaches to iGaming creatives. Can you recommend any winning bundles?
I wouldn’t want to seem trivial, but the most basic yet converting approach is to use gamification elements: spinning wheels, slots, huge bonuses, etc. Basically, anything that has entertaining value and hints at getting huge profits. But there is also merit in different approaches for different locations. For example, the main approach that has the highest click-through rate in sports betting in South Africa is showing exact bonus amounts both in texts and on creatives. Headings such as “free gift”, “free sign-up bonus” or “win big” work best. Don’t forget to show famous players and mention loud brands.
Another example is online gambling in Indonesia, where advertisers stick to the gamification approach. Spin wheels are used both on banners and icons, while welcome bonuses are also mentioned in every text.
And the last tip I can give is to always translate headlines to the native language and use at least 5-10 creatives to find the right approach for your offer.
Optimization and iGaming — any advice on how to avoid wasting money?
Optimization is the key to a working iGaming campaign – as it was for us at Richads. First, get the whitelist from our managers for free and use only premium sources to get the highest quality of traffic at once. If you have a tracker set up, the second crucial option, set automated rules as soon as the campaign starts. This way you’ll automatically block non-converting or expensive sources automatically, without constant checking of your results.
An even more effortless way of optimizing is to use the target Cost-Per-Action algorithm. It actually does all the work in terms of optimization for you and tries to fit into your CPA goal, but again, a tracker is required.
Marketers always look for ways to earn as much as possible and constantly try different networks. Any tips on testing RichAds traffic without great expenses?
Actually, at Richads, we’ve recently launched a function aimed at quick and quality testing: Performance Mode. Even if you don’t have a tracker, but still want to have the best results together with automatic optimization, give it a go. It is an algorithm that creates black- and whitelists automatically and renews them every day according to your settings. You just set up a usual campaign, and that’s it — everything is done for you. Furthermore, recent tests have shown that with the help of the algorithm conversion rate can increase by 253% while CPA decreases by 79%.
Do you have any predictions on iGaming industry in 2023?
We don’t see any global changes in terms of popularity as the industry seems to be growing as time goes on. What interests marketers is that there is a huge change in browser settings is coming. Push ads will be available for iOS 16 users in the Safari browser. This way we’ll receive a greater amount of new audience that isn’t familiar with push ads and new opportunities for marketers who work with iGaming industry will open.
