American Bullseye: Using Ad Targeting to Optimise Your US Gaming Opportunities (Part Two)

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Last week we looked at the US real-money iGaming markets of New Jersey, Nevada and Delaware. To seize these three opportunities, operators and affiliates alike need to develop sophisticated and targeted marketing strategies. This week we’ll discuss three alternative US gaming opportunities: online horseracing betting, daily fantasy sports and social gaming.

Targeting the First Alternative: Social Gaming

Of the three, social gaming is the most open market. Social casino and free-play poker sites are currently legal in all 50 US states. As a result, 14.6% of the US adult population or 35.4 million Americans play social gaming brands, according to SuperData Research.

Of course, just because social gaming brands can be marketed to the entire country, it doesn’t mean that you should be complacent when it comes to marketing them. Your marketing strategy should be segmented according to region, state and even city.

Let’s say you have a free-play poker brand and there’s an important ‘live’ poker tournament at a Los Angeles land-based casino. Why not partner with the casino and develop a campaign to publicise both the event and your social poker brand? You’ll need geo-targeting to make the campaign really impactful – targeting players in the Greater LA area and even other major Californian cities if the tournament’s big enough.

Targeting the Second Alternative: Online Horserace Wagering

Geo-targeting becomes even more important when you’re marketing online horseracing betting brands. While the vertical’s legal in more than 22 different states, including California, New York and Louisiana, a number of other states, such as New Jersey, Utah and Texas, restrict it.

Texas and Louisiana sit side by side, but the first prohibits online horseracing wagering, while the second welcomes it. Given this divide, it’s vital that your online ads are geo-targeted very specifically across state boundaries. Players in New Orleans (photo, right) should see your brands’ banners but not players across the Texan border in Houston.

Targeting the Third Alternative: Daily Fantasy Sports

Geo-targeting is also vitally important when marketing daily fantasy sports brands. The vertical is expected to grow phenomenally. Indeed, Eilers Research forecast that the amount spent by players on daily fantasy sports sites like FanDuel will in 2015 exceed the annual amount bet on sports in all of Vegas.

Impressive? Sure. But for your daily fantasy sports brand to become a reality, you need to develop a sophisticated marketing approach that includes ad targeting. Although the majority of US states let residents play daily fantasy brands, there are a number of dissenters, including Arizona, Iowa, Louisiana, Montana and Washington. Your online ads need to be aware of this division when they target players.

Targeting the Alternative US Gaming Opportunities: the Solution

Daily fantasy sports, online horseracing betting and social gaming brands are a great short-term US alternative to real-money iGaming. However, as with real-money, to succeed you need to ensure that you’re targeting the right players in the right places.

To make operators lives easier, we’ve added an Ad Serving tool to our acquisition-tracking software. Using its capabilities you can target players at a state and city level. It also allows you to target according to language, letting you create separate campaigns for English and Spanish-speaking players, as well as time of day and day of the week, which is vitally important for daily fantasy sports brands.

We’ve talked about the when and the where of Ad Serving and the major US gaming opportunities. Discover more about the ‘how’ of Ad Serving by reaching out to us.