Does pay-per-click (PPC) advertising play an integral role in your overall digital marketing strategy? If so, how effectively do you feel you’re using paid search as an acquisition channel? Satisfied? Or could you be doing better?
Going into 2015, PPC’s importance as a B2C marketing tool for brands continues to grow – and the iGaming, social gaming and land-based casino sectors are no exception. However, to use PPC to acquire not just new players but high-value ones, operators need to ensure that they’re optimising their campaigns through technology.
Surveying Paid Search: The Acquisition Channel You Can’t Afford to Do Without
Sti
ll not convinced of the power of PPC? A recent report on the paid search industry by Hanapin Marketing reveals that a growing number of firms (55% of those surveyed) are allocating more than $1 million of their marketing budgets to PPC. A whopping 97% of companies consider PPC text ads either very important or important as a marketing tool, according to Hanapin Marketing.
The future also looks good for the paid search market. As we approach 2015, 83% of firms are optimistic about PPC’s impact, a 21% increase on the companies that felt that way in Hanapin’s survey last year.
These facts and figures suggest that iGaming and land-based casino operators should embrace PPC as an acquisition channel. Sure, the nature of gaming places some minor geographic constraints on your Google AdWords and Bing Ads campaigns, but these are far outweighed by the many lands of PPC opportunity.
Players for real-money brands in most European markets, including the UK and Scandinavia, as well as Australia, can be targeted using PPC text ads. On the other side of the pond, the American PPC market is open to paid search ads for land-based casinos and daily fantasy sports. While other gaming-related opportunities exist, promoting real-money online casino and poker sites to US players is restricted.
Optimising Paid Search: Third-Party Software to Acquire the Right Players
If we’ve convinced you to start developing PPC campaigns to market your brands, you’ll soon become very familiar with Google AdWords and Bing Ads. The two search engines’ respective PPC platforms provide you with almost everything you need to monitor, analyse and optimise your PPC text ads. Almost everything, that is – but not everything.
Let’s say you launch a PPC campaign for your new UK-facing online casino brand. Your ad group on Google AdWords includes five text ads with different keywords. AdWords indicates that two of your ads result in much higher conversions – player registrations and deposits – than the other three. What do you do? You pause the three underperforming ads and extend the reach of your top-performing twins, right?
Let’s consider their performance in more depth. Are these two ads really twins when it comes to performance? Sure, they’re converting roughly the same number of players, but what about the quality of those players? Google AdWords gives you no info about how much each converted player is depositing when they register.
What to do? To discover the true value of every player converted by your PPC ad, you need to integrate third-party software like the Income Access platform, whose Ad Serving tool can create tracking links for your campaigns. Once this software is enabled, you might discover that of our two top-performing text ads, one is converting much higher-value players than the other, even though they’re driving the same number of conversions. As a result, you can pause all campaigns except your true top-performer.
By using Income Access’ software you can not only carry out conversion optimisation for your live PPC ad groups, but you can also gain valuable insight into keyword performance for future campaigns. “Thrilling online casino” converts more high-value depositors than the keyword “Best online slots”? Use that knowledge to develop your next PPC campaign for that brand.
Given the conversion optimisation of PPC campaigns that a third-party platform like Income Access can provide, it’s not surprising that more and more B2C firms are planning to use this type of PPC software in 2015, according to Hanapin Research. Will you be one of them?For more details on our platform’s capabilities and our PPC campaign management services, please don’t hesitate to get in touch.
