How to Recover Lost iGaming Traffic
Every visitor that comes to your website is an opportunity to generate revenue. Whether the traffic is organic or paid, there is an investment in acquiring those visitors to your website.
However, not every visitor will reach an iGaming site operator successfully. There are several reasons that a visitor may reach an endpoint without successfully registering with an operator.
Publishing houses often assume that any visitor that hits an error on a website has been lost to their publisher efforts. However, many of those visitors can be recovered with the implementation of the following strategies.
Recovering even a small percentage of the traffic that is blocked by licensed operators can significantly impact your affiliate revenue.
Why Traffic Recovery Matters
Generating traffic for your publisher programs can become increasingly costly each year. The methods used to generate traffic for content include search engine optimization, content marketing, paid advertising, brand development, social media, and email marketing programs.
If the traffic generated for your website gets blocked before it can reach an operator, your marketing efforts have returned little value to your publishing house.
Recovering some of the existing traffic can be a more cost-effective strategy than increasing your spending on acquiring new visitors.
Why Visitors Become Blocked
Understanding the reasons that visitors become blocked on licensed operators is half the battle of recovering those visitors.
Some of the most common reasons that traffic gets blocked include geo-blocking, licensing restrictions, using unsupported iGaming operators, compliance requirements, using broken redirects, having expired promotions, and encountering technical failures on the licensed operators website.
Some of the blocks cannot be avoided. However, several can be managed with proper strategies.
Replace Dead Ends With Alternatives
When visitors encounter a redirect or some other means of error on your website, instead of showcasing an error page for them, you should show them an alternative operator that you work with.
Several alternatives can be shown to visitors based on your operator rankings and licensing requirements. By doing so, you give them one more option before they leave your website.
Use Smart Traffic Routing
Traffic routing software will analyze each visitor before they are exposed to your affiliate offer. Several factors will be analyzed, including their country of residence, the device they are using, their browser language, and which operators are available to them.
Based on these criteria, the traffic will be routed to a specific iGaming operator. This significantly increases your opportunity to monetize your publisher program with each visitor.
Create Localized Landing Pages
By creating localized landing pages on your website with different content for different regions, visitors will be more likely to convert to your operator programs.
Content that should be included on localized pages can include the licensed operators available in their country, their local payment methods, the currencies used in their country, the bonuses offered to visitors from those countries, and content in their native language.
Expand Your Operator Portfolio
By working with only one iGaming operator, you lose the ability to offer an alternative in case your visitor is blocked from your main operator.
Having a portfolio of several operators allows you to present alternative operators in the case of a blocked visitor.
The benefits of working with several operators include geographic expansion, increased conversion rates, reduced dependency on only one partner operator, and increased potential revenue from your affiliate program.
Keep Promotions Current
If you have a visitor landing on your site, they likely came to discover the promotions that your operator offers.
If the promotions have expired, your visitor is likely to leave your site without further consideration of the offers that you can provide them.
Reviewing the promotions that your operator has will ensure they are current with the offers they present to your visitors.
Improve Internal Navigation
If your visitor is encountering issues with one of the offers that you provide, your website should allow them to easily navigate to another offer that you provide.
Elements that can be included in your website navigation can include content about other casinos in the area, payment methods, offers, and other features related to your operator that can be beneficial to increase the visitor’s engagement with your website.
Capture Visitors Before They Leave
Not every visitor to your website will want to register for your operator at the time that they visit your site.
You can provide them with other opportunities to engage with your website to build your future affiliate traffic opportunities.
Examples of such opportunities can include email newsletters, bonus alerts, industry news, betting and casino guides, and strategy articles for the iGaming world.
Analyze Recovery Performance
To effectively manage your website and the traffic to your offers, you need to analyze how well your traffic recovery strategies are working.
Several recovery metrics to track on your website and software include the percentage of traffic that gets blocked by licensed operators, the percentage of visitors that get successfully redirected to another offer, the number of visitors that convert to operators when exposed to alternative offers, the revenue generated from the traffic that has been redirected, the percentage of traffic generated from each country, and the percentage of visitors that successfully navigate to alternative offers when encountering issues with your main operator offer.
These recovery metrics will help you improve your strategies each year to increase the percentage of your traffic that gets redirected to offer revenue opportunities.
Reduce Technical Barriers
Several technical aspects of your website impact the ability of your visitors to be redirected effectively to an operator.
Elements of your website that engineering teams should monitor can include the accuracy of redirects, landing pages, mobile compatibility, tracking software, and the uptime of your website.
Improving these elements will improve your traffic recovery efforts.
Segment Visitors by Intent
Not all visitors that come to your website have the same interest in the same type of offers from the same type of operators.
For example, some visitors may be more interested in sports betting than in casino games.
By segmenting your visitors by the type of offers they are interested in, you can greatly increase the likelihood that each visitor will discover another offer that aligns with their interests.
Automate Recovery Workflows
As publishers and operators websites grow in size, the manual management of visitor traffic can become challenging.
Automation software can manage the routing of visitors to offers based on factors like location, device, traffic source, and interest segmentation. The automation of these recovery efforts can significantly increase revenue for your publishing house.
AI Is Improving Traffic Recovery
Artificial intelligence software is allowing publishers to better manage the recovery of visitors who are encountering technical or licensing difficulties with accessing the offers they desired on licensed iGaming sites.
Artificial intelligence software can identify the best affiliate offers for each visitor by analyzing their browsing behavior, their location, the devices they use, their interest segmentation, the promotions available from licensed operators, and several other factors. These systems will identify any technical issues that may prevent a visitor from accessing an offer and provide a more personalized offer to the visitor to increase the likelihood that they will accept it.
Common Recovery Mistakes
Unfortunately, many publishers are unaware that they are reducing the possibilities of recovering their website visitors.
Such mistakes include displaying error pages for blocked visitors, using expired promotions to lure in potential visitors, promoting only one iGaming operator, ignoring geographic targeting of their website content, failing to monitor the traffic that their website receives, and failing to provide visitors with navigational opportunities to other offers on the same website.
Correcting these mistakes will significantly increase your affiliate revenue.
Best Practices for Traffic Recovery
To improve traffic recovery efforts, focus on the following best practices for publishers and operators to follow:
Identify where traffic gets blocked.
Route users to alternative offers intelligently.
Create localized landing pages.
Work with multiple iGaming operators.
Monitor traffic and recovery metrics continuously.
Update offers and promotions.
Optimize user experiences on mobile devices.
Capture returning visitors.
By implementing these best practices, publishers can significantly increase the percentage of their website traffic that gets redirected to their iGaming operators to generate affiliate revenue.
Final Thoughts
Traffic that gets blocked from licensed operators does not have to become lost revenue for your website.
Although there is no avoiding the licensing restrictions and requirements for iGaming content and operators, there are several strategies that publishers can use to dramatically improve the percentage of their visitors that get to register and contribute to the affiliate revenue programs that they operate.
Through providing visitors with alternative options, working with several licensed operators, and analyzing the success of your current traffic recovery strategies, your affiliate programs will increase their revenue opportunities from existing website visitors. As the competition in the iGaming industry grows stronger every year, focusing on recovering existing website traffic will be one of the best strategies to increase your affiliate revenue without increasing your website and program costs.