How casino affiliate programs work and how they benefit players?
Gambling providers came up with some seriously clever ways of approaching new players and generating extra revenue. From our point of view, affiliate programs are the best of all because they proved to work well regardless of the market and the preferences of local gamblers.
This marketing model isn’t a local thing or anything like that, but rather an international trend that you can spot everywhere from North America to Europe to Australia. Take Norway as an example. In this country, the best online casinos create outstanding affiliate campaigns to impress and attract new users. A quick look at the latest casino reviews reveals the quality of these providers, and easily convinces first-time players to give them a try.
But what exactly is affiliate marketing? And what do all parties involved get from it? Our goal is to answer both of these questions in the next few sections. Let’s get it going!
What Are Casino Affiliate Programs
We know most people hate definitions, but there’s no way around it this time. In a nutshell, casino affiliate programs are simple partnerships between online gambling sites and marketers who promote their services to potential players. In this case, the job of an affiliate is to get new users acquainted with a casino’s services through:
- Personal websites
- Blogs
- Social media channels
- Gaming platform accounts
In return, every affiliate earns commissions – this is determined based on the traffic or revenue generated through their own unique referrals. The more users they refer, the higher the revenue. Reports show that, across all verticals, the average affiliate marketer earns $8,038 per month.
For example, let’s say a casino offers you a deal where you bring friends to their platform in order to get a cut of the house’s profit every time your friends play. That’s essentially how affiliates work, but often on a much larger scale. In almost all situations, the affiliate market follows one of these three models:
- Revenue share
- Cost-per-acquisition (CPA)
- Hybrid model
In each case, the idea is to make more money through mutual cooperation.
Key Benefits for Players
It is pretty evident that casino affiliate programs benefit marketers, but this benefit also transfers to the actual players as well. For example, you can often get access to exclusive bonuses (think of higher deposit matches or cashback offers) which generally aren’t available by signing up directly with a casino. That way, you gain more value for your money compared to the standard system of non-affiliate signups.
More importantly, you get to learn a lot from affiliates as they often provide detailed reviews of the casinos they promote. The idea is to help the actual players figure out the ins and outs of any given website, so they can make more informed choices about where to play. This gives you extra transparency in terms of fair gameplay or trustworthy RNG systems, so you can play worry-free.
Key Benefits for Casinos
This part should be fairly easy to figure out because it is much more intuitive than the previous section. Online casinos obviously benefit from affiliate partnerships because they are able to reach a much broader audience without incurring the high costs associated with other – more traditional – advertising solutions.
That’s because affiliates bring highly targeted traffic: Influencers tend to entice players who trust their recommendations, and that leads to higher conversion rates while increasing the overall loyalty of customers.
Another reason why affiliate campaigns are so cost-effective is this – instead of paying money and hoping to achieve results, affiliate programs are all about performance. In other words, affiliates who do not generate attention do not get paid.
Bonuses and Promotions from Affiliates
We breezed through this theme in the opening paragraphs, but it certainly deserves a more solid explanation. The key reason why casino-goers appreciate affiliate campaigns is that they reap the benefits of fresh (and otherwise inaccessible) promotions.
For instance, many affiliate partners tend to negotiate special deals with casinos so as to pass them along to their followers. These bonuses typically include more generous welcome offers or free spins – features that make users more likely to engage with a given online casino.
Trends Shaping the Future of Casino Affiliates
Mobile optimization is not as new as it may sound, but it demands constant attention due to its sheer importance. Almost every gambler out there will play games on a smartphone or tablet, so it becomes of utmost importance for affiliates to promote casinos with perfectly optimized mobile content.
In addition, it’s natural to see marketing partners relying on data analytics to track player behavior so as to refine their promo strategies. For instance, they ought to do it in order to personalize offers based on users’ affinities.
We also need to mention another booming trend, and that is the need to create content that doesn’t look as promotional as traditional marketing campaigns. Players expect gambling campaigns to naturally integrate with affiliates’ contents, and that will remain the only way to design a top-performing affiliate program.
Conclusion
The bottom line is that affiliate campaigns act as a triangle with some serious advantages for each party involved in the process. Affiliates get to earn money through referrals and online casinos can grow their user counts, whilst players get extra funds to bet with. That’s exactly why everybody seems to love affiliate programs and why they continuously prove to be the most effective marketing tool for gaming providers.