GPWA Times Magaine - Issue 23 - February 2013

ate managers at bet365 are excellent, to be honest. Other excellent managers include Garry McGibbon and Simon Dackombe at StanJames, Graeme Hoyne at Blue Square, Adam Kalmanson and Aaron Yarm at Wil- liam Hill, Craig van Flute at SportingBet and Elina Basheva at 10Bet. I have probably missed a huge number of other people who have helped me, so I apologize in advance if I have! In contrast, I have also worked with a lot of affiliate managers who just blanket e-mail everyone asking for top position x on your homepage and hope for the best, which is not as effective in my experience. It is also important to be able to meet your affiliate manager once in a while. I am based just outside London so it is easy for me to go to the various affiliate social events and conferences throughout the year to meet face to face. With regards to affiliate programs – they must be as transparent as possible. I am happy to push any suitable brand for a few months that fits our website content, and to be patient in waiting for that advertis- ing to generate a return, but only if I trust the affiliate program. It is surprising to read on the likes of the GPWA, Affiliate Guard Dog and other forums that many affiliates are quite untrusting of affiliate programs, so I feel this point is probably echoed across many affiliates. I have far too often found that tracking links do not track; they disappear or become disabled over time. Thousands of click- throughs strangelydonot turn into signups, and hundreds of signups do not convert to depositing players. These and other prob- lems have led me to question whether the effort we are putting in is being optimized and rewarded. For example, if you have sent 30 signups to an advertiser and you have achieved only one new depositor then alarms bells should be ringing on both sides – for both the affiliate and the advertiser. More recently I have been on an efficien- cy drive to analyze and create a lot more transparency in my own affiliate statistics. I would recommend that affiliates bench- mark their own statistics across their ad- vertisers – know how many clicks it takes for you to achieve one signup with a good advertiser, how many signups it takes for you to get a depositor, how much turn- over and revenue you generate per player, and compare this to everyone else. You can then make informed decisions about which advertisers work well for you. We are actually now slimming down on inefficient, nontransparent and unfriendly affiliate programs. These are programs for example that do not make us enough mon- ey for our clicks compared to efficiently converting programs, or ones that are start- ing to change their terms and conditions so that they are less in favor of affiliates. That is not to say we might not switch back and advertise them in the future. Keep- ing advertising fresh helps conversion. On the positive side the good affiliate pro- grams provide trustworthy stats, reliable affiliate systems and prompt payments. The ability to form a good relationship with an affiliate manager is essential. I have actually promoted programs for months without making a single penny but have continued to work with these programs primarily based on the willing- ness of an affiliate manager to work with me and stick at it. Over time the conver- sions have eventually materialized due to hard work and perseverance. One thing that really encourages me to ad- vertise a program is a good set of advertis- ing media. When you log onto an affiliate system and you see tens of thousands of banners that are all miscategorized and out of date it does not give you much con- fidence in advertising that company. Mobile gaming and social gaming are attracting legions of new players to on- line gaming. What if anything are you doing to bring these people to your sites? We are looking at mobile options at the moment. We get a significant pro- portion of our traffic from mobile devices. However, my train of thought is that many of these mobile devices have gone full-cir- cle now with regards to Web usability. We have gone from PC-based customers using Web browsers, to people using tiny screens on phones, to now where people are mostly carrying around a PC in their pocket with a screen resolution larger than most people had 10 years ago any- way! For those people surfing on a new Samsung S3 or an iPhone 5 our sites ren- der pretty well on those screens, and any- one with a tablet can use the full website anyway. I would advise anyone to dig a little into their Google Analytics and ac- tually see which devices are being used to view your websites. We are not complacent, though. It is not to say we do not have a need for mobile; we do already optimize advertising to our mobile users. How much time do you devote to SEO and/or social networking in order to drive more traffic to your sites? SEO is a natural, ongoing process for us. We do not set aside a certain amount of time to it. As for social networking we do try to post on social media every day, so perhaps 30 minutes to an hour on average. Some days, however, we might spend five hours hitting Facebook and Twitter ahead of a busy weekend or popular sporting event. If you had to pick five keys to success as an affiliate, what would they be? 1. Hard work – there are no shortcuts to building a good affiliate website. 2. Prioritization and being objective – if you are not careful you can spend all your time doing worthless tasks. 3. Choosing the right advertisers, working with those that perform well, and ulti- mately moving on from those that do not perform or fit with your website content and visitor profiles. 4. Understanding your visitors and their needs – this will help you optimize your content and ultimately your revenue. 5. Be open minded – being able to put aside your own biases and how you use the Web and assuming everyone else is just like you! And be open to new ideas. What prompted you to join the GPWA? How has it helped you? I had beenmean- ing to join the GPWA for a long while. The GPWA is an essential for any affiliate and going to the conferences may be, for many affiliates, the only chance they get to meet the companies they advertise. LAC is great, and Barcelona had its advantages too, being a smaller get-together. I only started going to the conferences last year, because I thought it was time to network and expand my horizons. Since running the websites on a full-time basis they have now become a serious business rather than a sideline hobby, so the GPWA and industry events are essential. If you could change one thing about the industry, what would it be and why? Make it more transparent . There are loads of things advertisers could do to make the industry more transparent. I am not say- ing the industry is largely unethical, but when you do not have as much transpar- GPWA AFFILIATE INTERVIEW SERIES GPWA Affiliate Interview Series