This is an article I wrote for the London Affiliates Conference 2014 Magazine.
Online Reputation and Affiliates
I’ll start by talking about the trust ecosystem on Google, because when you understand this, you understand why for so many sectors reputation is really, really important.
We trust Google.
Here is some proof. When we’re considering a purchase, 84% of us are influenced by what we see online. Google is where 91% of us navigate the internet from
Pew internet did piece of research on the trustworthiness of Google. They found on average 66% say that search engines are a fair and unbiased source of information
Another piece of work from Eidelman around trust in information sources, shows that we trust search engines as trusted as traditional media i.e. newspapers and TV
Source Edelman Trust Barometer
Generally people trust Google and they trust what Google ranks. So arguably your brand is what Google says it is.
We ask Google questions.
When we use Google its because we have a question to ask. A typical search query is ‘your brand name’, or ‘[your brand] reviews’ and whatever the results are, they will influence consumer buying decisions.
If a brand has a number of bad reviews or negative feedback that ranks on their most important ‘consideration’ phrases, it can be damning.
According to a survey by Dimensional Research with 1046 respondents, 90% of us are affected by online reviews and 86% of us are affected by negative online reviews. This validates the importance of good online reputation for any brand.
Source: Dimensional Research / Zendesk
Review phrases are ‘consideration’ phrases i.e. someone is thinking about buying, but hasn’t made their minds up, so they want some 3rd party unbiased information to help them make a decision.
This set of principles drives the commerce on whole parts of the internet, but with iGaming affiliate, the trust and reputation ecosystem doesn’t quite work like like you think.
Affiliates
There is a very counter intuitive thing about iGaming affiliates when it comes to SEO …the most profitable affiliates attract the most commercially hot traffic and pass them straight through to the operator.
If you could do SEO and not bother with your own site and just get traffic straight from Google to the operator that would be great… hmmm it reminds me of something. Adwords?
Getting back to the point, about reputation. Reputation matters when you have a brand. You will want a brand because you become trustworthy and memorable and the place to come back to again and again.
A good guide to wether your site is a brand is to use a tool like Semrush.com , type in a domain and if you get more than 35% ofthe traffic on their unique brand phrase – it’s a brand (by my definition at least)
You could say livescore.com its a brand forinstance. According to trafficestimate.com it gets about 20 million visits a month But livescore.com has a big problem. It is really bad on conversion. It’s a drive through site i.e. you dip in and out getting your scores.
Clubcall.com is a brand. It’s been around since 1996 and has football news. It gets about 1.5 million visits a month and is terrible at making money ( I know because I am a shareholder of the site ), why? for the same reason as livescore.com – drive through traffic. At least livescore has 10 times the volume of traffic and is a destination site, so it gets sensible revenues from brands willing to pay typically £600 per conversion for banner ad inventory and it will get some decent affiliate revenues.
Theoretically the best performing affiliate sites are casino ‘spam’ sites, that is if you can get the traffic.
Onlinecasiinotop.net is a classic. Does this site look like a moneymaker to you?
And when you look at the site, you will probably think ‘how can a site like this make money?’.
The searchmetrics graph shows it ranked and died.
I had a discussion with Irishwonder, the notorious black hat spammer and it turns out she had some inside knowledge on this. Mr Onlinecasinotop made fortunes, enough to buy a spare house and have change for a mid priced Ferrari, all off ranking for ‘online casino’ and having such an awful site, that the banners looked attractive enough to click.
As an affiliate, you care about money. You are only there to pass traffic through to a conversion. That’s how you get paid.
The catch is, if you want to play in the Google organic search ecosystem, they demand you follow these webmaster guidelines:
Quality guidelines – basic principles
Make pages primarily for users, not for search engines.
Don’t deceive your users.
Avoid tricks intended to improve search engine rankings. A good rule of thumb is whether you’d feel comfortable explaining what you’ve done to a website that competes with you, or to a Google employee. Another useful test is to ask, “Does this help my users? Would I do this if search engines didn’t exist?”
Think about what makes your website unique, valuable, or engaging. Make your website stand out from others in your field.
That’s a problem if there is nothing very unique, valuable or engaging to make your website stand out. And in fact if you do follow guidelines, you probably won’t encourage traffic to just pass through your site and convert.
This is why most affiliates are at odds with Google and why they will never be a brand and why reputation will never matter to them.
There are a few sites where this rule of thumb does not apply, assuming you care about maximising affiliate commissions.
Odds comparison sites
By their nature they are about comparing one operator with another on the value of a bet, so naturally it makes sense to look there for value. Oddschecker is the biggest and most famous of these sites, yet its biggest traffic phrase is ‘bet calculator’ with ‘odds checker’ coming 3rd.
So in many ways no matter how you look at it, brand and affiliate dont really go together, therefore reputation by default isn’t a significant consideration for you.
Reputation because its a ranking signal
Google is pushing Google plus and authorship in a huge way. Their idea is; rank based on who wrote the content, not what site.
It’s a very hard signal to game and so you will see far more reliance on this and other social signals helping Google understand what sites and pages are worth ranking because people care.
Without getting into a long thing about Google, it’s in their interest to promote useful relevant content that helps form buying decisions and use Adwords to bring users directly to commercial sites. So promoting content written by real trusted people is huge.
Operators
Affiliates do play one very important part in the reputation ecosystem. They can make huge operators sink or swim on reputation.
As we know, affiliates will promote the operators who earn them the most commission. This happens because the operator can keep converted customers gambling for longer with more sustained losses. If an operator does a good job at keeping the customer happy and losing, then the affiliate is happy.
There are constraints, for instance if an operator is cheating punters on margins and odds or if customer services are terrible, then these customers will leave and gamble elsewhere. This means less revenue for the affiliate and so they will drop the operator and use one that does actually do a good job for them
Consideration
As we know affiliates can do something operators don’t usually do – price compare. This is why keywords like ‘bookmaker reviews’, ‘free bets’, ‘casino offers’ are so attractive to affiliates.
These phrases are known as consideration phrases i.e. you are considering who to go with before making a buying decision.
In other industry sectors affiliate commissions are tiny in comparison to iGaming. 5% versus iGaming’s 20% – 34%, so generally there isn’t a huge commercial incentive to dominate the consideration searchresults. Therefore the information is more trustworthy and life carries on.
When you add ‘most money making operator’ and ‘domination of consideration phrases’ together, you end up with something almost unique to iGaming; a broken reputation ecosystem that works!
Finally
So to wrap up, in my opinion affiliates should not worry about reputation in the ‘brand’ sense, but should pay a lot of attention to either genuinely winning or nicely faking good social signals to show ‘reputation’, so Google is happy with you.
And collectively you hold the cards for operators reputations, even though they may not appreciate that fact
If you are interested in seeing a conference presentation I have done on reputation management, check out : http://90digital.com/blog/nick-speaking/reputation-5368.html
About:
Nick Garner is CEO of 90 Digital, the iGaming Search & Reputation agency. He is been in iGaming since 2006 where he began as search manager for Betfair and subsequently became Head of Search for Unibet. At 90 Digital his team of 44 works with brands like Betfair and Pokerstars.
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