Converting Gambling Traffic – Banners

Many affiliates spend all of their time trying to drive traffic to their site and tend to disregard converting their players. It is one thing to get them to your site but if you can’t convert them the traffic is worthless.

I have a hard time with this and have been working on ways to improve conversions and increase my earnings. I am going to write a series of posts about the changes I have done and the reasons behind them.

Disclaimer: The conclusions I have come up with are due to a small sample size of traffic and may not work for you. The best thing to do is constantly try new techniques to convert your traffic.

250×250 Banner on Best Online Poker Sites

When I designed Best Online Poker Sites I thought a 250×250 banner in a premium spot would drive a fair amount of my homepage traffic.  So, I put a rotating banner script which displayed a 250×250 banner of one of the three best poker rooms from a list I had to the right of the banner. I figured people would likely click it after seeing that it was one of the top poker rooms.

This ended up not being the case and when I added tracking to the area I was surprised to find out people rarely clicked the ad and it was basically a waste of premium space.

Banners	Impressions	Clicks	CTR
	914	12	1.37%
	877	12	1.37%
	799	3	.38%

The click through ratio was barely over 1% when I combined all of the banners stats. In total out of 2,590 I had 27 clicks which meant my CTR was 1.04%.

Why The Banner didn’t work

Banners can be great in the right places but I think at times people disregard them because they have been conditioned to ignore them (even if it is what they are looking for).

A banner on a homepage with lots of information is going to perform badly as people will look for additional information that isn’t a flashing box claiming a huge bonus to a site they have may never heard of.

New Poker Splendor Homepage

I found through looking at my stats that most of my traffic was clicking on the best US poker sites list. So, in my mind, it was a no brainier to expand the best us poker site list and eliminate the banner.

This has definitely helped me drive traffic directly to the poker rooms without having them go to other non-converting parts of my site. Looking at my stats (non-scientifically) I would have to estimate that about 10-15% more of my traffic now goes to the best US poker sites then before with the banner. My earnings for the rooms also increased after the change.