Free SEO Gambling Traffic

There will always be a lot of discussion by affiliates about the percentage of traffic that they convert. I have found real money player conversions (from your site to real money players) has a lot to do with keywords. There are definitely other site factors including calls to action, programs you are promoting, banners used…etc. But in the end, I think if you have the best keywords (online poker, online casino) you will convert more traffic than the most optimized free casino/poker site.

I think most people realize that “free” is a really low converting keyword but there is a lot of traffic for it. So how bad can it really be?

I created a site to target a “free” (casino/poker) site and here are the stats so far:

Clicks: 719

Unique Downloads: 35

Sign-ups: 30

New Depositors: 0

Yep, no conversions…This doesn’t mean that later down the road there won’t be any real money conversions as this is a small sample size of time and players. Though, I can definitely say that “free” keywords aren’t a get rich quick type of keyword. Also, the program that I was sending the traffic through has done really well in the past with converting players so I don’t think it’s the program…Although, I may try sending the traffic to another program to see if I will get better results.

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.

2009 WSOP Satellites Graphs and Banners

Update (8/5/09): Since the poker sites have stopped running tournaments for the 2009 WSOP the widgets are now blank. I will do this again for the 2010 WSOP Main Event satellite seats.

The biggest promotion that all poker affiliates are pushing (or should be) is the 2009 WSOP Satellites. It is a great way to attract new or even established poker players as many know the stories of Moneymaker and all the past Main Event winners who became millionaires over night.

I have created a couple widgets and banners for seats given away for the 2009 WSOP Satellite Main Event at both Poker Stars and Full Tilt Poker.

I am allowing affiliates to use them for a link back on that page or another high quality page on the site (excluding link pages or pages with minimal content).

They are updated every 15 minutes and can easily be inserted into any website since they are iframes.

If you would like to use them send me an email: kdollar (at) gmail.com. I will then email you a text file with all the iframe codes for the graphs and the banners as well as linking options.

All the possible WSOP Main Event graphs:

http://www.pokersatellitestrategy.com/widgets/

All the possible WSOP Main Event banners:

http://www.pokersatellitestrategy.com/widgets/banners/