Affiliate marketing for online casinos

Upgaming offers you an affiliate system that lets you manage, track, analyze, and optimize your online casino’s advertising activities from a single place. It gives you various advantages, such as creating your own affiliate network, analyzing the data to create actionable insights, optimizing the campaign performance, managing the assets and commissions, etc. For additional information, you can contact our sales team, and they’ll let you know about every detail of the system.

What is affiliate marketing?

Affiliate marketing for online casinos is a common and highly effective, performance-based marketing strategy that can be used in many industries. Online casino affiliates are web content creators and publishers who earn a commission by directing customers to the promoted business. Affiliates can drive traffic to partner sites by using banner ads, advertisements, and links. Online gambling platforms reward them with a commission for each player they refer.

Affiliate programs allow content creators and publishers to become affiliates. Web publishers must draw a certain amount of traffic to be considered as a part of an affiliate network. They also need to have a solid and trustworthy reputation to gain followers.

Types of iGaming affiliates

There are many types of online casino affiliates. They can be:

• Bloggers – Affiliates often write about the iGaming industry. They may write about the new games, bonuses, and latest releases. They also evaluate online casinos to determine their quality and trustworthiness. Bloggers can drive traffic to your website through articles, listicles, direct advertisements, and vlogs.
• Online magazines – Affiliates can create online magazines about iGaming content that publish the most recent news and direct large audiences to your gaming website. these magazines can be available in digital forms as well as in print. Such magazines include iGB Affiliate, GPWA Times, SiGMA Magazine, SBC Leaders Magazine, and many more.
• Forums – Online casino players gather on forums to exchange insights, information, and opinions about online sportsbooks and casinos. Sometimes, the owners of those forums or moderators can be affiliates. For instance, you can check gambling portals, such as AskGambler, which has a Casino Affiliate Program list on its webpage, and AffPapa. To learn more about this topic, follow the link about affiliate forums.
• Streamers – Some players stream videos of themselves playing games like poker. Through their broadcasts, players who follow them on YouTube and Twitch connect with them and learn more about the new or already famous games you might have in your library. Streamers can be active on streaming platforms like Twitch and YouTube Live and websites dedicated to live streaming online gambling. You may choose to compensate them with a single payment or a portion of the earnings produced by every client they introduce.

Affiliates can operate on a global, extensive level and bring together all types of content from casinos and sportsbooks from different markets. On the other hand, a group of very specialized affiliates also exist that focus on certain types of casinos operating in specific markets. For example, an affiliate site might only review online casino platforms that accept cryptocurrency payments. IGaming operators must consider their target audience and the audience of their affiliate network when selecting a partner.

Why do you need to work with online casino affiliates?

Affiliate marketing for online casinos provides numerous advantages for operators. It significantly influences their advertising performance, website traffic, and brand awareness. To cut it short, we don’t have to tell you how essential it is to market and promote your online casino. But, still, If you need to find out more about it, you can check the articles about online casino marketing and the costs of online casino marketing.

The main thing with affiliates is that to acquire a substantial base of users, operators need continuous traffic on their websites. Affiliate marketing for online casinos is one of the most efficient and valuable ways to get it. Needless to say, SEO is still one of the main domains that work to increase your web platform’s online presence. But, still, online casino affiliate marketing is a different outlet in the sense that it is performance-based. You can always track, manage, and analyze the strategies you’ve been enacting in your affiliate network. 

The apparent benefits of affiliate marketing include adjusting advertising campaigns to target markets by cooperating with the right affiliates and assessing and making adjustments to your strategy as necessary.

Reward systems such as loyalty and VIP programs are some of the most widely used strategies for player retention. Email and SMS marketing are also popular marketing strategies. However, in that case, you need to have potential players’ contact information obtained when a player fills out the form on a landing page to which they were directed by an affiliate banner.

Advertisements on an affiliate’s website will drive large amounts of traffic to your online casino. This will help build brand awareness and improve the image of your online sports betting or casino platform. Even players who do not click on the banner ads to reach the site will be aware of your website by seeing its advertisements. Affiliate marketing for online casinos is a great way to increase brand awareness at a time when brand recognition is growing in importance.

How to find online casino affiliates?

In the initial stages, finding the most appropriate affiliates for your online casino business may appear daunting. It’s important to note that the experience varies for each operator. Seasoned and well-known operators often have little difficulty identifying and reconnecting with their previous affiliates. Nonetheless, for new operators, the process of uncovering new partners may require additional time and effort. However, through diligent research, one may be astonished to uncover the plethora of affiliates available and the number of them eager to collaborate.

In essence, there are various ways to find the affiliates. You can find them by conducting a competitor analysis, defining their referral sources, and then target their affiliates. Otherwise, you can just simply research online casino-related keywords on Google, half of the results that will appear on the first page will be affiliate websites. You can also turn your attention to various affiliate forums and iGaming affiliate platforms on the web, allowing you to search within the thousands of affiliates and communicate with the preferred ones.  To get a complete picture with detailed information, we recommend checking our article about How to find perfect affiliates for your online casino.

Types of commissions in affiliate marketing for online casinos

There are various types of commissions in online casino affiliate marketing. These types are revenue sharing (or simply RevShare), pay-per-acquisition, and hybrid models.

• Revenue sharing (RevShare) – The rev-share model implies that affiliates earn a portion of the net revenue of the online gambling platform. This is a highly profitable commission strategy because both the affiliates and online casino operators are rewarded for their performance. The more revenue and sales the operator generates, the greater the commission for the affiliate partner. Rev-Share is often associated with the online gambling vertical, and almost every online casino offers it to its partners. 
• Pay-per-acquisition – Pay-per-acquisition is a less common model in the iGaming vertical compared to RevShare when it comes to paying affiliates. Nonetheless, many operators still offer this type of commission to their partners. In this case, a payment rate depends on a specific action, such as making the first deposit after registering on the online casino’s website. This strategy is generally used by new online casinos since they are still in the stage of bringing clients to their platform.
• Hybrid – A hybrid model combines the approaches that are mentioned above. This model includes revenue-sharing and pay-per-acquisition. Thus, by offering a hybrid commission type to your affiliates, you can pay them 5-10% of your revenue plus 50-60$ per acquisition. A hybrid model is also a popular option for affiliates in the iGaming industry.

Frequently Asked Questions