Industry reaction: How will Google’s casino stance affect the search for success in the US?
As Google plans to lift its ban on online casino advertising across the pond, who are the biggest winners and losers in the market?
News emerged yesterday that Google was planning to lift its ban on online casino advertising in the US gambling market by the first quarter of 2020.
The search engine’s switch in strategy will open up a plethora of marketing opportunities for US-focused gambling firms as they gain access to the world’s largest publisher.
But for many businesses looking to make it in America, finding success in online gambling’s most exciting market just got that little bit harder.
Below, four digital marketing experts share their thoughts with EGR Intel.
Pontus Karlsson: CPO at Pineberry
Advertising for online casino has been banned for a long time on Google in the US. If the ban opens up, the biggest winner will be Google themselves. It is a huge market, and the online casino keywords will fast become some of the most expensive within Google Ads.
The online casino operators will also benefit from this change, since a very efficient marketing channel will open up for them. Today, affiliate sites bring home a lot of the search traffic related to online gambling. Adding ads to the search results will move a big chunk of search traffic from organic results to paid ads, making casino affiliates potential losers.
Liam Casey: Consultant and former head of marketing at The Stars Group
The change in Google’s policies for online casino advertising is a double-edged sword for an early-stage industry. Performance marketing has always been the most expensive acquisition channel – and the casino vertical the most expensive within the channel.
Agility in being able to make quick decisions, optimise, change and improve results is something that affiliates tend to be better at than operators. These affiliates tend to be absolutely performance-focused, so have a clarity of purpose and experience that can be lacking due to wider marketing mix focus at operators.
Everybody will be watching everyone else, particularly in terms of initial offers and calls to action. European marketing knowledge will be at a premium here, due to the hard-won battle-scars of running every type of online casino offer – some that won, some that lost.
Neil Roarty: partner at Wedge Traffic Ltd
I think the fear around the Google ads for both sports and casino for smaller affiliates is that the market elsewhere is so mature that it’ll be all of the big PPC firms that move in on launch day and drive up the prices immediately. This means that you’re not going to be able to get much value out of it as the likes of Catena and Better Collective can go in and test with throwaway budgets, that would require a pretty reasonable ROI for smaller affiliates.
The difference between the US and the African countries [where Google also recently relaxed gambling advertising rules] is that the potential upside for getting Africa right is nowhere near that of the US, so you won’t see as much of a rush from the big-budget firms to try it. It means people can trial a lot more stuff, whereas in the US I think the cost, even if you’re first to be approved, will be a huge barrier.
Ali Syme: former head of marketing at Nektan
There are those in the industry who believe that Google should relax rules to increase revenue, or that the only blocker for Google is territorial regulations on advertising regulated products.
We’ve seen with Sweden that Google puts the cost of compliance before business, which operators should appreciate since Payment and Fraud teams aren’t there to make money and CEOs overturn or ignore compliance advice at their peril.
To allow advertising, they need expertise and legal knowledge of the current laws to be able to handle the documentation required for advertising on their platform (in the UK this is a copy of a recognised licence), how to handle misuse of the platform, what the costs are to them from regulators if they fail to act quickly.
With the US, they clearly see enough clarity with laws and enough of a demand from operators to warrant building the infrastructure needed to support advertising. The timetable for this roll-out makes sense, given it’s similar to how Google and Facebook approached the Swedish market.