Data: Horserace betting search visibility

Digital marketing agency Stickyeyes asks whether online bookmakers missed a trick at the Cheltenham Festival

As the world famous roar was heard for the first time at Prestbury Park, one couldn’t help but wonder where all the bookmakers actually were.

This year’s Cheltenham Festival convinced the bookies to bring out the usual array of free bet, money-back and extra place offers that we have come to expect from the biggest meeting in British racing, but it seemed that many of them were hiding in the shadows when it came to organic search.

We analysed more than 600 horse racing and betting keywords in the run-up to the opening day of the Cheltenham Festival, and found that bookmaking brands were struggling to overcome the dominance of affiliate sites and price comparison services in terms related to the Cheltenham Festival.  

These bookmakers are successfully earning organic visibility across generic terms but, when it comes to event-specific terms, what is happening to allow affiliates to take valuable ground.

Significant keyword peaks

The keyword opportunity for events is significant. We have trended search volume across the year and while generic volume remains fairly consistent through the,there are clear peaks in search volume across the entire keyword set in the months of March, April and June. These peaks are driven by the Cheltenham Festival, Grand National and Royal Ascot respectively.

When it comes to both Cheltenham and the National, event-specific searches actually overtake generic terms during those months, so there is a significant opportunity for operators around these key events.

The distribution of clicks also reveals the size of opportunity, with event-specific terms providing a significant number of clicks from a much smaller number of keywords.

We can see here that the Grand National is by far the most active event from a search perspective, with more than 130,000 potential clicks available at peak.

So how are brands positioning themselves in the market?

The horse racing market is extremely competitive, with many bookmaking and affiliate brands competing very heavily for position.

Paddy Power is the most visible brand, ahead of the affiliate site Oddschecker, but the market behind these two is incredibly fierce. William Hill, Ladbrokes, Sky Bet, Sporting Life and Betting Directory are all closely clustered together, indicating the strength of competition for those organic search positions.

But it is worth noting that in this ‘whole of market’ analysis, much of the high visibility for the affiliate websites is the result of high rankings for event-specific terms – particularly Grand National and Cheltenham.

It is often said that bookmakers themselves do not actively target the Grand National as an event online, due to notoriously lower customer lifetime values that the event generates (the effect of so-called “Granny bets”), but what about Cheltenham? This is one of the most profitable events in the calendar, so surely bookmakers are throwing resources into this market? Well, not so it would seem.

Whilst we see that there are notable bookmakers achieving visibility, such as Paddy Power and William Hill, the market is being crowded by affiliate websites. Oddschecker is the most dominant brand, followed by Cheltenham-Festival.co.uk (a tips and free bets blog).

Bucking the trend

The visibility of affiliates in the horse racing betting market is at odds with a trend that we have seen in other gaming markets, particularly bingo and casino, where these affiliate websites have fallen away. There’s a very simple explanation for this – content.

Sport is something that naturally lends itself to content, more so than other gaming verticals. These affiliates are filling a demand for content, producing relevant and useful content throughout the year to be in prime position for these events.

For the bookmakers, that is the challenge. Their brands are strong enough to secure visibility in these relatively sparse but potentially lucrative markets; they just need to dedicate resource into producing content on these events over the longer term.