Data: Affiliates take the lead ahead of National Hunt showpieces

Bookmakers sprang to life last month with a raft of bonuses and inducements for customers new and old ahead of the National Hunt showpiece at Prestbury Park. And you can bet your bottom dollar the same is likely to occur again in the lead-up to the big Aintree meet this month.

March and April are some of the most active in the online racing betting markets, and that activity is fuelled significantly thanks to Cheltenham Festival and the Grand National.

Over the course of the year, the search volume for generic racing betting keywords peaks at just over 27,000 in the month of March. However, that peak is dwarfed by the event specific keyword searches that take place around Cheltenham and the National. Cheltenham related searches peak at close to 80,000 in the month of April, while more than 540,000 searches take place in April alone for Grand National related terms.

While customer lifetime value for the Grand National tends to be relatively small (the so-called ‘Granny Bet’ effect), for Cheltenham in particular this peak in search interest represents a huge opportunity – and it’s one that many of the bookmakers may be missing.

Winners and losers
Last year, we reported that bookmakers were not in prime position, in terms of organic search rankings in March to capitalise on this peak in interest. Instead, while bookmakers did rank relatively respectively on generic terms, they were outranked by a number of affiliates for event-specific keyword terms.

Have the bookies modified their approach to reign in the affiliates? Well, it would appear not. In fact, the affiliates appear to be taking the lead on the generic terms, as well as the event terms.

As we approached Cheltenham 2016, Paddy Power was the most visible brand in organic search across the whole market. However, it has now been overtaken by Oddschecker. The price comparison site is one of the biggest winners from our analysis in 2017, achieving double the amount of monthly clicks when compared to March 2016.

Other big winners were grand-national-guide.co.uk, aintree-grand-national.net, freebets.co.uk and the TV broadcaster At The Races, and these have gained visibility at the expense of established bookmaking brands.

Betfair, Sky Bet, Coral, 888sport, BetVictor and BetBright have all lost notable levels of traffic according to our analysis, with only the first two brands remaining among the 10 most visible domains. In fact, only Ladbrokes, William Hill and Paddy Power (despite losing first position in our index) appear to have gained traffic from organic search.

Bucking the trend
In other gaming markets, it is common to see affiliates struggle to rank within the markets – or at least, to rank for any sustained period of time. However, sports bookmaking is a search market that lends itself much better to the affiliate business model, as it is naturally an industry that can support a range of useful, informative content.

The weeks leading up to any sporting event and any race, not least the two biggest on the racing calendar, are full of views, opinions, tips and debate and the affiliates are extremely agile and adept enough at producing this quantity of content at a very quick pace. Affiliate websites are also built purely for content, and this helps them to adapt to Google best practice – they simply aren’t held back by the limitations of a clunky CMS that is designed to service bets, not content that search engines can read.

That remains the challenge to address. As long as the affiliates can keep producing quality content more quickly, they’ll continue to take click share in these competitive markets. 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.