Data: PokerStars stands tall despite a tough poker market

The online poker industry has faced its fair share of challenges in recent years. Traffic has been on the decline since the peaks of 2005 and 2006, the impacts of regulatory oversight in the US shook the industry hard (most infamously on ‘Black Friday’) and only in the last few weeks, we have seen PKR call in the administrators.

It all typifies the difficulties facing poker operators in the market, where we are seeing some quite remarkable shifts in the organic search results, and some notable brands losing organic visibility.

PokerStars dominates while the rest struggle

PokerStars is far and away the most visible brand in the UK poker market. The brand ranks for 93 of the top 98 keywords in the market, and achieves high rankings across the board. This is something that the brand has done consistently, although there has been a slight drop in visibility between 2016 and 2017. From our analysis, we estimate that PokerStars has seen its traffic from organic search fall from 12,478 to 11,748 between September 2016 and April 2017, despite similar levels of search traffic in that time.

But it is a very different story for the other big players in the market, where a combination of ranking falls and even Google penalties appear to have hit a number of brands that, in 2016, were among the most visible. Partypoker is the biggest ‘loser’ in that period, seeing its traffic from organic fall by 62.6%, while NetBet.co.uk, the third most visible brand in 2016, is now the 220th most visible brand – a fall that is likely to be the result of a manual action penalty from Google.

Other notable fallers include Full Tilt Poker, which has fallen from the fifth most visible to the ninth, 888poker has fallen from 10th to 25th on our leader board.

Grosvenor and Sky Poker buck the trend
But it isn’t all doom and gloom in the market, with some significant risers in the market over the course of the eight months between our market surveys. In particular, Grosvenor Casinos and Sky Poker have both added more than 4,500 clicks to their traffic totals, with Sky Poker becoming the second most visible brand in the market.

In the case of Sky in particular, this appears to be due to strong performances on prime keywords, rather than rankings over a wider range of our keyword sample. This could put the brand at risk should the rankings change in the future, so the next stage for the brand should be to achieve rankings beyond the 46 keywords of our sample that it currently ranks for.

Bet365 has also emerged from relative obscurity in 2016 to achieve strong visibility in 2017, becoming the third-largest gainer in our analysis.

Falling traffic makes visibility more important than ever
The Google Trends data for poker makes for rather grim reading, and this points to why brands such as PKR have had their difficulties in 2017.

Search traffic has shown a marked decline since the heady heights of 2005-2006 and this makes traffic in this market even more valuable. There are still hardy players out there looking for their fix and brands need to be in a position to capture the traffic that exists, retain it with a high quality service proposition, and use it as a platform to cross-sell customers to higher-margin casino and slot game products.