It’s the subject that nobody wants to mention alongside a marketing piece, however it is the one piece of information that almost everybody in the gambling industry has been looking to answer. With Betting furloughed for the considerable future as major events like the Grand National and Euro 2020 succumb to delays, it has been up to the other major verticals such as Casino, Bingo and Poker to make up the differences for the ‘big brands.’
While nobody will admit the truth of the situation – that is to say that no online casino is going to announce that they are having a record month or losing half their reserves shoring up player accounts – it has been interesting to see what has happened from a marketing perspective (now that major sports sponsorships are out of the picture and credit cards are no longer accepted). One of the greatest levels of insight we can garner is actually available courtesy of the Google Trends tool – a freely accessible tool offered by Google to showcase where the interest in certain topics, around the globe is actually sitting, and one that when used correctly can assist you both in understanding an audience and also in helping your site improve both its’ visitor numbers and page engagement rate.
For example – much like you are all expecting – when you look at a term like ‘flights’ or ‘football betting’ in the last month – the drop off in percentage popularity (out of 100) is catastrophic.
Google Trends: Football Betting
Google Trends: Flights
A search in the other direction however with terms like ‘face mask’ yields a very different story and showcases a ‘spike’ at the time of the pandemic breakout.
Google Trends: Face Masks
So how can this tool give us the necessary insight into the gambling market that we are looking to understand more of … take two of the largest terms in the online casino space – ‘casino’ and ‘slots’. In the image below – there are two pieces of important information to take away from the ‘Trends’ insight. The first is that the demand for casino stayed pretty average while slots jumped to its’ maximum peak of 100 and, while it has subdued back a bit, it has still steadied above where it once sat. The second piece of information is harder to spot but is actually the more astute observation: that is that the small index at the bottom-left determining the average for each term – shows that casino should be higher than slots … but at this present time, and certainly over the last month – that hasn’t been the case.
Google Trend: Casino/Slots Comparission
So what can we do now that we know this information. If we were hosting an online casino – the most sensible option would be to scale back on our PPC spend and continue our online marketing knowing that the demand had not changed (or had only slightly peaked as would be expected at the Easter season). If we were focussing our attention on an array of new online slots (from blockbuster titles to megaway slots), then we would use this period as an opportunity to increase our PPC and overall marketing spends knowing that the demand was peaking well-above where we would normally have expected it to, thereby offering an opportunity to accrue more market share and more new players to our brand.
At the end of the day, the Covid-19 pandemic has changed the way most online platforms are run and online casinos and gambling sites are in no way different than the wider array of verticals. While online shopping sites and medical supply websites will be booming, the demand for casinos has only changed in a slither of instances – and for those who are looking to take advantage of the situation – the truth is that there is limited room to do so. In a saturated market such as the UK gambling space, the only edge that you can get now is to use all the tools available to you such as Google Trends, News and Suggest features to determine longer-tail opportunities (to rank for more keywords), to write engaging content (to increase your pages per session numbers and reduce your bounce rate) and more importantly – where the best bonuses and game selections are (although here at SmashCasinos.com – we think we’ve done a pretty good job in figuring out that last one).
Stay safe and enjoy the selection!
