Amaya
Summary:
While we won’t go into the Amaya drama, we did have a chuckle when we started to be targeted on Twitter by ads from Morganti Legal who are “Investigating Shareholder Lawsuit Against Amaya INC”
Impact on Gambling Industry:
Following hot on the heels of a rake hike this is yet another chink in the PokerStars brand, can competitors do anything to capitalise? We doubt it.
Links
Screenshot of Ad here
Article from 2015 which highlighted the share activity that promoted the Amaya Investigation
Chat Ad Bots
Background:
Purveyor of such fascinating click bait headlines as “21 Child Stars Then and Now… Wow How They Grow Fast” and that guy with the hipster beard who speaks 11 languages. OutBrain have announced a new “Chat Bot Ad Service”.
Chat Apps are the new social media and the top 4 chat apps combined have more users than top 4 social apps combined.
Impact on Gambling Industry:
Some Sportsbook operators have been ahead of the curve for this a while with stand alone dedicated chat apps powered by Onion Sack. However these apps do not integrate into third party message services that the users are actually on. This is the big step the industry needs to take.
Cheltenham PPC Case Study
Background
Cheltenham is one of the biggest PPC acquisition periods for UK bookmakers. Two weeks before Cheltenham Google removed the right hand side ads from the desktop search results causing some concerns.
Case Study
The team at TMI recently published a case study showing what they have seen happen in the auction during Cheltenham in 2016 and 2015 and the impact on CPC and CTRs.
What Happened:
As expected, CTR dropped massively for ads at the bottom of the page (positions 5 to 7) with the majority of clicks going to operators in positions 1 to 4.
Interestingly there was some hesitation by Operators and TMI are reporting they exploited an opportunity to take advantage of lower CPCs in positions 3 & 4 with an increase in clicks.
Conclusion
We agree with the TMI conclusion that this will normalise over time as search teams sort out the data and do more testing. This also highlights our view that being aggressive at times of change creates opportunities.
SMX SEO
We’ve been keeping an eye on what is getting presented at SMX SEO conference and feel these two presentations are the best and most relevant.
Future of Deep Linking & App Indexing
How Google Works: A Ranking Engineer’s Perspective
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