How to Identify and Eliminate Inefficient Online Gambling Ad Spend?

A drop in the ocean.

That is how each spend on ads appears to businesses and operators undertaking them. And this may not always be the wrong outlook.

Here’s why – 

Each click or impression will cost you $$$. Depending on the goals set for your campaign and the targeting aligned, ad spends can become fodder for budgetary straitjacketing within marketing departments.

If the ad is programmatic, there is even more cause for alarm. Your marketing manager may control who sees the ad and how much money gets spent. But where will the ad be placed? It’s anyone’s guess. You may as well bring a knife to a sword fight.

The plot gets even murkier. 

Only after the money leaves the wallet can it be properly accounted for. That’s because a click does not guarantee a conversion. Users may click away at their leisure (and at your expense). 

Often your ad won’t cause registration. Other touchpoints affect conversion.

So the next best thing to be done is: controlling wasteful spending and streamlining your online gambling ad spend. If you’ve got checks and balances in place, you can map every dime leaving the bank. How can you make it happen? Let’s examine.

Why Do We Need to Limit Ad Spend Waste?

With great power (read: $$$) comes great responsibility. There are three main reasons why patching up this hole in your pocket now is a must.

1. The ROI and Profitability Aspect

When you can’t keep tabs on ad spend that isn’t resulting in registrations or deposits on your platform, you’re investing with no hope of returns. You might as well put a blindfold on for your next campaign.

2. The Issue of Misallocation

The other issue is, you’re most likely missing out on other opportunities for growth, revenue enhancement and effective returns if you’re not watching your online casino ads strategy like a hawk.

3. The Pressure for Results

Throwing money at a platform with the hope of getting even one conversion is an absolute no-no. Without the right direction and tools in hand, performance marketing teams cannot bring outcomes into existence.

You must be wondering, what tools can save a flailing gambling ad and the associated spends? The truth is, your marketing budget could be falling victim to more than poor planning. But you’re not going to know the cause without due analysis.

Where Does Online Gambling Ad Spend Waste Come From?

The core factors which are bringing inefficiencies to your online gambling ad strategy are listed below.

1. Ad Fraud Instances

Running ads and not expecting bad actors to do their thing? That’s just bad strategy. Fraud’s hitting your campaigns in a variety of ways. Here are some of the most common ones:

1. Click Fraud – Data centers and bots could be targeting your gambling display ads or programmatic campaigns with fake clicks.
2. Impression Fraud – Poor contextual placement or incorrect targeting towards non-human traffic can pile up impressions without any boost in brand awareness.
3. Traffic from Bots – Bots, data centers and unserious players may even register, triggering conversions which are not valid.
4. Bonus Abuse – Suspicious characters can register and add a small deposit, with the goal of making away with the bonus amount. Many platforms match the bonus in a 1:1 manner, which makes this type of fraud extremely common.
5. Affiliate Fraud – Within the broader marketing spend, affiliate campaigns can be a major draw for those indulging in such acts. Ad hijacking, link squatting, data center traffic, fake registrations and misleading creatives are exceedingly common. 

Local or global, all kinds of fraud can be limited due to some simple reason. Since fraud on online gambling ad spend is not an anomaly, there exist robust tools to detect and prevent it. All you have to do is find the right one for yourself, and incorporate it in your processes.

2. Poor Audience Targeting

Are your ads coming up in the feeds of people of the wrong age, incorrect country or interest group? That could explain why your current ad spend isn’t giving you any results.

Many organizations operate through ‘buyer personas’ which is a clear indication of why targeting is poor. Who ends up becoming a customer cannot always be predicted through planning, especially in dynamic spaces like iGaming. 

You could be hitting all the wrong spots when it comes to:

• Geography
• User Preferences
• Income
• Keywords
• Website Categories

What’s even worse is — your retargeting efforts are again reaching the exact same audience which has rejected you once already. Are you not evaluating bounced visitors to your website for relevance before they interact with you again? Playing with your online gambling ad spend in such a manner should be a crime of the highest order.

3. Bad Creatives, Messaging or Experience

Still sticking to “50 Free Spins” and “$100 Bonus — You Won’t Regret It!” to make a point to ad viewers? That ship sailed many eons ago. Good content marketing is a must in all geographies.

Poor messaging like this can be an instant mood-kill for potential customers. Deficient graphics on top of that? Maybe some lost soul still clicks on your ad, and reaches your slow-loading, non-mobile optimized landing page. Then you’re definitely done for. 

It’s certain that their click off is going to register 0 seconds of session time. Your leaky faucet is actually a full blown pipe blast if you’re in the midst of compounding errors of this nature.

However, this is not always the case. The ad itself could be right in all ways, shown to the correct audience but the landing page too needs to match this framework. It should have: 

• clear, direct calls to action (CTAs), 
• comprehensive information, 
• visible disclaimers and privacy policy, and 
• short, easy to understand copy.

Without these basic steps, you’re sure to be spilling your online gambling ad spend somewhere along the way. And that’s without accounting for the cost of non-compliance of channel guidelines.

4. Media Buying Missteps

If you’re experiencing an inflow of cross-network traffic (which can be easily verified on GA4) that can’t be attributed to a similar number of conversion events, your ads are showing up across the wrong display networks.

Or, maybe you’re not segmenting for device type. It may seem insignificant. Yet if people with devices that do not support your online casino website or app are being exposed to your ads, it’s a waste you could’ve eliminated.

Then there are simple strategy issues which are straining your spending. Here are the most common ones:

• Heavy investment on poor ROI channels
• Low spend on effective, but longer funnel conversions
• Campaigns having overlapping audience sets
• Focusing only on CAC, instead of LTV

That’s basically how poor media buying can skew the numbers against you. 

Diagnosing Wasted Online Gambling Ad Spend

To know where it is all going wrong, you need to thoroughly inspect all the sources of the waste and work out how much you’re losing. For some, this sum may not be eye-popping — but we all know every dollar counts.

1. Analyze Your Data

Start by checking your numbers. Not the usual ones, but the stuff that comes after the conversion — deposit amounts, website visits, wagering behaviour, LTV per customer and affiliate, and so on.

Does the data show drop-off points within your funnel? Then you need to clock exactly where this is more prevalent. Does it happen more:

• Post landing page registration
• After the first instance of brand communication
• Immediately after the first game,
• Or, While filling the registration form itself.

Knowing where interventions are needed is the first step to fixing the outflow problem. But the fault may not simply lie with your funnel, and instead be a direct result of the traffic your online gambling ad spend is bringing. Set up filters to review your traffic quality through:

• Session source/medium
• Session duration
• Device type
• Number of pages in a single session, and
• Time of day.

Finally, verify if this is an ongoing challenge or limited to a specific campaign you’ve recently run. Go back to the data and compare cohorts across acquisition sources to test this hypothesis.

2. Invest in Fraud Detection

Since fraud exists, fraud detection is absolutely necessary. 

You can use third party tools and get your tech team to build platform-based fraud detection features. But what should you be looking out for?

• Bot traffic
• Suspicious IPs
• Use of VPNs and location blockers
• Odd click patterns
• Anomalies in account usage, etc.

Timely (and often instantly) fraud identification and blocking is the only way to conserve unwarranted ad expenditure.

Occasionally, fraudulent actors may evade such safety nets and still enter the platform. For that you must have additional security protocols (which are also required for regulatory purposes). These protocols should be expected at the pre-registration, deposit and post-registration stages:

• Effective KYC processes
• Anti-money laundering (AML) checks

Sometimes, operators are required to go one step ahead, based on the type of fraud they’re coming into contact with. KYC can become a recurrent theme for users to avoid acts like multi-account creation, account takeovers and carding.

3. Regularly Audit Ad Accounts

Are you checking whether non-specific keywords are bringing in random traffic? If you’re working in a niche operation, the number of keywords in use may often be limited. Which means ad spends, specifically online gambling ad spend on each acquisition, may be higher.

The other issues could be caught if you’re keeping an eye out for:

• Non-optimized bidding methods
• Low performing ad groups
• Old creatives
• Copy which hasn’t been updated
• Broken links in redirections and so on

The unbreakable rule is: all aspects of a running iGaming campaign should be in sync (read: compliance, on-brand and attractive). 

One way to always identify broken flows before they have setback your budget is to test the flow yourself — but as a user. Use an incognito tab and work your way through the funnel naturally, as you expect potential customers to. Close any gaps you find, and you’re all set.

4. Map Your Attribution

The player journey is not a simple line but a spectrum. This means there can be overlapping or non-directional aspects which become critical to the conversion event journey. Here, you can acknowledge where the problem lies, based on the source.

Multi-touch attribution allows operations and brands to define weightage, when it comes to useless online gambling ad spend. 

Of course, you could blame the last touchpoint (as marketers are often prone to do). But the right approach would be to view the full picture before the waste is diagnosed.

5. See What Competitors are Doing

You’re not alone in the online gambling space. In fact, you’re standing within a highly crowded market of operations and brands, of varying sizes and formats. 

Regular people learn from their own mistakes. You can choose the way of the wise instead, and learn from the mistakes of others.

Analyze the strategy of competitors, visible through their creatives, ad copy, placement and so on to learn how others are cutting down on this type of spend. This can benefit you further by revealing untapped potential and over-saturated mediums, for your given iGaming segment. 

What’s more? You’ll be able to identify additional zones of savings through simple avoidance of bidding wars with direct competition.

The Next Step: Eliminating Wasteful Online Gambling Ad Spend

1. Go Beyond Basic Targeting and Segmentation

You have heard of keywords, but have you ever used negative keywords? This simple trick can help you eliminate irrelevant people coming onto your website.

The next step would be better segmentation. How does this work? You create smaller, but more targeted audiences that align with your goals. Pick the basics like demographics, interests and location but add more depth through previous interactions, day parting, audience layering and dynamic betting ad copy.

Using GA4 data for lookalike and custom audiences is also a pro-move, which is sure to help you locate more sticky users.

2. Build Better Creatives and Landing Pages

The first rule of marketing is A/B testing. That’s a crucial hurdle for all your marketing efforts to touch upon: visuals, ad copy, calls-to-action, landing pages and all other collaterals adding value to your campaigns.

How to optimize your landing pages? Here’s a key checklist:

• Ensure they’re fast,
• Should have in-built responsiveness
• Must be mobile optimized
• Should convey a single offer clearly
• There should be a single CTA placed
• Copy should consistently turn the user’s attention to the main message

If you’ve met these criteria, you’ve already won half the battle against wasteful online gambling ad spend.

For the other half, ensure cohesion across all deliverables. And maintain this sameness even when it comes to compliance. Marketing for online gambling isn’t easy with all the rules and fines. That’s the other place where you can resume money from going down the drain.

3. Set Better Affiliate Management Terms

Check up on the people joining your affiliate programs. Strict vetting can prevent problematic affiliates from becoming associated with your operation.

Set our clear contracts with explicit fraud clauses to limit suspicious and poor behaviour from your partner marketers. Your relationship should be built on the highest level of transparency in this aspect.

Be communicative: let your affiliates know the rules for working with your organization, and resolve problems through open lines of conversation.

For better internal operations, you can classify affiliates into groups based on commissions. This provides better payouts for those who bring genuine users with respectable LTVs. Those cutting corners on promotions can be adjusted to lower tiers, awarded proportionally with respect to effort and outcome.

4. Encourage Cross-functional Collaboration

A common challenge, even beyond online gambling, is organizational cohesion. When teams in different departments work in silos, the changes of poor spends, including poor online gambling ad spend increase many-fold.

By ensuring all departments in your organization are aligned, greater efficiency and productivity can be achieved. One of the ways this could be done is through AI — a tool which can facilitate better results across the brand or operation.

5. Keep Testing and Measuring

An agile spending style is sure to set you on the right track when it comes to optimizing your ad spends. But is your current strategy going to work long-term?

That’s something you can only keep tabs on if you’re testing and measuring on repeat. This means monthly cycles of audits and a watchful eye on metrics — a killer combination for staying on course.

Of course, smaller tests should be run to increase effectiveness, improve existing processes and innovate. Those can be tested on a smaller scale before making them pillars within your framework.

Summing Up

The solution to this marketing challenge in online gambling, however, is one that can’t be solved forever. As the field of marketing evolves and iGaming (as always) undergoes shifts, your strategy to save those $$$ must shift too.

Preserving your online gambling ad spend can seem a fool’s errand. However, optimizing any expense from the business can be the difference between sustainable growth and bankruptcy. 

By understanding sources of waste and being proactive in strategic terms, iGaming brands can convert these losses into opportunities for growth. All it takes is the right perspective and appreciation for a culture of learning.