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The seven top conversion mistakes nearly everyone makes (and how to fix them). Few online businesses are as dependent and as focused on conversion rates as the online gambling business. Driven by necessity, marketing and product, managers have been forced to come up with new ideas on how to improve conversions and over time they’ve implemented some pretty good stuff. Lots of it even came to serve as inspiration and benchmarks for other online businesses. But with a lack of a systematic approach many operators still make beginner’s mistakes and miss a lot of opportunities (conversions!) by not applying conversion optimisation best practices. This article will bring you ideas on some easy quick fixes which correctly applied can boost your conversion rates surprisingly fast.
How it all started (for me) In 2005, I was put in charge of CasinoEuro, a Betsson gaming brand. The casino was unprofitable, and I was given the task to turn it around in three months. I did so in just over one month, and what I learnt there came to shape my career as a conversion professional. Many of my competitors had a simple recipe for increased conversions – pump up the volume on the marketing. They got increased conversions not by improving the conversion rates, but simply by increasing the input in the conversion funnel. Well, I didn’t have any marketing budget so I had to go the other way, which basically meant turning each and every stone in order to find improvements to the conversion and retention of the little inflow we had. Many of the changes were ridiculously small and subtle, but in the
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iGB Affiliate june/july 2010
end, they summed up to greatly improved conversion and retention rates.
So let’s cut the small talk and go to the list.
Why are conversion rates so important?
Top seven conversion mistakes nearly everyone makes
By ‘conversion’ I mean the act of a visitor to perform a desired action at your website. The most frequent ‘conversion goals’ in the online gambling industry are: 1. Playing a free game or using some kind of trial offer (without registering) 2. Registering 3. Depositing 4. Playing a real money game/placing a wager.
1. Not using landing pages for affiliates and campaigns I interviewed long time Affiliate Director John Ryott, who has worked for Betsson/ AffiliateLounge, GamingVC and Expekt/ Mangas, about the current use of landing pages for affiliates. He confirmed my suspicions that there is a huge untapped potential here. According to John, conversion rate is the second most important factor for an affiliate to promote a brand, after brand awareness. And still, many operators have no landing pages or just lame generic landing page templates which can be slightly customised. Conversion professionals talk about ‘maintaining the scent’. Think of your visitor as a hound searching and closing in on the fugitive. When the visitor clicks and arrives at your landing page that scent must be maintained. It’s all about establishing a clear and trustworthy connection to the affiliate site. Yes, many sites do this, they reserve a space for the affiliate’s logo on the generic landing page template, but that’s not good enough. Different users have different scents depending on where they came from. Just think of the different mindsets of a visitor from an odds comparison site and one from a casino bonus guide. Many operators’ sites are reviewed by affiliates and get at ‘star ranking’ or similar. If you want to keep just one piece of conversion advice from this article, take
I went to the inaugural Conversion Conference in San Jose a couple of weeks ago and the case studies presented there showed improved rates of 20-30 percent in general, with many up to triple digit gains and one case showed a staggering 1,500 percent combined rate improvement, as a result of a series of changes. And all the improvements were results of relatively cheap and non-complex website changes which required no massive website overhauls or big IT projects. Conversion authority Bryan Eisenberg demonstrated how a change of a single picture on a single page at Overstock.com increased yearly sales by $25 million! Do you know of any marketing channel or campaign where you could increase traffic to your site by more than 20 percent with little investment? I wouldn’t think so. That’s why I, and many other online marketing professionals, see conversion optimisation as ‘the new frontier’ in online marketing.