New survey highlights online gambling traffic sources

A new independent study by SimilarWeb claims that only 37 percent of online gambling traffic is direct, with referrals (ie mainly affiliate) activity delivering 24 percent; followed by 22 percent of traffic attributable to advertising; and 17 percent from SEO work.

Surprisingly, there is much room for improvement in social media marketing, which currently delivers just 1.3 percent of traffic, with only 21 percent of operators active in this area, SimilarWeb claims.

The SimilarWeb report is accessible here https://www.similarweb.com/blog/online-gambling-industry and explains how the study was carried out, involving the collation of multiple online traffic data streams and an examination of backlink profiles from major online gambling operators.

SimilarWeb estimates that online gambling traffic constitutes a mere 0.4 percent of overall online traffic, and points out that as at the date of its study in February this year Facebook was generating 53 percent of the meagre social media traffic contribution to i-gaming sites, with Youtube trailing in second with 23 percent and Twitter bringing in 8 percent.

The survey found that Pokerstars enjoys the most active gambling community with just short of one million likes on Facebook, and that Britain ranked highest in online gambling traffic with 9 percent, followed by the USA on 8 percent and Germany on 6 percent.

Figures from Ahref, which has a database of live backlinks, suggest that the industry is generally below average when it comes to backlinks, with just 12 percent of operator backlinks classified as above average (those with a score above 60).

From a news site perspective the study found that 37 percent of gambling domains have at least one link from a top news website and 24 percent of gambling websites have more than one top media source in their backlink inventory.