The sports betting industry is undergoing significant growth worldwide with restrictions loosening and new markets emerging. New opportunities create fierce competition among sportsbooks, and this has led to them devising increasingly expensive and aggressive advertising campaigns.

Public figures and influencers have become a popular go-to for sportsbooks promotions, such as Michael Jordan partnering with DraftKings or Jamie Foxx with BetMGM. Big names are costly, and sportsbooks haven’t realised the ad spend used on these campaigns is going to waste. Without the right precautions in place, up to 22% of ad spend is lost to fraud according to Juniper Research.

The big budgets behind high-profile brand campaigns need to translate into real user engagement. To achieve this, sportsbooks must ensure their digital channels are optimised to capture the surge in interest these campaigns generate. Without proper management, this potential can be lost to inefficiencies like invalid traffic, diluting the impact of their investments.

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Ad Budgets Going to Waste

In today’s competitive landscape, sportsbooks need to make every click count. In 2023 alone, The American Gaming Association estimated that over $1.9 billion was spent on advertising campaigns in the US. With such a large amount of spend in play, it’s crucial that sportsbooks see as big a Return on Advertising Spend (ROAS) as possible.

Pay-Per-Click (PPC) campaigns are vital for sportsbook growth but can be disrupted by invalid traffic (IVT). IVT includes both malicious activity, like fraudulent bots, and unintentional actions, such as users repeatedly clicking on ads without intent to convert. These interactions inflate impressions and skew campaign performance data, leading to higher customer acquisition costs (CACs) and inefficient allocation of ad spend. Effectively managing IVT ensures that ad budgets drive genuine engagement and measurable growth.

Investing into influencers and celebrities also forces sportsbooks to bid on brand keywords to prevent their competitors stealing potential users searching for them. Up to 29% of PPC budgets are spent on this bidding according to Wordstream. As competition for brand keywords increases, PPC budgets are depleted without generating any new net revenue.

As campaigns become more expensive than ever, sportsbooks can’t afford to let profits fall to ad fraud. Instead of cutting budgets, sportsbooks should focus on analysing their campaign strategy.

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Problematic Navigational Traffic

Navigational traffic is also presenting a significant challenge to sportsbooks alongside ad fraud. Navigational traffic refers to existing customers clicking on branded keywords to log into their accounts. While this seems convenient and harmless enough, this behaviour drastically inflates CACs. Like ad fraud, this can skew the effectiveness of PPC campaigns. By utilising paid search results instead of organic links to navigate to the site, costs are driven up without contributing to new user acquisition.

In addition to the challenges posed by navigational traffic and ad fraud, the competitive landscape for first-time depositors intensifies the need for strategic bidding on Google search. Brands investing heavily in influencers or sponsorships of major sporting events to generate awareness and drive potential users to search for them. However, without securing top placements in paid search results, these prospective customers may be intercepted by competitors before reaching the organic search listings. This creates a critical juncture where the effectiveness of a brand campaign hinges on converting that intent-driven traffic into first-time depositors, ensuring marketing spend achieves its goal of meaningful user acquisition.

First-time depositors are a critical metric for sportsbooks, and this issue directly impacts the cost efficiency of acquiring them. High CACs make marketing budgets less effective, reducing overall ROI.

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Shoring Up Your Defences

Before launching costly ad campaigns, sportsbooks should adopt a multi-faceted approach to address ad fraud. IVT typically goes unnoticed, so to prevent this sportsbooks should monitor and analyse their campaign traffic for any suspicious activity. It is possible to identify IVT by looking out for signs such as irregular spikes in traffic from unknown locations or high pageviews. Fraudulent traffic can then by highlighted and removed.

The advancement of technology has made ad fraud more difficult to identify, and legacy fraud tools fail to detect IVT. They don’t analyse traffic at the impression level or consider the context of the business advertising. Sportsbooks can leverage ad-verification platforms to compensate for this. This allows sportsbooks to analyse and report suspicious traffic in real-time. Fraud can then be blocked before it has a chance to harm budgets.

Sportsbooks can also deploy tactics to reduce the impact of navigational traffic on CACs. Methods include encouraging existing customers to use mobile apps or direct bookmarks to log into their accounts instead of paid search campaigns. This decreases their reliance on PPC campaigns for navigation and protects budgets.

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Keeping Profits in Sportsbooks’ Hands

Influencer and celebrity campaigns have proven to be a popular and useful tool in reeling new users and profits. However, if sportsbooks don’t have the essential precautions in place, they risk losing these profits to advertising fraud.

To make the most of their advertising efforts, sportsbooks need to prioritise their traffic. Implementing sophisticated tools to analyse traffic and filter out fraud will allow sportsbooks to protect their interests and focus on driving future growth. This way, they can secure their position in an increasingly competitive landscape.

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Written by: Chad Kinlay, Chief Marketing Officer, TrafficGuard

A driven, open-minded, creative senior marketer with a strong sense of dedication and commitment. With over 15 years of progressive international experience in marketing and communications management, Kinlay has a credible history of commercial success.

The three Detroit casinos reported $102.9 million in monthly aggregate revenue (AGR) for the month of October 2024, of which $103.7 million was generated from table games and slots, and negative ($826,796) from retail sports betting.

The October market shares were:

• MGM, 48%

• MotorCity, 30%

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• Hollywood Casino at Greektown, 22%

Monthly Table Games, Slot Revenue, and Taxes

The casinos’ revenue for table games and slots for the month of October 2024 increased 26.9% when compared to the same month last year. This remarked increase is due in part to when casino employees went on strike on Oct. 17, 2023, which caused AGR totals to be lower than normal. October’s monthly revenue was 2.4% higher when compared to the previous month, September 2024. From Jan. 1 through Oct. 31, the Detroit casinos’ table games and slots revenue increased by 3.0% compared to the same period last year.

The casinos’ monthly gaming revenue results all increased compared to October 2023:

• MGM, up 32.4% to $49.4 million

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• MotorCity, up 26.7% to $31.7 million

• Hollywood Casino at Greektown, up 16.5% to $22.6 million

In October 2024, the three Detroit casinos paid $8.4 million in gaming taxes to the State of Michigan. They paid $6.6 million for the same month last year. The casinos also reported submitting $12.8 million in wagering taxes and development agreement payments to the City of Detroit in October.

Monthly Retail Sports Betting Revenue and Taxes

The three Detroit casinos reported $22.19 million in total retail sports betting handle, and total gross receipts totaled negative ($822,552) for the month of October. Retail sports betting qualified adjusted gross receipts (QAGR) were down by $2.0 million in October when compared to October 2023, and down by $1.6 million when compared to September 2024.

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October QAGR by casino was:

• MGM: negative ($474,293)

• MotorCity: negative ($528,408)

• Hollywood Casino at Greektown: $175,905

During October, the casinos paid $6,649 in gaming taxes to the state and reported submitting $8,127 in wagering taxes to the City of Detroit based on their retail sports betting revenue.

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Fantasy Contests

For September 2024, fantasy contest operators reported total adjusted revenues of $1.1 million and paid taxes of $89,282.

21VIRAL, the Latin American-focused games aggregator and solution provider, has onboarded Air Dice Group’s games portfolio.

21VIRAL, which is creating a streamlined integration, onboarding and transparent pricing in the iGaming casino and game aggregation supply vertical, announced the onboarding of Air Dice Group today.

The distribution deal allows 21VIRAL access to Air Dice’s complete portfolio of content. Air Dice specialises in strategy-influenced money games, which are in high demand across Latin America.

Christoph Härtel, CEO of 21VIRAL, said: “Our business is customer-first, and building out a great CRX experience is our goal. Having looked at the market incumbents, we decided to specialise in the Latin American market, given its current growth, which is double-digit, and is expected to maintain high levels of growth over the next 5 to 10 years.”

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“We have already onboarded several industry-established operators and game providers in record time using AI to facilitate faster and more streamlined workflows. We are, therefore, delighted to work with Air Dice Group to ensure their massively popular games, such as Wild Cash, Coco Craze, and Book of Goddess, are available to our operator’s portfolio of games content.

However, one of the limiting factors, especially if you are an operator or game provider, is the technical integration expertise and market access within the supply chain. If a game provider wishes to have their games deployed on Operator A’s website, but they are yet to be available to that operator, 21VIRAL’s GameConnector will be the provider’s enabler with all the technical integration, heavy lifting, and onboarding. We will also offer reverse integration, which means that we integrate our GameConnector Platform into their systems – therefore, the operators have less effort.

Simply, it’s a win-win, as many game providers in other territories, such as continental Europe, lack the commercial and technical distribution to enter LatAm—we do all that from them—and the operator gets access to the unique game content in the supply chain that can enhance their players’ engagement and revenue opportunities.”

Rocio Moitino, Director for LatAm, Air Dice Group added: “Latin America has proven to be an expanding and high-growth market for our games content over the last few years, and it continues to increase. We are delighted to increase our market accessibility with 21VIRAL’s team, as they provide faster speed to market to enable operators to access and publish our unique games to their casino lobby in quicker timeframes.”

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