Ad tracking in iGaming advertising is a concept that is slowly getting traction. The benefits and solutions from other industries slowly slip into iGaming. But there are still many misconceptions, confusions and inaccuracies surrounding ad tracking in iGaming. This article should address the most pressing ones.
iGaming landscape
First. Let’s look at the unique challenges that iGaming advertisers have to face:
- Fragmented environment: They often need to work with several different platforms, hundreds of affiliates, who, even if managed by affiliate platforms like Affilka, still need to be checked for performance, and host tens of individual offers or pages.
- Lack of trust. The absence of trust is often caused by incomplete and unreliable data, making each party suspicious of their counterparts’ intentions. When there is no universally agreed-upon data collection standard, each misunderstanding is hard to settle, which increases friction and operational costs.
- Outdated tech stack. Many platforms don’t implement even basic reporting solutions like postbacks, and advertisers need to rely on getting data manually. This prevents them from achieving higher efficiency than normally could be achieved with live data.
What is ad tracking in iGaming?
Ad tracking is about precisely measuring user-generated events in real time. This provides accurate information about an audience, performance of advertising campaigns, costs, and profits, and can be the basis of optimization.
Ad tracking in iGaming works with paid and SEO traffic and works with most platforms in the market, such as affiliate platforms, ad networks, and operator platforms. It ensures a clearly defined way of recording data that all parties involved can agree on.
Why do you need a tracker for your iGaming offers?
A tracker is essential for iGaming offers because it provides insightful data about your campaigns. It helps you understand the performance of your offers, identify which ones are converting, and detect any issues that may be hindering your success. By having access to real-time data, you can optimize your marketing strategies toward higher registrations or FTDs, allocate resources more effectively, and ultimately increase your return on investment.
How fast redirects can help you increase the number of registrations and FTDs?
Ad trackers use two tracking techniques:
- Pixels – scripts that activate on page load and send a request to a tracker with information about a visit.
- Redirects – mechanisms that pass through an ad tracking server before reaching the destination page.
Fast redirects are crucial in enhancing user experience and reducing drop-off rates. When users click on an offer, a quick and seamless redirect to the destination page ensures they remain engaged and are more likely to get to the registration or making a first-time deposit.
Redirect speed depends on the speed of a server that ad tracker uses. Ad trackers can be self-hosted or cloud-hosted. In the first scenario, you are the one that is responsible for setting up a fast server for them. In the second, it’s the ad tracker’s company responsibility to ensure a robust infrastructure. Most cloud-based ad trackers, such as Voluum, use server networks close to visitors and have fallback systems in case a server fails.
How to track the performance of every subpage on your online casino comparison site?
You need to put a tracking code (often called a ‘pixel’) or set up a redirect to each individual comparison subpage. This way, you can monitor user behaviour, page views, and engagement metrics. This data helps you identify which pages are performing well and for what audience segments.
Why do you need postback tracking for your casino/iGaming offers?
Postback tracking is essential for accurate and reliable conversion tracking. Postbacks are the mechanism of sending a POST request BACK to the source of the original visit – ad network or an ad tracker. For postbacks to work, an operator or affiliate platform needs to have a postback-firing mechanism set up on their side, and operators needs to have a way of recording a postback. The last part is usually handled by an ad tracker.
Postback tracking is reliable and accurate, and it allows you to attribute conversions (so events like registrations or FTDs) to the original visits to learn what actually worked: what combination of user characteristics, ad variants, pages and offers.
With postback tracking, you can optimize your campaigns based on precise data, ensuring you are credited for every conversion generated.
How to track unique visits?
Ad trackers, including Voluum, assign a unique ID to each user click. This is often called a ‘Click ID’. This identifier is stored in a cookie on a visitor’s computer, and it is also used to distinguish a first-time visit (unique) visit from the second one.
You can track unique visits to show different content to returning visitors, increasing your conversion rates and overall ROI. Voluum ad tracker has a Rule-based paths feature, where you can create different paths for visitors that are unique and non-unique, and for visitors divided by other factors, such as device type or country.
How to send conversion data to Google or Facebook with postbacks?
Google and Facebook (Meta) don’t support postback out of the box. They use their proprietary pixel technologies to track conversions. However, this approach works best if you control the pages you track and you can implement this tracking pixel in the page’s code.
If you are not in control of the websites and you source them from networks or operators, you can often track conversions with postbacks. The problem is that since the two platforms don’t support them, there’s no technical way to feed them with conversion data.
Passing conversions to Google and Facebook trains their media buying algorithms, which allows you to purchase better, more converting traffic.
To solve that problem, you can use an ad tracker like Voluum. Voluum can record conversion data with postbacks from networks or operator platforms and send conversions back to Google or Facebook via API.
Why do you need tracker for an iGaming comparison site?
iGaming comparison sites are a popular way for showcasing different games on one site. Providing detailed data on game characteristics, an advertisers can help visitor chose the best game for them, increasing the chances of engagement.
Tracking of these page provides detailed information on a visitor that clicked a given game on a comparison site. For example, and advertiser can learn about the GEO a visitor is coming from, their device type, language and even browser version. This enabled advertiser to tune the traffic targeting setting in programmatic ad networks toward more profitable traffic segments, or shift their SEO efforts toward the audience segment that brings the most registrations and FTDs.
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