Supplier News

UK – Online gambling takes its biggest tumble yet, on the search front

By Phil - 2 September 2013

Brits spend £2.3bn annually on online gambling according to research from Deloitte, commissioned by the Association of British Bookmakers (ABB).

However, a new report from leading independent digital marketing agency, Greenlight, shows consumer online search volumes pertaining to sports betting, poker, bingo and casino, have suffered their sharpest drop yet.

Greenlight’s findings follow hot on the heels of the government’s announcement of a 15 per cent tax imposition on operators in the remote gambling market – depending on the type of gambling offered, and warnings from bookies on losses to come from the planned tax reform set to kick in next year.

The agency’s “Gaming Sector Report – Issue 11 profiled consumer search habits when they went to Google UK in July to make gaming-related queries. The report reveals the most popular search terms, total search volumes and the most visible sites to searchers.

The report’s 12 month retrospective shows gaming-related consumer searches which totaled 995,830 in July, suffered a sharp 34% decline on June’s volume of 1.5 million, the steepest drop yet since August 2012.

Casino made up the majority of July’s queries, accounting for a 35 per cent share, followed by sports betting (31 per cent), Bingo (18 per cent) then Poker (16 per cent).

Overall, the most visible site to searchers in the organic listings was paddypower.com which achieved a 44 per cent share of voice. In the paid listings however, williamhill.com was the most visible advertiser, securing a 75 per cent share of visibility.

On Social Media, Betfair.com had the highest number of YouTube views whilst Paddypower.com had the highest number of subscribers to its channel. However, Wikipedia.org, the free web-based multi-lingual encyclopedia, a non-gaming site, topped Greenlight’s Social Media analysis.