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How to Promote Gaming Offers: Affiliate vs Referral Marketing

861 words · Reading time: 5 minutes
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Affiliate marketing is our bread and butter. However, not everyone is aware of how it differs from the referral method of promoting online gaming offers. In this article, we’ll take a look at the difference in methods and summarize what works best for gaming. 

Features of affiliate marketing

Affiliate marketing implies partners’ independence in choosing ways of promotion, generating creatives, cooperating with networks, and determining budgets. Here it is important to understand that the amount of bonuses depends almost entirely on the performance and quality of advertising campaigns.

Features of affiliate marketing are full responsibility for traffic to the advertiser and taking burdening the risk of in terms of spending. It’s not uncommon for campaigns lose money. However, focused and experienced affiliates know that a few successful campaigns can more than cover all previous losses. Success here built entirely on experience, data management and rigorous testing.

Another peculiarity is compliance with terms and conditions. Affiliates need to comply with the terms and conditions of networks and advertisers in order to promote their offers unimpeded. Creatives often need to be adapted and coordinated, as do the sources of traffic and the quality of the ads. 

5 reasons to work with affiliate networks:

  • convenience - all the tools you need for your work are in one place;
  • Savings - useful tools for traffic, tracking and analysis at no extra cost;
  • security - trustworthy affiliate networks guarantee payments for affiliates, even if advertisers don’t hold up their end of the deal. This gives affiliates security when working with advertisers. 
  • Wide choice of verticals and access to exclusive offers for different GEOs;
  • personal support - affiliates can always count on a personal manager for all questions, including the development of creatives.

To all of the above, it is important to add that affiliate marketing is beneficial not only for the affiliates themselves, but also for the advertisers. Often, affiliate networks act as direct gambing advertisers and as intermediaries in working with large online operators. The latter get a lot of bonuses in cooperation with an affiliate network - from qualitative large traffic volumes to avoiding direct interaction with hundreds of partners.

Features of Referral Marketing

It’s easy to get confused with the concepts of referral links, which are also kind of like affiliate links, and referral marketing. Here’s the difference. 

The referral promotion method is essentially blogging. Here the main participants in the promotion of online gaming offers are Influencers, bloggers and brand ambassadors. 

However, there are all regular people that also promote via referrals. These are just the people who, in the case of a two-way system of bonus payments are rewarded with the motivation of bringing friends onboard with the promise of bonuses and perks.

Online gaming ambassadors are thematic bloggers with large audiences, who promote the product on their platforms and receive payments unilaterally from the advertiser. They can be streamers, vloggers and other Influencers, working on the constant creation and promotion of content about online games and offering a “link in the description”.

The peculiarity of referral marketing with a one-way payment system is a somewhat limited audience. It is possible to get warm traffic through a single ambassador, but its amount will be limited. Plus a massive amount of work on traffic analysis falls directly on the advertiser. 

The system of referrals, where people sign up after being referred by a friend show good results. According to statistics, on average 20% of users who come through referrals from their friends become players. The network scheme works, but, again, it is difficult to compare it with affiliate marketing in terms of quantity and quality of traffic.

Affiliate and referral marketing: which is cheaper?

Affiliate marketing objectively wins over referral marketing in terms of scalability and optimisation. Working with affiliate marketing is profitable for all participants in the scheme. Only large thematic Influencers can really make money on referral marketing. But how much does it cost to promote gaming offers using the affiliate and referral methods respectively?

Referral marketing may seem cheaper at first glance. However, we all know that gathering and retaining an audience is not easy these days. Constantly producing quality content takes a lot of time and effort. And if you roll out an advertising campaign via well established bloggers, you can spend many thousands of dollars.

There are no such restrictions in affiliate marketing. Often the success of an advertising campaign depends on many factors, including the budget, but you can literally start with a penny. Often, a successful creative combination and a timely optimized social media campaign will bring hundreds of percent ROI in just a couple of weeks. In other words, here too, affiliate marketing wins over referral marketing.

To recap

Referral marketing is not bad, but it is different. In our opinion it is inferior to affiliate marketing by many parameters, including the volume of useful traffic. Cooperation with an affiliate network provides a lot of advantages both for affiliates and advertisers. Everyone wins and earns money in this scheme, which makes affiliate marketing top-notch for promoting gaming offers.

Contact Converting Team today & get access to exclusive offers and awesome free affiliate tools today!

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