Should you drive traffic to gambling offers from Google Ads in 2023

Google Ads advantages

Large affiliate marketing teams always drive traffic from multiple traffic sources to minimize the risk of getting banned and find new bundles. Google Ads has long secured its status as one of the best places to get clients from since the traffic it provides is high-quality and warmed-up and the accounts of this platform provide big limits when properly operated. 

Among the advantages of working with this ad platform are:

• the ability to get relevant traffic through key queries and reduce the price of traffic in comparison with other sources;
• combined with SEO, the cost of traffic is as low as possible + the ad campaign helps get the website’s organic search-results rating up;
• accounts can last for a long time and provide large limits;

If you don’t want to depend on a single one source and take risks, Google Ads is definitely worth a try.

 

How to work with Google Ads accounts

If you work with multiple accounts, you will need a proxy and an antidetect browser.

An important point is that Google is more picky when it comes to proxies than Facebook, so it’s best not to skimp on this expendable tool.

There are prepaid and postpaid accounts for Google Ads. In the event of a ban, it is very difficult to get back your money from an account, so we recommend using postpaid ones.

Google Ads algorithms remember accounts by their hardware, so if you use multiple accounts from one computer and one of your accounts gets blocked, all the rest will also stop working.

Warming up the account is crucial, using a freshly-registered account to promote gray-hat stuff is guaranteed to get you banned, so it is important to put up a $15-20 campaign on a white-hat site and let it chill there. Then you can do your main campaign.

Google Ads also pay attention to domain names the traffic is driven to.  First, it’s best to choose a domain from a Tier-1 country, they don’t arouse as much suspicion. Second, track the domains you use. Banned domains must not be used repeatedly.

The same goes for cards, always stick to the “one account – one card” rule. Changing the means of payment damages the account’s trust-level.

The main advantage of Google Ads is that if you properly work with their accounts, they can last for months before getting banned.

How to drive traffic to gambling offers from Google Ads

There are 2 main approaches to driving traffic to gambling offers:

• driving traffic from competitors;
• driving traffic from brand search queries;

In the first option, webmasters use keywords the user enters to search for specific competing brands. Such traffic converts extremely well because it’s already targeted and people often don’t care about the particular brand. But, as you understand, this method is not entirely honest.

The second approach is to create an ad campaign for the brand of your offer. For effective advertising, you need to use keywords not only with names, but also related ones: casino reviews, casino payments, gambling, popular casinos, and so on.

And don’t forget about negative keywords either. If a query contains these words, your ad will not be shown to the user. Oftentimes, well-chosen keywords can greatly help to optimize your campaign.

Some affiliate programs don’t accept branded traffic, believing that webmasters steal part of their traffic that way. 

Features of launching a campaign in Google Ads

You can compile the semantic core and a list of negative keywords via Google Adwords. This tool becomes available when you create an ad campaign.

Requests are divided into high-frequency and low-frequency. High-frequency requests – from 10 thousand per month. Competition here is significantly higher and the cost per click isn’t too cheap either. When you’re just starting out, it’s best to use low-frequency queries – 5-7 thousand a month. 

While the campaign is running, it’s best to introduce whatever changes smoothly, add 1-2 keywords a day. Increase your budget when Google recommends it. 

Changing the means of payment and logging in from another device is a direct path to getting banned.

When creating a campaign with a white-hat pre-landing, pay attention to the domain. It is important to make sure it hasn’t been banned before. If you use a website instead of cloaking, best to make it on WordPress or another CMS and fill it with some white-hat content.

You can find plenty of tips online on launching Google Sites and other simplified forms, but in practice such forms lose out on around 30% of the conversion rate, which is why websites are the most effective option to be used as a pre-landing page.

Some countries introduce restrictions on launching gambling offers, you can study them in the Google Help section. When launching campaigns in such countries, the algorithms will issue bans not for the keyword queries but for the promoted resource. Meaning, in such GEOs you have no choice but to use cloaking. 

Cases of traffic driven to gambling offers through Google Adwords

The average ROI for gambling offers promoted through Google Ads ranges from 90 to 100%. Here we have a case study from an affiliate marketer who works with Affter Affiliates. They drove traffic to gambling offers in July 2021.

July 2021

Offer: Affter

GEO: Ukraine

Revenue: $95,683

Expenses: $43,986

Profit: $51,697 

ROI: 118.3%

Our team has a person whose sole job is to manage accounts, so we don’t have any issues with them. We use trackable accounts that each have $100-150 “invested” in completely white-hat offers. We use a famous cloaking services and com domains that have been registered long ago. We compiled our semantic core from old campaigns and added some keywords from search queries for our serious competitors. The campaign lasted around 2 months. As for the accounts, it varied – some survived for a day, some – a week. Those of our colleagues who don’t have much experience working with this traffic source should pay extra attention to negative keywords. It’s crucial you cut off all freebie lovers and your non-target audience using the latter. Working with accounts (after you drive some white-hat traffic) is easy. When it gets banned, get a new one and launch the same campaign on it.

 

Conclusion

Webmasters don’t call Google Ads an endless source for nothing – it’s all true, after all, it’s Google’s main source of income. Learning to launch campaigns in Google is a useful skill for both beginners and seasoned affiliates. Online marketing is an always evolving sector, but working with Google Ads involves rare changes. This is a skill that will be especially in demand by 2023 when the company will stop accepting 3rd party Cookie files and no one can predict how other traffic sources will work after that.