There’s some bidders playing silly buggers at Gambling.com causing some keywords to be way over priced. Gambling.com uses – like Overture and AdWords – a ‘maximum bid per click’ model, meaning, of course, that if you bid a maximum of $5 per click and the bidder directly below you bids a maximum of $1 per click, you will only pay $1.01 for each visitor.
However, some of the early bidders put in maximum bids of $10-$20 knowing that their ACTUAL cost per click would be far, far lower. This is essentially to scare off the competition rather than an assessment of the real value of a Gambling.com click. However, all this achieves is to push the price of a click way higher than it needs to be as all it requires is two or three other bidders to bid $0.01 lower than the top bid to turn a $2 click into a $20 one. Which is, of course, exactly what’s happened.
So where’s the value to the savvy PPC bidder ? Well, it would be -as it was with Google and Overture – in the huge amounts of low volume keywords available. There’s no broad matching at Gambling.com, so you would have thought that throwing in a few hundred or thousand secondary keyphrases would bring good traffic at a reasonable cost.
Not so. And here Gambling.com themselves are to blame. When you visit the home page, you have the search box, but above that are a bunch of text links that are actually Gambling.com searches and below it are graphic links that also run searches. I have some strong bids and high listings for some good keywords. Are these generating traffic ? Not really, because the visitor to gambling.com seems perfectly content to click on one of those other links. This means that the only keywords really generating traffic are things like ‘poker’, ‘online casino’ and ‘blackjack’.
While I’m happy with conversions from my Gambling.com traffic, I’d prefer if they did what all those second tier PPCs do and have a wider selection of direct links for things like ‘play blackjack online’, ‘progressive jackpots’, ‘casino bonuses’ etc, etc.
Just my $0.02