2023’s Top Acquisition Channels for Sports Betting & iGaming Brands

Our latest research into UK sports bettors’ buying habits has uncovered some useful insights for informing paid media strategies in the year ahead.

Perhaps the most unsurprising insight was the fact that punters plan to spend less in 2023 than in 2022, pointing to a more competitive environment for operators.

Some of the top insights to guide our paid media mix are:

• Overall, TV, Google, Facebook and YouTube are among the top channels that bettors turn to, to keep up-to-date with sports
• Younger bettors spend more time researching their bets
• When choosing brands, punters like a range of betting options, and brands that have a good reputation and the best odds.

What do these insights mean for paid media?

Given that TV, Google, Facebook and YouTube are among the top channels, it’s clear to us that the platforms that are most underused in sports betting marketing are YouTube and paid social.

The single biggest opportunity here? YouTube. YouTube offers massive and very cost-effective reach across the marketing funnel, if targeted correctly.

Having sliced and diced our survey results by age, gender and number of accounts, three types of bettor have emerged, and the only top site that features for all three of our bettor personas? YouTube.

The effectiveness of YouTube

We advertise across YouTube extensively. It’s one of the most powerful, yet underused tools in the paid media arsenal.

With cost per view figures still less than £0.05 per view in many cases, advertisers can gain vast amounts of brand exposure, using low-risk advertising models such as skippable in-stream ads. When combined with short form bumper ads, and sequenced properly, we can achieve significant uplifts in brand awareness, ad recall and purchase intent.

Such exposure is crucial for several reasons

1. We need to be on the platforms that punters are on: YouTube is also a Google product, meaning Google can join the dots between Google and YouTube, offering advantages to other Google campaign types.
2. Sports/betting research happens on YouTube: Given the natural fit between YouTube and sports content, the choice of platform should be obvious for most. Given that we can also target YouTube ads based on specific search queries or site interest (including competitors) it makes it very powerful indeed.
3. YouTube can promote the things that punters are interested in: this includes the brands they know, their range of betting options and their best odds (where applicable), to highlight the USPs that matter to punters, at the right moment.

The potential of paid social

In addition to YouTube, paid social advertising is generally underused, especially if you want to reach 18 to 40-year-olds – our survey has shown us that younger, higher-spending punters are also using Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Spotify and Reddit.

Yet, this isn’t reflected in advertisers’ platform choices, representing an opportunity for many to increase their reach.

Given that the same 18 to 40-year-olds are also the age brackets that are more likely to increase betting spend in the year ahead (according to our survey), this certainly seems like an area to double down on in 2023.

In addition, “regular promotions” feature highly in the reasons bettors choose brands in our survey. That means there’s also a nice opportunity within social media, to push promotions to a more passive and lower-cost audience.

The main operators now use a variety of free-to-play games to add more to the punter experience (examples below), but rarely are these promoted in the places that they could be to great effect – YouTube and paid social.

Contact us to find out more about how our paid media team can help you run effective YouTube and social campaigns. Or learn more about our services for sports betting & iGaming brands in general.