As online gambling and sports betting are expected to reach US $107.30bn by the end of 2024, advertisers keep searching for ways to stay relevant in the market.
While it’d be unfair to question the importance of great visuals or opening new channels, this article focuses on another aspect of a successful gambling ad campaign—ad formats, specifically push ads.
You’ve all most certainly heard of those, but this article goes one step in the direction of specific push ads use. What are push ads? What do they look like, and what exactly makes them great for betting advertising? Let’s find out!
What Are Push Ads?
Push ads, also called web push notifications, are ad notifications sent to the user from the content distributor with mutual consent.
The definition is a bit hard to swallow, but if you spent the last decade outside the cave, you probably know what a push notification is. Yes, the push concept is hardly anything new. The first push notifications were used by Apple to send messages from servers or apps to users.
Today, those are the usual app notifications about new messages, updates, or other social media activities.
The push ads are the derivatives of this process. This means that instead of applying for notifications from Facebook, you agree to receive ads, for example, from the gambling app.
Push notifications weren’t meant for advertising at first, but now more and more advertisers (from the betting sphere, for example) are using those for affiliate marketing within the app or outside of it.
What Are the Examples of Push Ads?
Depending on the platform, there are three types of push ad notifications:
- Web Push Notifications: Messages sent from a website to a user’s browser, even when they’re not on the site.
- In-App Push Notifications: Messages sent from a mobile app to a user’s device while they’re using the app.
- In-Page Push Notifications: Messages sent from a website to a user’s browser, displayed within the website’s interface while the user is browsing.
Why Use Push Ads for Gambling?
- Push ads offer unique advantages over banner ads. Users opt-in to receive these ads, making them more likely to engage with offers. Ads are delivered directly to users’ screens, ensuring they reach the intended audience.
Basically, you have the user’s consent + your ads always target an interested audience. These ads are a great way to notify users already engaged with your betting resource about sports events and new offers. - They’re cost-effective, making them accessible for beginners in affiliate marketing, and the publisher’s inventory (if you post placements on other apps) is vast. With push ads, you pay for clicks (CPC model), and the cost per click usually starts from $0.005.
- Push ads have a lenient content policy, allowing a wide range of offers without the risk of bans and prohibitions, which are regular guests in the betting industry.
Finally, push ads bypass ad blockers and banner blindness, ensuring they reach the audience effectively. These days, ad-blocking software is very good at blocking gambling promotions; with push ads, you don’t have to worry about it.
How Do Push Ads Work: Publisher’s Setup Guide
Now that you know about the benefits of push advertising, let’s discuss how it works and how you can actually use it in your app.
We’ll discuss how you can implement push ads in your resource; if you want to place your push ads on somebody else’s resource, check out our ad placement guide or skip to the next part.
- Players Involved:
A few key players are involved in sending push ads:
- Operating System Push Notification Service (OSPNS): Each mobile operating system (iOS, Android, etc.) has its own service for handling push notifications.
- App Publisher: The entity responsible for enabling the app with OSPNS and uploading it to the app store (that’s probably you!).
- Client App: An app installed on the user’s device that receives push ads.
- Adding Push Notifications to an App:
- Registration: The app publisher registers with the OSPNS.
- API Integration: The OSPNS provides an API for communication, which the app publisher integrates into the app.
- SDK Integration: The app publisher adds a Software Development Kit (SDK) specific to OSPNS into the app’s code.
- App Upload: Finally, the app is uploaded to the app store.
- User Activation:
- Download and Installation: Users download and install the app from the app store.
- App Open: Upon opening the app, unique identifiers for the app and device are registered with the OSPNS.
- ID Transfer: These identifiers are sent back to the app and also to the app publisher.
- Storage: The app publisher receives and stores these registration details, including the IDs.
- Sending Push Notifications:
- Message Composition: The app publisher composes a message either manually through a user interface or sets up automated messages via the API.
- Audience Definition: The publisher defines the audience to whom the push ad will be sent.
- Sending Options: They can send the message immediately or schedule it for later.
How to Buy Push Ads: Advertiser’s Tips
The section before was dedicated to betting providers who already have their own app or website and can use the power of push ads as a publisher. Now, before we leave, we should give at least some tips for betting advertisers who want to buy push ads.
- Avoid using direct links since you can’t track if users proceed to the next phase or not, and it’s hard to gauge the quality of traffic. Instead, consider employing landing pages, especially when promoting online gambling.
- Begin your campaign with at least five different creatives to identify the most effective one. It’s common to find that only one out of five creatives generates the majority of conversions.
- Take into account that people tend to engage more with push notifications in the evenings and on weekends. However, for testing purposes, set up your schedule to run all day long initially and then optimize based on the results you gather.
Whether you’re a publisher or an advertiser in the gambling sphere, we hope that our guide will help you run your push or any other ad format campaigns like a pro!
