Traffic to revenue estimator

What these numbers mean

Every income projection in this industry is this multiplication with the inconvenient steps left out. Traffic is the number people quote because it is the number that grows fastest and matters least. Ten thousand visits a month sounds like a business; at eight percent through to the operator, twelve percent registering and thirty percent depositing, it is twenty-nine depositing players.

The sensitivity table is the part worth staring at. A percentage point added to a click through rate of eight is a twelve and a half percent lift in revenue; the same point added to a deposit rate of thirty is barely three. The rates with the smallest bases move the outcome the most, and they are usually the ones you control — page layout, positioning, which operator you put first — rather than the ones the operator controls.

A worked example

Take the defaults: 10,000 visits, 8% through, 12% registering, 30% depositing, EUR 480 of net gaming revenue per depositor over a year, 30% rev share. That is 800 clicks, 96 signups, 28.8 depositors, EUR 13,824 of revenue for the operator and about EUR 4,147 for you. Roughly one depositor for every 347 visits, and about EUR 415 per thousand visits.

Now aim at EUR 2,000 a month. At these rates you need about 4,800 visits a month — achievable. Aim at EUR 10,000 and you need over 24,000, which is a different sort of project with a different sort of timeline. The value of running this backwards is that it converts an ambition into a traffic number you can actually plan against, and occasionally into the realisation that the plan does not survive contact with arithmetic.

The two mistakes people make here

Counting all traffic as commercial traffic. A guide about responsible gambling and a comparison page do not convert alike, and averaging them produces a rate that describes neither. Run the funnel per page type, or at least per section.

Reading a broken funnel as a low rate. If clicks are high and signups are near zero, the problem is usually not persuasion. It is bot traffic, a tracking link that dropped its click ID, or geo-blocked visitors landing on a brand that cannot accept them. Check the tracking before you rewrite the page — see postbacks and click IDs in the glossary.

What we would do this week

• Pull your real click-through rate from your own analytics and your real signup and deposit rates from the affiliate dashboard. Do not estimate any figure you can look up.
• Enter your revenue target and read off the visits it needs. If that number is more than three times your current traffic, work on conversion first — it is cheaper than traffic.
• Check the geography of your clicks against the markets your programs accept. Clicks from countries a brand cannot take convert at exactly zero and quietly poison every rate above.