Gambling was the last thing on the minds of UK consumers in the month of July, according to the latest Gaming Sector Report from London-based digital marketing agency Greenlight. The firm says Google search data shows a sharp drop-off in gambling-related search terms during the third warmest July since records were first kept in 1910.
Greenlight reports that the volume of gambling-related searches in July was 995,830, a 34% fall from June’s 1.5m tally. Casino-related searches accounted for 35% of the total, with sports betting not far behind at 31% followed by bingo (18%) and poker (16%).
The top 10 individual search criteria were as follows: ‘bingo’ and ‘online casino’ tied for top honors with 60.5k searches apiece, ‘casino’ was next at 49.5k followed by a three-way tie with ‘poker,’ ‘no deposit casino’ and ‘bet’ all coming in at 33.1k, while ‘poker hands’ and ‘bingo sites’ tied for 22.2k, and ‘betting calculator’ and ‘free bingo’ rounded out the chart tied at 18.1k.
Paddypower.com ruled the organic search listings with a 44% share of voice, while Williamhill.com scored a 75% share of visibility in paid listings. Betfair topped the YouTube view charts but Paddy Power’s YouTube channel had the highest number of subscribers, in keeping with Paddy CEO Patrick Kennedy’s humble-brag about having “more than double” the number of social media buddies than their closest competitor.
It’s worth noting that July isn’t known as a particularly active month for gambling. Nonetheless, Greenlight client services director Matthew Whiteway suggested that with both summer and winter seasons expected to continue pushing the envelope in terms of extreme temperatures, gambling firms may need to adjust their marketing strategies accordingly. Of course, acknowledging these extremes would require one to believe that Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth wasn’t merely a slightly longer episode of Punk’d. But hey who knows? This site may even taken a more serious approach when a betting business lays the blame for a poor earnings report on the weather.
