While working with OLG’s Casino Acquisition team, I learned of paid media campaigns driving traffic to an outdated landing page with thin content. The bounce rate was high, engagement was low, and of those who started registering, few completed the process. What’s a Content & SEO Manager to do?
TL;DR: I led a series of UX and SEO content updates that generated*:
- +954% New Organic Users and +269% Organic Revenue
- 2x more registrations completed for every one started
- +18.5% more total revenue across all traffic sources
*Comparing two pages, Dec 1 – Feb 28 YoY (2023/24 vs 2024/25)
Content & SEO Optimizations
Learning of the page, I threw up a flag and performed an audit. After fleshing my thoughts out with the Casino Acquisition Marketing Manager and lead Casino Copywriter, we landed on some high-level content goals:
- Reasons to register with OLG vs competitors
- More prominent registration CTAs
- “Demos” to trial before registering/paying
- “How to play” content
- Social proof of “winnability”
- Key points/lingo from campaigns driving to this page
- SEO keywords for organic and upper-funnel traffic
With the full Casino Acquisition team aligned, we developed our new page, hoping to see an increase in New Users, Key Events, Registrations, and Revenue.
Performance Comparison
Comparing the two pages YoY for the same calendar period, we see a big boost for Organic User Traffic measures, and mixed results for All User Traffic measures:
Despite attracting fewer New Users and Registration Starts overall, the Bonus Page excelled in retaining users, driving Key Events, and converting Registrations into Activations. The bottom line result was higher Total Revenue and better per-capita revenue from Post-Registration Activations:
With more registration efficiency and monetization, we could theoretically pump paid traffic at this page and see a better bang for our buck. Before that, I wanted to see if I could better understand and improve upon our underperformance on New Users and Registration Starts.
Performance Analysis
I felt certain the full-height promo banner was increasing bounce rates and detracting from page content. So I planned for an A/B test on that in the future.
But both pages had the same banner; there had to be a better explanation why users were 3x as likely to start registering with the Affiliates page, and why the Bonus page more than doubled its rate of completions to starts. Knowing already that the latter had a much higher share of Organic Traffic, I figured a fuller breakdown of each page’s traffic channels might shed some more light.
Impact of Traffic Channel Proportions
Affiliates Page
| 80% Paid | 17% Affiliates | 3% Organic |
With other 95% of traffic driven by some form of active marketing, the Affiliates page had much more transactional-intent traffic. Users were more likely to be driven by a registration offer, explaining why we see more Registration Starts. But, with possibly no prior interest in OLG beyond that offer, the steps of registration may feel too onerous as users abandon the process.
Bonus Page
| 68% Paid | 30% Organic | 0.1% Affiliates |
With 900% more Organic Traffic, and 30% less marketing driven traffic, the Bonus page likely had far more informational or consideration-intent traffic. Users were less likely to start registering, but those who did were more likely to complete and then spend. Rather than an overt “hook”, aligning page content to a potential casino player’s informational and consideration journeys moved them farther down the funnel to become a paying OLG player.
That’s true for Organic, but Paid still made up the majority (68%) of Bonus page traffic. Was the type of paid traffic making a difference? Or was it our new content?
Impact of Paid Traffic Sources
While the Affiliates page had 47% of its total users come from one paid source (Snapchat) with a 94% bounce rate, the Bonus page received a much more diverse range of paid traffic sources with lower bounce rates and higher engagement. There may be differences in the way paid ads work, or in the average user demographic for these platforms, which could help explain the differing results. That aside, the paid campaigns driving to either page used the same promo banner creative, so it seemed likely our new content had made a difference.
Notably, traffic from any search-based source (i.e. paid or organic), had a much lower bounce rate, higher user engagement, and a higher rate of registration completions to starts. Meaning, traffic that reached either page via a self-initiated source were more likely to engage and convert because the content aligned with their pre-existing intent.
Impact of New Content
Our new, more engaging Bonus page content may have diverted users to other pages as they played demos, explored OLG.ca, or consumed ‘How to Play’ and Responsible Gambling content on PlaySmart.ca.
These side journeys might have lowered the rate of registration starts, but while facilitating organic exploration, delivering positive content experiences, and honouring a longer-term user journey. Compared to the Affiliates pages, the Bonus page content better conveys OLG’s value, and may lead to organic users returning to register through another means, another channel, another page; more likely to complete and with a higher average Customer Lifetime Value (as can often be the case with organic user journeys).
Continuous Improvement
In a nutshell: Affiliate page users were most likely to either bounce from the page or begin registering, without engaging with page content. Bonus page users were most likely to either bounce or explore page content without registering.
Both pages had a high bounce rate, and I had long assumed that the offer banner’s height and immediacy was to blame. Served up as the first chunk of content at full-page height, the banner pushes any introductory or contextual content “below the fold”, creating a jarring experience that some may think is the extent of the page. Even if one scrolls past, the heavy transactional push without context could feel pushy and impact conversions.
This landed me on a pretty straightforward hypothesis: if we reduce the offer banner’s height and bring the intro content into immediate view, we’ll add context that reduces bounce-rates, increases engagement, and earns more conversions.
Next Steps: Offer Banner A/B Test
As of April 2025, next steps are to coordinate an A/B test of my hypothesis, which I am hoping to launch in collaboration with the Casino Acquisition team in Summer 2025. This will provide direction for how we redesign the intro content, as part of a larger V2 Bonus page refresh, targeted to launch Fall 2025.