Services Required
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20%
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80%
Dev
Total Organic Audience *
Client Summary
Partypoker.com is part of Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment, an online gambling company with a number of leading brands, including Party Poker and Foxy Bingo. The company has a market capitalisation of £935 million and operates throughout Europe and Canada.
The PartyPoker brand is one of the world's longest established and biggest online poker rooms and operates in one of the most competitive search verticals.
Project Brief
Bwin.com is part of Bwin.Party Digital Entertainment, an online gambling company with a number of leading brands, including Party Poker and Foxy Bingo. The company has a market capitalisation of £935 million and operated throughout Europe and Canada.
PartyPoker briefed Blueclaw to create a piece of content for search marketing aims that would sit on a microsite and attract backlinks from a variety of high authority sources, as well as social shares and media coverage.
To successfully fulfil these aims the content would need to be innovative and creative, building a newsworthy buzz that would attract interest from news and blog sites, and be readily shared by social media users.
The project timeframe saw development begin in December 2015 ahead of the content’s launch in February 2015.
Strategy Implementation
Blueclaw struck upon the idea of commissioning SimpleUsability, a behavioural research consultancy, to undertake bespoke research aimed at understanding the neural activity within the brain when playing online poker.
Using an EEG (Electroencephalography) headset, SimpleUsability conducted research with players of varying skill levels (Beginner/Intermediate/Expert). They were tasked with competing in multiple online poker games while their brain activity was analysed using state-of-the-art software. Game events analysed included the Deal, Flop, Turn and River, as well as player betting actions such as the ‘Raise’, ‘Call’, ‘Check’ or going ‘All-in.’
The results were then designed into an interactive graphic and accompanied by original video from Party Poker professional Tony Dunst, who provided anecdotes and insights around various stages of poker games.
Content and design teams then met internally within Blueclaw to ensure the design vision was aligned with the content that needed to be presented, and that crucially the study’s findings were fully represented.
Blueclaw’s design team used a range of cutting edge CSS and Javascript techniques to animate the graphics within the piece and build intrigue around the subject matter.
Initial concepts were story-boarded and approved by the client before front-end development commenced. Overall, the design and development process took four weeks to complete, with a further week required for bug fixing and client approvals.
Once completed, the graphic was outreached via media relations, blogger outreach activity, as well as seeding on social media and bookmarking sites. Blueclaw’s outreach process focused on niche poker sites and blogs, sports sites and social bookmarking activity. The content was seeded onto Reddit (which has delivered 3,000 visits to date), StumbleUpon and other leading social bookmarking sites.
Blog and media outlet research undertaken by Blueclaw’s Content and Online PR Team was then put into action, with an extensive outreach campaign undertaken to obtain media/blog coverage and links.
Results
Yourbrainonpoker.com has to date attracted 35,000 unique visits (July 2015) without any paid promotion or advertising. Just over 20,000 of those visits have come from referral traffic, with 4,500 visits from social media to date. The remainder of visits have come from direct and organic traffic to the micro-site.
Primarily designed to fulfil search marketing aims, the content has also attracted links from over 150 high-authority, unique referring domains (against a target of 70). Coverage includes the Daily Star, Squawka.com, Twoplustwo.com, Huffingtonpost.co.uk, Tiltbook.com, Pokerstrategy.com and Pokertube.com
The site also attracted design awards. The application collect Site of the Day from CSS Winner, an Honourable Mention from the Awwwards, Website of the Day from the CSS Design Awards, and a shortlisting in the FWA awards. The graphic was also recognised as a ‘Staff Pick’ on Visual.ly and has over 4,000 views on the site.
Party Poker also requested the site be translated into German ahead of outreach in that country. Blueclaw undertook this and the campaign has been well received in the country, attracting more than a dozen pieces of media and blog coverage.
The micro-site in-turn links through to PartyPoker.com, pushing authority to the site and helping to reinvigorate the brand’s presence in organic search, where it now ranks No. 2 (behind Wikipedia) for the term ‘poker’, as well as ranking No.1 for ‘online poker’.
“It’s rare in the poker world that content comes along which causes as much of a stir as this piece. It is a true original and continues to attract traffic, coverage and links six-months after its launch. I have no doubt this will continue going forwards –this content is truly evergreen.”
Bwin Content Strategist Toby Grainger.
