The 2019 iGB (iGaming Business) Affiliate Awards took place in February on the last evening of LAC (London Affiliate Conference), one of the year’s biggest events for those of us in gambling affiliation (admittedly rather a niche business!).

If you don’t know what gambling affiliation is, basically we’re like Money Supermarket or Compare the Market, but for casinos, bookmakers and so forth – in my case for online bingo and slots. I write all the content for and do most of the management of Best New Bingo Sites and have done so since its launch in 2013.

Best New Bingo Sites was shortlisted for the Best Bingo Website award in 2016 and 2017 but in both those years it was won by Which Bingo, at that time very much the industry leader.

I didn’t even put our site forward for the 2018 award. Nominated sites are judged based on what they’ve achieved in the last year and we had just had our worst year to date largely due to a poorly thought out new design. At the time of the 2018 awards ceremony in February 2018 (which I attended as a guest of one of our favourite operators) traffic to Best New Bingo Sites had been declining for some months. We were still on the front page of the SERPS, but not where we wanted to be and as anyone in digital marketing will tell you, there’s a world of difference between the top 3 and the lower reaches of the top 10.

The seeds of recovery had already been sown – our talented designer Razvan had demoed a new version of the site’s home page in time for LAC 2018 and shortly afterwards it was rolled out to the rest of the site, to be followed by an implementation of several things we learned at Brighton SEO and other such events, including properly done AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages). We recognised the explosion in mobile play at bingo and slot sites and wanted to make sure all the people who only have smartphones and not computers would find our site easy to use.

Fast forward to the autumn and, with our traffic massively up on earlier in the year and Best New Bingo Sites all over the Featured Snippets (the big box you often see on search results), it was time to enter the site for the 2019 awards.

The iGB awards used to be by public vote on nominations from anyone in the industry but in recent years all categories have switched to being judged by a panel of industry experts which has resulted in them being taken more seriously than in the past. The nomination process itself has changed so that one cannot just put a name forward; nominations have to be accompanied by a 500 word statement explaining why that site (or person or affiliate program) should win so it is more usual for people to nominate their own site or employee than to be nominated by someone else in the industry.

The 500 word statement needed to answer the following questions:

  • How has your business grown over the last 12 months?
  • What positive changes have you implemented and how has this changed your business?
  • How have you increased the volume and quality of your traffic?
  • How have you innovated in the last 12 months?
  • How have your rankings changed over the last 12 months?
  • How have you increased your brand power over the last 12 months?
  • How have you improved your relationships with your affiliate programs in the last 12 months?

Once we were shortlisted, the 500 words had to be expanded to 2000 words and I took a lot of time and trouble over that. The deadline was 12th December and after that, all there was to do was wait while the judges reviewed and marked the submissions.

The venue for the awards ceremony was the Brewery in London EC1 and an after party was to take place in another suite of rooms nearby. As the date approached I felt less and less hopeful we would win. I was reasonably confident of beating Which Bingo as the site had changed hands during the year and most of the original staff had left causing it to go off the boil somewhat – but what about our other competitors? Bingoport in particular were going to be stiff competition.

You can see from the photo above just how delighted I was when Best New Bingo Sites was announced as the winner – but what you can’t see is how delighted Luke (Ubud’s CEO) was to receive the photo via WhatsApp a few minutes later! If we had felt that it was likely we would actually win, he’d have been at the ceremony (and I’d have worn something a bit smarter if I’d thought for a minute that I would appear in the highlights video!).

Here’s our official victory photo, with Razvan. We’re already thinking about next year’s entry!

Team Victory Pic