Paddy Power tops UK gambling search rankings

Paddy Power is the go-to betting and gaming brand for UK punters, according to a new report into gambling-related search terms by Pi Datametrics.

The Paddy Power Betfair-owned brand topped the search leaderboard by appearing in 8.01% of all gambling-related searches carried out by UK customers for the period between December 2015 and January 2019.

It ranked ahead of Gambling.com, which appeared in 7.14% of searches. Coming in third was bet365, with a 5.54% share, followed by Oddschecker in fourth, with 5.10%.

The UK’s leading high street bookmaker brands were conspicuous by their absence, with William Hill just missing out on the top ten. The operator appeared as a result for 2.70% of betting-related searches.

The report monitors Google searches to assess how many times each brand appears in the results, as well as specific search terms (such as horse racing tips), within each search theme, and across every betting-related category.

It also assessed the most popular terms searched by punters, with football leading the way in the UK. The sport saw search activity spike in July, during the summer’s FIFA World Cup, highlighting the positive impact of seasonal events.

Interest in tennis appears to be falling, with search volume falling 50% year-on-year by July 2018. However Pi Datametrics noted that this could have been as a result of unusually high search volume around 2017 Wimbledon Women’s Final, which saw strong favourite Venus Williams defeated by underdog Garbiñe Muguruza.

This was also the case in horse racing, with search volume dropping 20% between March 2016 and March 2018. The sport tends to see search activity spike in March – around the Cheltenham Gold Cup – and April, when the Aintree Grand National takes place.

Despite seeing search volume decline, horse racing still leads the way in the number of searches, with an average monthly search volume of 675,033 between December 2017 and November 2018. The sport’s cost per click averaged at £6.30 over this period.

It led football, the second most popular sport searched, by a fair distance. Football’s average monthly search volume for the period came in at 461,757, with its CPC averaging £5.36.

The full Pi Datametrics report is available to read below, or download on the Pi Datametrics website.