iGaming Daily

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Hello and welcome to the latest episode of iGaming Daily, supported by OptiMove. We're nearing the end of 2024, and as many look to wind down this year's operations for the festive period and bringing the bells for Hogwini, we'll be spending today's episode recapping on an eventful year of sports. This year, we've seen sporting events all around the world take place, including the African Cup of Nations, the Paris Olympics, and the European Football Championships, along with staple events in the sporting calendar, such as the Super Bowl, Wimbledon, Tour de France, and many, many more. I could keep reeling that list off and be here for another 10 minutes. Joining me, myself, James Ross, to go through these events is John Collins, the strategic consultant and team lead at OptiMove to delve into the figures from 2024's sporting calendar and highlight what they have gained when it comes to play behavior and actionable strategies for improving retention and return on investment. John, welcome back to the podcast. How are you doing? You okay? Very well, thank you. Thank you for having me on here once again. Always a pleasure. Well, it is a pleasure. We did a recap. I think it was of the European Championships. I think it was a few weeks after the event, which was incredibly interesting to hear the insights of what you took from that event. I do remember Portugal was a standout anomaly for you, which was interesting. It's kind of good to have this episode to recap on a lot of other events that have happened and what you've taken away from it. Before we do jump into that though, I have two, maybe three, just little fun questions. And the first one is what sporting event kind of stood out to you the most this year? Well, I think for me personally, it probably was the Euros final being as England actually made it this time. The first time I thought that potentially they might win a game in that tournament and then of course massively outplayed. But no, I mean, what a great tournament that was. Just pretty much everything that we predicted happened with the exception of obviously England's performance there. So that was great. And I think aside from that one, I'm a big NFL fan. So I think... Maybe not so much the Super Bowl, that was a bit of a letdown, but there's been a few early season games for this season so far which have been very, very enjoyable. So yeah, those are the two big ones. Perfect. So I said what was the one that stood out to you the most? Which one was personally your favourite? Well, yeah, so stood out to me the most would have been the Euros, but personal favourite? It was probably also in the Euros to be completely honest, but just for personal reasons, the people I was with watching a game with a beer in hand, it was very much easier to do that with football than some other things, isn't it? So I think definitely some of those England matches for me. Yeah, I think one of mine, one that stood out to me the most was actually for me the African Cup of Nations. It's normally a football tournament that I don't watch as much, but I really invested in it this year. Surprisingly, the quality was better than I imagined it to be. So yeah, I was invested into it, the atmosphere. I think a lot of when the World Cup was in South Africa, the atmosphere was electric then back in there. I mean, what year that was it? 2010? Oh, you've got me there. All I can remember is the vuvuzela. I hated them when I was younger, but I did miss that vuvuzela and started embracing it more in the African Cup nation. We'll bring it back, bring it back every couple of years so we know what we're missing. I might just take a move with Rosalia every time I go to Old Trafford. Perfect. I'll annoy the Stratford end. And opposite side, what was your least favourite? Oh, my least favourite sporting event was week one of the NFL. We'll get onto this potentially a bit later, but there's something about abbreviated pre-seasons or seasons that happen post big tournaments, which are completely flat. They're low scoring, they're low interest. It looks like the teams haven't played together before. More fouls. All the things that you don't particularly want to see in this sport event. So I remember being super hyped up for that weekend and it was a total bust. Total bust. So. Perfect. Like I said, hopefully we get into something like that later on. I'm aware we've only got about 20, 25 minutes. So we'll jump into the topic and we're gonna get some, like I said, we're gonna get insights from 2024 sport event. And this is a very, very vague overview or a very vague question, so to say. But for you, what have been the key takeaways from 2024's sporting events? Certainly. So I think, I think the main thing to the main overarching takeaway about the big events in 2024 is that they were generally the same in terms of user behavior as the big events that we've seen in previous years. There's no big surprises here. So. In every major sport, they'll have the same general pattern. We'll see massive increase in new players. And in mature markets, even more so probably, we see a huge number of reactivated one-back players as well. To give you an example of this, so in the States, we saw an increase of about 50 to 65% in terms of active player numbers, depending on... which operator you're looking at, between the Super Bowl or college national championships. So massive, massive increase in numbers who are addressable and placing bets. The effect of that on revenue generating numbers is as you probably would imagine, we'll also see a commensurate decrease in betting volume and better amount. We spoke about this effect in the last. The last episode on the Euros, actually the same thing generally across the board. Again, if we look at the NFL as a use case here, we were seeing something about maybe a decrease in a third in terms of wager amount per player over these big events. So that's a pretty big casualization effect, I would say, in place for most of these events. And then... The other thing that we typically see, and this is something that we're warned about when we're planning out these events and how we should approach them, is a sharp increase in churn post-event. So, typically speaking, we see around just under half of the player base will have churned after a month after one of these big events. And that interestingly does include... include the footballing leagues around Europe as well. We actually do see quite a big shift in the player base where the big event player will churn and then you'll reactivate a sort of elapsed league better. Sorry, just clarify, churn. Churn, yeah. So that is a player who was placing bets or other activities such as deposits, who has then ceased all activity for a defined period of time. Usually that's gonna be around a month. So... That's why we start with that one month as our first measure for churn. That means effectively all of our bettors, we look at them and around half of them have just ceased to make any activity, whether it's on that particular sport or anything else, so including cross-sell, including other sport bets, that kind of thing. So very, very marked decline in the user base from the people who are betting on those sports. kind of suggesting, as you may have guessed, that people are coming in, placing a bet just on that one event or group of games, and then just not hanging around afterwards. Either they've won, they've withdrawn, and they've left until the next time we see it, or potentially they've decided that they're gonna do something else, potentially come back in a few months rather than sticking around to place bets on a different product. What's interesting though is that sort of lower retention rate doesn't really persist or doesn't really accelerate, I should say. So if you look at the difference between one month after the season's finished or the event, whatever you'd like to look at, and then compare that with about six months, actually the sort of players you've got, they're about the same. You don't tend to lose a ton more. This is obviously more pronounced in, say, America, where you have much longer off-seasons than in Europe with a nine-month football season. But it's typically the same. You generally lose most of your users that you're going to lose in the first month, effectively. So that gives us a really big opportunity there, doesn't it, in terms of post-event retention? We just know we have a short window of about 30 days that we need to concentrate our efforts into. And it's relatively low risk as well, because we know that there's probably about half of those players, and we can probably identify them relatively easily if we put some effort in beforehand. We're just going to share anyway, so retaining even one of them is a net benefit to us. So yeah, that's number one in terms of our big takeaways, I think, from sporting events. Okay, perfect. Again, we've emphasized how many sporting events there were in 2024. With that, you know, you operators have to start looking at ways to manage the kind of the marketing that they do for these and what they offer for certain events, because not all sporting events are obviously the same, you know, football, cricket, NFL. What mistakes are you seeing operators consistently doing when it comes to these sporting events? Yeah, so I think I think there are four. that I'll point out here. I think the big one starts before you even get to marketing, and it's the dislocation of how you set up your marketing team. I see quite a lot of operators at the moment who have almost segmented their team rather than the customer base. So you'll have your sports team, your gaming team, your new user journey team. And unless those teams are working really well together, which you do in some cases, then your marketing efforts are just going to be really, really harmed whether it's orchestration kind of being fouled up because all the different teams are trying to speak to the same users or whether it's just like a lack of a consistent plan, lack of a system approach across those customers. So that's the first one now. I think it's a bit of an issue and one that you can definitely address quite easily if you've planned things out together. And all of the right people are involved in those conversations, especially a long time before the big events and the leagues start. Everything can be easily adjusted. There is definitely one to keep an eye on, especially if you do have multiple different products, you market separately. The second one, I think when it comes to big events, certainly is, I don't think they start early enough. I think. Typically speaking, we always say we should start around four weeks before the start of the campaign, the Euro championship, the World Cup, NFL. And I think something I've noticed recently is that a lot of operators we speak to, they start to plan fine. Their window for planning is actually perfectly far in advance, but the actual activity that they're sending out, the marketing activity. It kind of still is held up until almost the last minute in a lot of cases. And that's not really building it up like your customer journey in a coherent way. I know like it kind of sells itself to a certain extent, but you're almost relying too much on organic activity and traffic. If you're not building up some certain sense of anticipation, if you're not marketing towards it, so that's definitely something I think people, people can improve upon. The third one. It's going to be, I think people, once the events start, they immediately sort of shift to performance campaigns, which is fine, you have to do that. Obviously, this is your moment to rake in a lot of the money that you're gonna make in that year. I think we also deprioritize acquisition and reactivation campaigns a little bit too much here. I think when you look at the composition of a big event player base, you're going to find is that it's very, very different to a normal in-season player base. The number of active players, players who've been betting for quite a while, they will be a much smaller proportion of your player base than they would be during a Premier League season. What that means is we probably are not leaning hard enough into acquiring new players in-season, in-event. or reactivating those players who have lapsed from previous events. And I think there's a big opportunity is kind of being left on the table, especially in mature markets, because we know that those players are probably being picked up by a competitor. And that's something that we need to keep in mind, especially in what I said before, when we see these sort of cold start to seasons. I'll admit the Premier League here a little bit because it's not really a big event. But certainly NFL and the Euros, after we see potentially a long season, fatigue starting to creep into both the players and the betters, you can't necessarily assume that they're all going to turn up on day one. And if you don't have those efforts persist, at least for a little while into the tournament, you are definitely leaving money on the table. And I think the last one here is probably... It's really to do with the way that we're marketing towards content as well. I think it's about user experience. User experience these days. It's very much siloed together. Like, here's your sportsbook. Here's your casino page. Here's your live casino. Here's your poker. And it makes it very, very difficult, I think, for the average punter, regardless what platform they're using to make their bets, to really engage with cross product stuff. I think we're very, very too focused on a user kind of logging in and just doing what they've always done. And it makes increasing the value of a user actually quite hard when you think about it. So just thinking about how we can seamlessly transition a user experience to the most appropriate content is something else that I think a lot of operators aren't quite doing enough of these days and it's definitely a big growth area as we go forward. Perfect. And everything you've just kind of explained there. Well, first off, the data it comes from, is it Pulse? I'm crazy. That's correct. Yeah. So, OptiMove maintains a benchmarking data. We pull all of the data of all of our clients together, aggregates it and anonymize it. And from that, we're able to pull out industry trends, country level trends, certain other types of trends as well, and make that available to our clients. And yeah, the link will be in the description of this podcast, I hope. You've just done my job there, John. Perfect. To clarify, we will leave a link to the post link in the description below. But I just wanted to get that because all these data and everything you just mentioned when it comes to the mistakes that operators are making, what would you kind of then suggest for an actionable strategies for 2025? Yeah, so, you know, probably just thought of the inverse of what I was saying there. So the big one, I think, is to start early. So we'll give you a... list, I'll give you an example here, one stat which I think is really quite stark, which is that during the NFL season, the last NFL season, players who engaged during the preseason, i.e. August effectively, were almost twice as likely to remain active all season compared to people who placed a bet on day one. So that's massive and kind of speaks a little bit towards what I was saying about or starting early enough. We do see an uptick in player numbers during August as there are pre-season games and things like that. And what I think is interesting about the opportunity here is like most bettors, especially the kind of bettors who, maybe the more casual players or mid-tier players as we'll get onto in a minute, what they tend to bet on, the types of bets that they make are quite generalist ones. Like I'm going to pick the winner of the game. I'm going to pick the winner of the league. It's not necessarily things like, you know, the number of touchdowns thrown by the Detroit Lions this season. These are quite easy to market, especially as we'll have pretty good odds by that point, as we know all about, you know, the state of the league up to that point, and with the exception of a few injuries potentially that might happen. But they're quite easy to market too, and they're quite easy to incentivize, and they're also quite easy to understand. And that means that players can engage in that kind of activity before the season starts. And as we know then, they are far more likely to stay engaged throughout. The second one, I think that I would very much drive towards people, and I think most operators will resonate with this one fairly strongly. It's about cross-sell. especially if you are in a market like the US, where your off-season can potentially be most of the year, depending on the sports that you're playing, you really have to encourage engagement across multiple products to boost retention rates. There are a number of different ways you can do this. I'll just give you a couple of examples. So, as I said before, maybe we're siloing users too much here. Incentivizing gaming products directly from the sports page is something I see some of... the operators do. Really, really effective, actually. I mean, it gets around the UI constraints, the user experience constraints, and just allows for a much increased, much improved cross-sell rate. The second one, I would say, would be a certain amount of gamification, I guess. Gating sports, betting bonuses behind either gaming, casino, or hybrid activity. It's a great way to get someone to try something new out, especially if there's something that they're more familiar with at the end of that. Third, something that we opt to move Trider to push a little bit is the idea of an experience campaign. So, if you try something for the first time and you have a bad experience, you're not going back. If you try something... you have a bad experience and someone says, sorry about that here, have a free meal on us or whatever. Not none of us should be giving away free meals, but give something back. It generally works quite well, right? This is a way of turning a negative sentiment into a neutral sentiment or a positive sentiment for users who've had a bad experience or something. And you can kind of do the same thing with a really... like high win rate even as well. Like you don't have to throw money after it, but you can kind of reinforce like this was really good, like come back and try it again. So that's a good one there. And then the most, you know, maybe more of like a platform sensitive one here is to use intelligent segmentation to model users appropriately. If you've got the ability to view and the data obviously to do a bit more machine learning focused here. You can try to identify propensity to play gaming casino products and incentivize the users who are most appropriate to do that as well. So those are a few things there that go into Cross-Sell. I think, and I'll just give you two more ideas here that I think are really important for these big events. One is focusing on mid-tier players. So I think most operators are actually really good at going after... high value VIP customers now, they're quite good at identifying and rewarding them. And you see that in retention rates, like being really, really high amongst those players. So they're doing really well there. I think fewer have a good, or at least consistent plan at engaging the mid-tier player who make up pretty much all of the rest of the revenue for that brand. They retained a much lower rate. We're talking... sub 80% typically as opposed to like 95 for your high tier players. And these people typically, especially if they're new, they are the VIPs of tomorrow. They probably are the ones that you can actually affect increase in their average revenue, engagement with different products, and just general like lifetime in terms of like 10 years as well. So having a plan for them. is just as important as having a plan for your VIPs, because they will probably take their place or just join them at some point in the future if you take care of them. And then the last one here, it's just about using smart bonusing, which again, is something that I think we spoke about in the last one, but this is going to be one of the big themes of 2025, I think it's like generosity strategy and, you know, We know when, especially as we start to transition more towards normal, we're in the football season now, right? So we know that in-season retention is generally going to be priority number one for brands during the regular season. And it's sort of true for things like the NFL as well. And so I think something a lot of brands don't do intelligently is managing the risk of sharing customers well. So there are a number of methods. available really to identify escalating risk amongst the player base. And what a lot of operators tend to do is just pick an arbitrary day of like days since last bet or days since last deposit or something and just say, okay, if they cross that threshold, they're risk of churn. There are better ways of doing it like that. And I would definitely encourage people to use those. Once you've kind of bracketed users into like high risk, mid risk, low risk, you get a couple of twin bonuses out of it really. The first one is you can reduce bonus on the players that are not really a risk of churn. So you don't have to put money into players who are going to hang around organically anyway. And then the second one is that for every one of those high-risk users or even worse potentially, that you then go on to retain, you're just getting money that would have 100% gone basically. So... is zero risk for the operator as well in effectively working this out. So those are the ones I would suggest are the most actionable things for people to work with. Perfect. We are rounding up now to the end of the podcast. We have about a minute left, I'd say. So quickly and briefly, I'll actually say 2025 and beyond. You've already gone through these actionable strategies for 2025. What should the industry be keeping their eyes out for? over the next 12 months? Sure. So I think, as I said, cross-sell generosity strategy will probably be top priorities for the industry in most of the mature markets, certainly. I think we're going to see increased regulatory pressure, certainly in Europe as it's already kind of happening, but maybe elsewhere as well. Regional strategies are going to become more important, especially for those big sort of household name operators who are kind of blanketing everything at the moment and have... wildly inconsistent offerings amongst their products. And then lastly, a US-focused, I think, we are going to see the gold rush kind of end here. I think the bonus generosity spending has to equalize, has to decrease in parts of the US. Operators should be very careful. They don't want to be caught out kind of holding a bag here with being like the most generous operators because they are going to get exposed to bonus abuse. And obviously, we're basically throwing money away that they don't need to. Those are, I think, the main trends I'll be keeping an eye on this year. Perfect. That's everything we've got time for, John. I'm looking forward to see if your predictions come true. We'll keep an eye on and you'll no doubt be back on to kind of... Maybe we'll do like a mid-year recap and then end-year recap like we've done now. Sounds great. Well, until then, John, thank you very much for joining us. And have a brilliant Christmas as well and a great New Year because I probably won't speak to you until then. Likewise, likewise. Merry Christmas, everybody. Again to the listeners. links to the Pulse website is in the description below so you can find out more about that along with any other relevant information that is on the SBC roster of news websites. But until then, thank you and goodbye.