Conversion corner: The football season is key for player acquisition
Free-to-play games specialist Chalkline’s founder Daniel Kustelski on why operators must focus their acquisition efforts on football and, in particular, at the start of the new season
Football season will soon be upon us and this year, for sportsbook operators both retail and online, it is more important than all of the other big sporting events on the US calendar. This is because American football is the most watched sport week in and week out, and this is reflected in betting activity, too.
Since we have been tracking betting data (this includes betting handle and hold for each sport), it is annually the most bet-on sport in Nevada.
Operators clearly see the opportunity as they bonus at a much higher percentage at the start of the football season than they do a few months in. But with a pool of 30+ million likely sports bettors in the US, according to the AGA, it’s no wonder operators are keen to spend big to engage bettors as the season-start hype builds.
There are other indicators of its importance. We have seen many states actually announce they would like to be live with legal sports betting “before the football season starts.” And then you have overseas operators, with many announcing plans to be ready to launch in various states in Q3 2021, a sign they want to be live for the football season.
Of course, the run up to the 2020 football season was muted due to Covid-19, but this means operators will throw even more cash at their marketing budgets this year.
And this is going to have a seismic impact on the market – in terms of betting handle, Q1 2021 is already three times bigger than Q1 2020 and we are yet to have a major sports season start.
Football is the last bastion of live TV
TV advertising will play a big part when it comes to customer acquisition and the football season presents an opportunity to target large audiences of potential bettors. Last year, eight of the top-viewed TV shows in the US were football games, as shown in the Top 10 Primetime Telecasts of 2020.
Knowing the audiences that football commands should encourage operators to utilize the season to educate, acclimate, and introduce betting products to the fans that are betting inclined.
The betting numbers don’t lie
Historically, football has also been the most bet-on sport in Nevada. This is quite remarkable when you consider there are only 256 games per season in the NFL compared with 2,460 NBA games.
When we look at other states, we see similar data, at least from those that track handle by sport. This includes New Jersey and Indiana.
In the Garden State, data from the past two years indicates that football takes the largest share of handle by sport when you consider the vast amount of parlays on football.
In Indiana, parlay accounts for the largest share of handle, with football, basketball, and baseball all holding around 23% of handle.
Operators should have plans in place for the start of the NFL Preseason, which gets underway in early August, to ensure a smooth launch into the football season.
Even in Oregon, with the lottery-run, SBTech-powered Scoreboard sportsbook, of its 40,000 active players, 35,000 or 88% have placed a bet on football.
Bonus spend and indication of importance
The importance of football can also be seen in operator bonusing in the states where this is tracked. Take Pennsylvania, for example. The graph shows significant peaks in bonusing around the start of the football season and of course the Super Bowl.
In Colorado, where we can track bonusing as a percent of hold, you can once again see how important the start of the football season is to operators and their player acquisition efforts.
The market only opened in May 2020, but bonuses issued in the state were almost double the hold for September. In February, bonusing was almost the same level and it is likely that hold achieved was entirely attributable to the Super Bowl.
Speaking of the Super Bowl…
The Super Bowl is perhaps the largest single-event betting market in the US and operators must take steps to ensure they can leverage this.
This year’s Super Bowl week proved to be FanDuel’s largest ever in terms of player acquisition with over 350,000 sports betting and igaming customers onboarded. Of these, 100,000 were from states that launched before 2020.
Come Super Bowl Sunday, FanDuel reported that it had more than one million customers active across its online sportsbook and casino.
Contests and competitions
Operators can use the football season to launch big-prize contests. In recent years, the Westgate SuperContest has been the staple for football but others are starting to emerge.
This includes Circa Sports, which has recently launched two competitions, Circa Sports Million, and Circa Survivor, with $10m in guaranteed prizes up for grabs. These contests, with multi-million-dollar prizes, ramp up the excitement ahead of and throughout the season and add another string to the operator’s marketing bow.
New states and brands expected
As I touched on earlier, there are a number of states that have expressed their interest in launching legal sports betting prior to the start of the football season. Why is this? Because bettors love football and these states want to launch with a bang.
For example, Tennessee launched in November last year and generated $100m in handle in the first month alone. It remained the biggest launch to date until Michigan went live a few weeks before the Super Bowl and to another record-breaking month with handle of over $300m in its first full month in February.
Operators are also rushing to launch in various states prior to the football season because they want to catch the wave and ride it throughout.
The states and operators that do launch in time will reap the benefits, and the brands active in these markets and other regulated and regulating states must act now to ensure they can leverage the huge opportunity the football season presents when it kicks off in September.