Oddschecker insights: Early season data demonstrates lack of price sensitivity among football punters
Oddschecker unveils August betting figures as interest in football specials climbs 42% year-on-year driven by Spurs' manager search and high-profile transfers
Premier League Pricing
From an operator perspective, the first few rounds of 2021/22 Premier League fixtures saw many of the same trends from last season rear their heads again. The below graphic shows how the average overround of each of the top 10 most-clicked bookmakers relates to the share of oddschecker betslip clicks that they managed to achieve.
Once again, we see that oddschecker’s football audience is much less price-sensitive than our racing-oriented users. Football customers are more heavily influenced by branding, free bets and retention offers – and therefore are less guided by competitive pricing. Grid position is also known to affect clickshare, with partners seeing greater activity the further left they move on the oddschecker grid.
The largest share of clicks was achieved by bet365 (20.5%), which offered an average overround of 105.4% on its standard 1×2 market (that’s the 16th best-priced odds of the 20 sportsbooks on the oddschecker grid). Moreover, Paddy Power ranked 4th for clickshare (8.0%) whilst offering the widest-ever average monthly overround on record (108.3%).
However, there has still been indication that pricing holds sway over a portion of our football audience. SBK, the most competitively priced operator on the grid (average overround of 101.2%), achieved the 8th largest share of betslip clicks in August.
Roaring Registrations
Last month, registrations via oddschecker were up +17% vs August 2020. This means that every month this year so far has seen an increase in acquisition delivery versus the equivalent month in 2020.
These upticks can be in part attributed to the sporting calendar – last year obviously saw sport stop during April and May, whilst this year saw Euro 2020 take centre-stage in June and July.
However, a number of site improvements, including an optimisation of the oddschecker Free Bets Page, has ensured that we have delivered +78% more registrations so far in 2021 than at the same stage in 2020. We’re also +18% ahead of where we were at the same stage in 2019.
Football Specials
The end of August marked the closing of one of the most dramatic transfer windows in recent memory. Some of the biggest stars in football completed high-profile moves across Europe – and the transfer market hype was reflected in the pageviews of oddschecker’s ‘Football Specials’ pages.
Our most viewed page was ‘Tottenham’s Next Manager’, as the saga surrounding the next Spurs boss rolled throughout the summer. Having been linked with several gaffers, Nuno Espirito Santo eventually ended up taking the reins at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium.
Cristiano Ronaldo’s move attracted the second largest volume of traffic, some way ahead of Harry Kane’s speculated move to Man City and Lionel Messi’s transfer to PSG. The futures of Jack Grealish, Kylian Mbappe and Erling Haaland also attracted the attention of our audience.
Overall, oddschecker saw a 42.2% increase in overall ‘Football Specials’ pageviews versus the summer transfer window in 2020.
