Opening the data taps

As legal, regulated online gambling continues to roll out across the world, a growing number of land-based operators are now offering online and mobile sportsbooks and casinos for the first time.

A move online comes with plenty of challenges and opportunities, but one that is often overlooked is the increase in data and information that becomes available.

If this data is collected, stored, analysed and actioned correctly, it can allow operators to streamline their business and drive tremendous growth across both retail and digital.

If they don’t, operators can suffer from information overload.

Historically, land-based operators have relied on highly fragmented data to help them acquire and retain players. For example, operators will track loyalty players but not others, and also track limited gameplay information, time of play, and amount spent and cashed out.

While this does provide some insight, it simply can’t be compared with the additional data and information that can be gathered with online play.

Data available with online play includes individual player game preferences, bet sizes, favoured bonuses, session times and duration, interaction with loyalty schemes and so much more.

This gives operators a forensic understanding; not only of the player, but the ROI they are getting from the marketing dollars spent on each customer.

But collecting, managing, analysing and actioning a huge increase in available data is not without its challenges and to maximise the value of this data, operators must consider the following:

Data warehouse

Make sure you have one centralised location where you can access all game and player data even if you are working with multiple providers.

This will allow you to make faster, more effective analysis and take immediate action instead of spending time pulling data from various sources.

Marketing analytics platform

Have just one location from which you execute all digital and offline user acquisition spend. This allows operators to quickly access campaign data in real time and return on ad spend.

This in turn allows them to be agile and make changes on the campaigns they are running based on what the data is telling them.

The beauty of investing in the right platform online is that decisions can be taken quickly and based on data and information in real-time instead of waiting days, weeks and even months for it to become available.

Use data and don’t just collect it

Land-based operators that are used to making assumptions based on fragmented, incomplete data must make sure they leverage the full potential of the information available to them online.

The granularity of online data can really help them increase margins and drive efficiencies but to do this they need to use the data and not just collect it.

This requires them to build out a digitally native team that is highly skilled when it comes to working with data. This will help operators properly explore the new information available to them.

This includes data from game platforms and payment providers, as well as CRM, tracking and business intelligence.

Those that do will be able to drive growth across their online and retail properties, create a seamless loyalty scheme and open up new cross-sell opportunities to extract the maximum lifetime value.

Allan Petrilli, VP of sales and growth at Intelitics, a marketing-tech and analytics services company that provides data-driven user acquisition at scale across online and mobile channels leveraging their proprietary innovative igaming-focused marketing technology stack. Petrilli has been in the industry since 2011, delivering tailored and proven user acquisition strategies across all igaming verticals.