In any business, understanding where customers are coming from and how they are reaching your platform is essential. For iGaming operators, mapping the player journey can be transformative and can create opportunities for highly effective campaign and platform optimisation that will drive conversions and improve results across the board.
Of course, effectively mapping the player journey can be difficult, especially given the multitude of touchpoints and routes of entry that today’s players are exposed to. However, if you want to truly elevate your marketing efforts, pinning down this player path is key. Let’s find out how data can help you draw a picture of where your players are coming from, identify potential obstacles and optimise your marketing to boost your iGaming brand.
The Stages of the Player Journey
Player journeys can be long and complex. The best way to evaluate these is by breaking them down into distinct stages. In doing so, we’ll have a clearer and more accessible way of understanding how players are reaching a platform and how they are behaving once they are there.
Acquisition
Acquisition describes the first stage of the player journey: how they reach your platform. Of course, there are a number of different acquisition routes, but you’ll commonly see players coming through search engines, social media channels and affiliate platforms.
Activation
The next stage of the player journey is activation. Once a player reaches your platform, activation describes the process of them actually signing up, creating an account and depositing funds to play. This is arguably the most important step and, unfortunately, one of the trickiest to get right.
Retention
Player retention refers to the percentage of players who arrive on an iGaming platform, register to play games and then return to play again in the future. Any successful iGaming brand is built upon a foundation of loyal players, which means tracking and boosting retention wherever possible is critical.
Mapping the Player Journey with Data
Understanding the player journey is one thing, being able to effectively track and map it is something else entirely. Doing so involves a level of technical know-how and access to back-end data analysis tools. As an iGaming-focused agency, Digital Footprints can help operators analyse and evaluate player journeys and adapt marketing strategies to suit unique targets. To give you an idea of the level of insight data analysis can provide, let’s take a look at some examples of using data for mapping the player journey.
When it comes to tracking acquisition, you can look at both your platform itself and channels that point towards it. If you’re directing users from your brand’s Facebook and Instagram channels, for example, you can use Meta’s native insight tools to track how many link clicks are being recorded on individual posts.
For a broader and more comprehensive acquisition report, Google Analytics is your best option. This tool can give you an overview of how many users are coming to your platform and where from, breaking them down into categories such as socials, search engines, email marketing and third-party platforms.
Tracking activation can be a little bit more difficult. However, you can set up specific ‘key events’ in Google Analytics that will trigger whenever a player creates an account or makes a first-time deposit, for example. You can compare these figures to acquisition numbers to establish an activation percentage.
Again, Google Analytics can be used to track player retention as well. In a retention report, the number of new users is compared against the number of returning users, and you can also track engagement and activity across your platform.
Another option for retention mapping involves partnering with a CRM service provider like Sportradar. Through the use of AI, Sportradar can create comprehensive player profiles to establish lifetime values, predict behaviour and analyse preferences. When it comes to player retention, having access to information like this is invaluable.
Stage-Specific Marketing Opportunities
So, now that we understand how data can be used for mapping the player journey, how can we use what we’ve learned to optimise marketing and improve results?
Acquisition Stage
Acquisition should be a primary goal for any marketing campaign. However, the exact strategy to adopt will be determined by the specific acquisition channel involved. For example, acquiring new players through social media demands a different approach when compared to acquiring players through organic search results.
While approaches usually need to be channel-specific, offering potential new players something of value is a tactic that can work across the board. Whether that’s a special offer advertised through socials or an affiliate partner, or an SEO-focused blog piece that ranks in search results, providing value is the key.
Conducting acquisition data analysis beforehand is paramount, as this will give you an insight into which channels are generating the most traffic and which are falling behind. Armed with this info, you can allocate time and budget more effectively.
Activation Stage
Marketing isn’t solely about getting players onto your platform, it’s also used to ensure they convert and become paying customers. Again, this is where value is important. But for activation, your marketing efforts should focus on incentivisation: if a player does A, they’ll get B.
Welcome offers are the most obvious example of this. They’re used widely across the industry, and for good reason. Not only can welcome offers incentivise players to open an account but they can also be used to motivate new users to deposit funds through the provision of match offers.
By breaking down activation into component parts, creating an account and depositing funds, you can analyse data to assess whether there are bottlenecks or issues at one part of the process. For example, if players are creating accounts and not depositing funds, could more be done to incentivise them or could the depositing process be made easier?
Retention Stage
Once you convert a website visitor into a registered player, you must take steps to ensure they become repeat customers and return again in the future. Customer loyalty programmes and reward systems are incredibly effective for driving improved retention. By showing your players that they’re valued, they’ll be more likely to return and favour your brand over a competitor.
In today’s data-driven age, we can implement personalised loyalty programmes that are highly effective in boosting retention. Through tracking player behaviour and preferences, custom offers and rewards can be delivered to improve engagement with your platform and brand.
CRM solutions provider Xtremepush’s work with Brazilian sportsbook Betsul is an excellent example of this. Through the utilisation of AI and machine learning technology, Xtremepush was able to engage and retain players through loyalty campaigns driven by advanced personalisation and behaviour analysis.
Key Takeaways
Successfully mapping the player journey with data and using this information to optimise marketing can seem like a sizeable undertaking, and doing so involves a high degree of technical proficiency. If you’re an iGaming brand looking to enhance your marketing through mapping the player the journey, here are the key takeaways from this guide:
· The player journey can be broken down into acquisition, activation and retention
· Use analytics tools to further segment these stages and evaluate the efficacy of traffic routes and touchpoints
· Your marketing approach should be stage-specific, but must always offer value and incentive to your players
· New technologies such as AI and machine learning are creating new personalisation opportunities that can further drive retention
