A winning analytics strategy for gaming firms

Even the very largest gaming businesses online today may be playing a weakened hand when it comes to delivering a truly efficient web analytics strategy.

Over the last year I’ve spoken to numerous companies who, although generally data rich about how their customers bet and how they acquire those customers, often have little visibility of what those people are actually doing on the site. Without ignoring the value of customer data, they have still forgotten to focus and invest in key areas of their customers’ behaviour and lifecycle – missing out on valuable analytics.

Any firm spending a healthy budget on marketing to and acquiring new customers will implement methods to understand which campaigns were most successful in attracting new customers and what their playing habits are. But that doesn’t provide them with visibility of either the drivers that spur their action onsite or the triggers that make them become transactional - or not. This hole in analytics capabilities is understandable, especially within large scale gaming companies who by necessity have become distracted by sophisticated customer acquisition methods at the expense of website experience optimisation analytics which can also play a significant role in revenue generation.

Before any online gaming company can invest in web analytics, it first needs to have a strategy in place that determins how to do that. At Foviance we analyse businesses individually to work out with them the best direction they should take to develop a web analytics capability that will immediately help to drive their business forward.

We believe that web analytics isn’t simply about data collection, but about information value – taking data and turning it into something useful, and actionable. We do this by looking at a combination of the technology and systems a business is implementing, the size and skills of the people and teams involved, and the essential processes required.

Firstly, it’s important to have a good web analytics system in place capable of collecting  high quality data and generating constructive output in the shape of understandable reports and analysis. That requires the right kind of metrics to enable the business to understand how its customers are engaging on the site as well as with the gaming products themselves.

Secondly, it’s vital to use people who are capable of extracting value from that technology and adding insight too basic reports and basic data. We’ve sometimes seen in the gaming industry that very skilled and motivated individuals aren’t necessarily skilled as analysts or interested in looking at a more granular level at what’s happening on site.

Finally, it’s valuable to examine the processes the business needs to develop to effectively build analytics into the routine of their business. For example, if a new site element or gaming product is under development then it’s important to start collecting data for analysis at as early a stage as possible in order to measure success. Criteria for measurement need to be established from the start of development so that the site can be tagged appropriate, marketing campaigns can be tracked and so on.

The real value to these gaming businesses comes through a broader understanding of how this rich analytical data integrates with all the other customer data the organisation collects. In time, it becomes possible for them to know not just what games a customer enjoys playing and what bets they place, but what else they’re looking at onsite, what other activities they might like to engage in, and how each individual’s potential can be maximised to ensure the greatest possible lifetime value for each customer.

This article was written as part of our June newsletter