By Rob van der Gaast, Gambling Analyst

Gambling Web- and Mobile sites are essential marketing tools for gambling operators. Online gambling increases on a yearly basis of 7% and H2 Gambling Capital expects interactive gambling to represent USD 30bn of a global estimated market of USD 352bn in 2010. In general the analysis of both online and offline gambling Web and Mobile Analytics (WMA) and analytics in general, play an ever-increasing role in catching the behavior of visitors and players in the gambling industry.

“Online gambling is still increasing in popularity”, emphasizes Dutchman Ronald de Bruijn, Managing Partner Turkey of the international company Adversitement. “Online Gambling is increasing in popularity and therefore it is crucial to catch the behavioral data of visitors with technologies fit for the gambling industry. Flexible tools for analytics (web and mobile) are a first step to know how your gambling website is perceived as a market, community and how usable it is. Next step is to analyze behavior of different groups, detect trends and create an up-sell through a relevant recommendation engine”

“Of course a tool is just a tool so it is actually the people behind it that will make the actual added value. Analytics can give you high powered insights in the times when people go on the web, how much time they spend and their specific betting behavior. Most websites use a login for their visitors, which mean they are quite easy to trace. However what is missing is a tool that captures their non-transaction data or clicks on the site.”

According to Ronald de Bruijn, the clicks give a treasure of information on how they perceive the site and where their other interests lay. Important question for analysis is why this visitor didn’t place a bet in this field of interest? “With the right tools and experience it is possible to improve the site that will persuade visitors to make that bet that is out of their comfort zone. After the first die has been cast the visitor will revert more to their other field of interest and will become part of their comfort zone and field of knowledge.”

“Another important aspect of WMA and the gambling industry”, ads Ron de Bruijn enthusiastically, “is the customer profiles. The offline analysis already can do that since all transactions are recorded in a CRM (Customer Relation Management) system or other database system. However, to retrieve good and useful insights we use other tools as a layer on top of them instead of looking at simple non-relational graphs and excel-files”.

CRM visualization tools used by Adversitement can show great value and better insights into the demography, geography, betting behavior and age groups than current CRM systems are capable of. In the online information it is even more important as the offline CRM data to be able to create customer profiles. The online behavior shows the visitors’ field of interest and their gambling behavior. “This interest expansion into other areas could mean that” according Ronald de Bruijn, who graduated at the University of Amsterdam, “the increase in betting behavior when the right triggers can be found. These triggers can be found by analyzing the online behavior of the visitors. Advice follows analysis and trying to either innovate or simply improve the site”.

Another important aspect of using analytics is that it gives information on how people found the website. This can be through search engines like Google, banners placed at other websites or even offline advertising like radio and television. Adversitement found tools to make a correlation between offline advertising and the use of the website. “This will give great insights into the effectively of every campaign. Another thing is the spend on other advertising like banners, paid keywords into Google or the amount that is spent to make the site compliant to the natural keywords. With analytics it is possible to measure what campaign or individual keyword will attract the most traffic” adds Ronald de Bruijn.

Actually, traffic from a banner or search engine is actually not what matters. What really matters is what these attracted crowds are doing on your site. If they come, see and leave, this is just a cost. If however the tools also picks up what the particular banner or keyword is doing inside the site, the affectivity of every campaign can be valued on its merits. “This insight”, emphasizes the Dutch entrepreneur, “will lower costs of certain campaigns since campaigns that only attract the wrong crowd (read “costs”) will be banned. Without good tools and specialists that can use these tools as power users, any campaign is a black box not worth mulling over.”

The last important aspect bringing the relation between Gambling and Analytics is the potentially increasing use of mobile (smart) phones visiting the website. For instance, a visitor places a bet on a sports betting site through his laptop or desktop. The result is only days after and the visitor is traveling or not able to get to his PC. The visitor wants to know what the earnings are and logs in through the mobile site. This will be the future behavior of a visitor placing a bet, looking at the results immediately anywhere. This will increase the mobile traffic to the website. If this website is not suitable for easy access and viewing, the image of the gambling company takes a (small) beating whereby the visitor will be less perceptible of placing bets outside its field of knowledge which is different than its field of interest or even worse, places a bet on a competing site with better facilities. Mobile behavior will have to be captured too. Tools that Adversitement (www.adversitement.com) uses are customized for gambling websites and give great insights into mobile behavior and how to satisfy visitors, even to place bets through the mobile website.

“The combination of web and mobile”, adds the Managing Partner Turkey “gives even higher added value and creates powerful knowledge of the users of both sites – web and mobile are different in betting behavior and usability therefore must have a different visualization.”

“The message is therefore that specialists like Adversitement can combine Website, Mobile site and offline behavior in such a way that an increase in turnover can be made in short, middle and long term. Attracting online crowds is relatively easy. The difficult part is to let them make a conversion and keep them. Trends of changing markets, behavior or interests can be spotted and adapted to in a flexible way. Analytics should be more applied to the gambling industry”, concludes Ronald de Bruijn.

Rob van der Gaast may be reached via robvan@diastar.eu