Since the inception of online gambling platforms, online casinos have gradually replaced traditional land-based casinos in popularity and preference among gamblers.
The main reason players prefer online casinos to the land-based ones is the easy accessibility that they provide. You can access them anytime and anywhere.
Due to the rapidly growing development of the iGaming industry, launching an online casino can be incredibly attractive because many people believe that it is a great way to make money. Still, it is not as simple as it might seem. Some essential business elements are involved.
The first is the technical element, which requires building and setting up the online casino platform. The other element involves marketing the platform to acquire and retain players as customers to the platform. In this article, we will be looking at how online casinos can track and analyze their marketing success.
Online Casino’s KPI
Once a casino has been created, the next step is to go into the marketing aspect. You need to promote your online casino to acquire customers and do marketing to get the customers to stay after acquiring them. Many casinos employ different methods and strategies for their marketing, but the end goal is the same for all of them. The end goal is to acquire as many players as they can and retain them as customers for as long as possible.
And in the fight for acquiring and retaining players, casinos employ various marketing strategies that require a considerable sum to finance it. It is important to know that what you are spending money on brings about meaningful results; this is where the Key Performance Indicators (KPI) come into play.
Definition of Key Performance Indicator
Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) are quantifiable metrics by which a business performance and success can be appraised. KPIs are essential because they allow you to estimate the efficiency of your marketing plans. They are useful not only for evaluating current performance and achievements but can also be used to determine further actions and strategies that will be effective for promoting your casino.
Main KPI for Online Casinos
The types of metrics used to analyze KPIs for online casinos include money-related KPIs, people-related KPIs, and hybrid or multiple KPIs.
Money-related KPIs
Money related indicators show a clear and transparent picture of the online casino’s profits.
- Gross Gaming Revenue (GGR) – You can calculate this financial indicator by deducting the total sum of winnings from the total sum of bets. This indicator shows the total revenue gained by the casino from players before deducting their expenses.
- Net Gaming Revenue (NGR) – The NGR indicator shows the real casino earnings after the casino’s expenses have been deducted. These expenses could include bonuses, commissions payable to payment systems and affiliate partners, royalty fees payable to game software developers, recurring online gaming license fees, state taxes and lots more. NGR is perfect for analyzing a brand’s success rate.
- NGR-to-deposits – This indicator shows how much revenue is obtained from players’ deposits. The higher this indicator, the better for the casino.
- Bets-to-deposits – The bets-to-deposits indicator analyzes the ratio of the bets to the deposited amounts in the games. If the value of this indicator is very high, it means that the casino has been giving out way too much money as bonuses to players.
People-related KPI
This indicator has to do with the players involved in online casinos; it has to do with the casino’s potential and real players. The metric used to categorize the people related KPIs include:
- Conversion Rate – This is the rate of people that did the targeted action the casino wanted them to do to the people that had the chance to do it. For example, people who clicked on a promotional advert to the number of people who saw it. It helps track and analyze casinos’ traffic to see if the expenses spent on promotions give a good return. The indicators include visitors/viewers, registered/visitors, and depositors/registered. A low conversion rate means something is not right, and the casino has room for improvement.
- Lifetime Value of Players (LTV) – This metric is the total amount of profit earned from a player during the period of his overall stay in the casino. Casino operators do all they can to try and increase this metric.
- Churn Rate (CR) – Churn Rate or Attrition Rate is the proportion of players that discontinued their activities on an online casino to the active players over a specified time. This indicator shows the success of the client retention strategies that casinos undertake in their marketing.
- Bounce Rate – Bounce Rate indicator shows how many people visited a casino without performing any action. They might have opened the casino website by accident or intentionally and found nothing that could interest them, so they leave without performing any action.
- Website Depth-level and Dwell Time – The Website Depth-level and Dwell Time indicator, as its name implies, shows how long people that are interested in the website spend on it. It also shows how many pages were viewed during a session. This indicator helps casinos know what they need to do to improve and develop the website well for better user experience and engagement.
Hybrid KPIs
Hybrid or Multiple KPIs are the indicators used to connect financial or money metrics to people related indicators.
- Cost per Acquisition (CPA) – The CPA indicator shows the amount of money a casino spends to get a user to sign up and make a deposit on the platform. It shows the needed average budget for marketing to attract a single player, and it also shows the effectiveness of promotional marketing and advertisements.
- Average Revenue per User (ARPU) – The ARPU indicator shows how much a casino earns from an average player over a specified time. The period could be a month, a quarter, or a year. You can obtain this indicator by dividing the total revenue of a casino for a specific period by the number of active players during that period.
How to Track and Analyze Your KPI in iGaming Business?
Knowing all the KPIs, what they do, and how they are calculated is cool, but it is essential to understand how to track and analyze them. KPIs can only be accurately obtained using automated software. Imagine trying to get all the necessary data and then calculating all the KPIs you need manually. It is an almost impossible task that is prone to errors.
The tracking of KPIs is something that is done using the online casino software. It captures, stores, and transforms the massive flow of data into ready-to-use information to the casino operators. It will then be interpreted, analyzed, and used accordingly to build the online casino’s development strategies.
The purpose of the CRM system is to help you acquire customers, develop customer relationships, improve customer retention, and increase your revenue by driving effective marketing strategies.
Different players have different opinions, preferences, and needs, and trying to use a single approach towards the marketing strategy for all players that visit a casino is quite illogical. Using CRM systems for your casino will help you operate a player-centric approach backed by data in your marketing strategies. It is why investing in a CRM system for your online gaming platform is crucial because it helps you to boost customers’ engagement and provide them with a pleasant gaming experience on your platform.
Some practical uses of CRM systems include:
- CRM for Segmentation – CRM systems can help you group your players into segments based on their common characteristics. It allows your marketing strategies to have targets.
- CRM for Personalization – This can help you give players personalized experience on your platform.
- CRM for Analytics – CRM systems software has built-in analytics tools that can help you derive insights into your platform’s performance.
- CRM for Retention – This can allow you to retain the best players by showing players’ gaming and betting activity on your platform.
These are what you can achieve with a CRM system:
- A better understanding of players’ preferences and needs.
- Custom-tailored marketing strategies that reach intended players.
- Increased player retention.
- Real-time analysis of data.
- ROI/Revenue growth.
Online Casino KPI: Top Tips and Tricks to Improve Them
Tracking and analyzing key performance indicators is a crucial thing that an online casino needs to do. With the information obtained from the indicators, a casino can easily determine if they are doing alright with all the strategies they have been employing to improve their platforms.
As we all know, the essence of using marketing strategies, whether for retention or acquisition, is to increase the engagement degree of players on online casinos, and they do this by tweaking offerings to make the platform more attractive to them. So, the status of your casino’s key performance indicators will determine which direction is necessary to take in order to improve it and increase the NGR and LTV of your casino.
Listed below are some tips and tricks for KPIs:
- Determining the average lifetime of your players can be incredibly difficult. But can you determine the LTV without the average lifetime? Yes, you can roughly estimate the average Lifetime Value by dividing the entire sum of the Net Gaming Revenue (NGR) since the inception of your brand by the total number of real money customers that made a minimum of one successful deposit since the start.
- Try and check on your NGR-to-deposits ratio occasionally. If it is too low, it might be as a result of too many winners or abusers on your platform. And if it is too high, then your active players are probably burning through their deposit balance at a fast rate. Your brand ought to have a strategic definition for the loyalty levels sought after.
- Keep tabs on your Bets-to-deposit ratio; it shows how many times money deposited by players is circulated in the games. And unlike the NGR-to-deposits, higher values mean that it takes long before players lose money in games, while lower values indicate that they are losing money at a faster rate. Any variation from the standard may occur due to problems with RNG or any other software issues, and you should contact your software provider to sort it out.
- Monitor the Withdrawal/Bet ratio; it gives a dependable way of determining the expected actual expenses/loss of gambling activities on your brand. We all know that the easiest way of attracting players to your brand is by offering nice instant rewards/bonuses, and the withdrawal/bet ratio will help you monitor how much of that is being cashed out. It is very handy when evaluating wagering requirements for your brand.
- Keep track of your Bonus/NGR ratio. It is not fixed across all the segments of your players, so you should have the standard Min/Max limits rules for each tier, and “out of standard” exceptions for unique players.
- Don’t be too occupied with a high volume of bets or partnerships with affiliates that have players with large deposit sums. Ultimately, the bottom line is to make money for your brand, and the only variables that genuinely counts are the Net Gaming Revenue (NGR) and Lifetime Value (LTV).
Working with all these tips can significantly assist you in improving the NGR and LTV of your brand.
Conclusion
Although the online casino business has only been around for a few decades now, its development and growth cannot be underestimated. It is expected to keep growing rapidly at a very fast pace due to the comfort and convenience it brings to players all around the world. Setting up an online casino platform is a good chance to key into this rapidly growing industry.
However, as a casino operator, to gain your share in the ever-growing competitive iGaming industry, you need an advantage that works for you. Considering and taking full advantage of effective customer relationship management and key performance indicator as part of the tools you use for your platform will give you the much-needed edge to be a leader in the iGaming industry.