• Seamless revenue integration with proprietary back-end gaming systems
  • Created view of search campaigns in the context of their wider business and historical data
  • Can now optimise bidding to long-term customer lifetime value as oppose to volume of first time accounts opened
As a result of the integration into our back-end systems we are now able to optimise our search strategy around major sports betting events for example. Some betting companies can pay high CPC’s for conversions with little long-term value around these events, but we now know which creatives and keywords are going to give us the greatest long-term value, and not just the highest volume of new accounts. This data integration has allowed us to develop a much better bidding strategy which will ultimately improve our ROI.”

Pavel Spirin,
PPC Manager, Betfair

Betfair Integrate Search Marketing into Wider Business Data to Understand Customer Lifetime Value

OVERVIEW

Thanks to technology it pioneered, Betfair has rapidly become the world’s biggest betting community. Bound by a commitment to innovation and value, in just ten years Betfair has revolutionised the betting industry.

CHALLENGE

Betfair were finding it challenging to understand which parts of their search campaign were delivering customers with strong long-term value and which were delivering one-time betters with no longer-term value. Betfair have their own proprietary technologies which hold their wider business data covering everything from tracking across various marketing activities through to how accounts are funded over time. These are essential proprietary technologies for any betting company and when Betfair were trying to connect data from them with paid search marketing campaigns it was causing a few challenges. Making the connection involved stitching together data from numerous sources within spreadsheets which was a very time consuming task. This process also created potentially inaccurate data from which they were basing bidding strategies. All of this meant Betfair were unable to get a clear view of how ad groups, creatives and keywords were performing in terms of the lifetime value of each conversion.

SOLUTION

After reviewing a number of search engine marketing platforms to help solve their data management challenges they chose Marin Software as a result of their ability to integrate seamlessly with tracking technologies and back-end systems. Marin Software created a bespoke solution which integrated seamlessly with Betfair’s revenue tracking, automating the daily and monthly-reconciled revenue data. This gave them a complete view of their search data including historical data. This allowed them to view their search campaigns across Google, Yahoo and Bing in the context of their wider business data.

RESULTS

By pulling this data together through a seamless integration, Betfair are now able to understand the lifetime value of a particular conversion down to a very granular level such as specific keywords or creative. This means they are building an accurate picture of conversion latency and how valuable customers coming from major betting events such as the Champions League Final, Grand National or Cheltenham Gold Cup actually are. They can now identify which keywords and ad creative around these events are generating them new funded accounts with long-term value and which are bringing them one-time betters with no long-term value.