Facebook: What can egaming learn about digital marketing from other industries?

Egaming is an extremely data-driven industry. The ability to interpret and act on data quickly and effectively is crucial to building a successful business. However, in working with large companies from a cross section of different industries, we see in this sector that there are clear gaps in how this translates to online marketing that are hindering potential growth.

The focus on the wrong metrics is holding many companies back from understanding which campaigns are really working, and where further investment could enhance effectiveness, save money and position well for the long term. We see three major opportunities for egaming to improve how they do this today.

1. Consider the limitations of Cost per Acquisition (CPA). While your primary objective is often First Time Depositors (FTDs), the number one KPI we hear reported by digital marketing professionals in the egaing industry is CPA. This indicates an underlying mindset that views marketing as an expenditure or cost line which is quite distinct from how counterparts in the Mobile Games industry lead the way in their perspective of marketing investment.

CPA on its own is somewhat meaningless aside from ensuring that costs have not increased or tracking how many new users you are getting for your budget. When viewed through its relationship with long term customer value it can be both a more flexible and more useful measure. While egaming companies focus on cost due to being restricted by a predefined (and often inflexible) budget they can miss the opportunity to increase investment when a channel proves that it can deliver above a targeted return on ad spend. Mobile Games companies reassess their budget on a frequent basis and agile to increase spend when campaigns perform well so no opportunities are missed.

2. Moving beyond Last-Click Attribution. Despite consensus from most parties that a move to Multi-Touch attribution (MTA) is needed, the vast majority of egaming companies still rely on a last-click attribution model. From research of a large number of campaigns and experiments, we have seen that even for a reasonably impulsive action like installing a mobile app 14% of credit would be misallocated if excluding view-through attribution altogether. If we move to higher consideration events such as deposit or bet and acknowledge how rich and diverse the typical media strategy is for one of these companies, the need for a full multi-touch attribution model increases.

An incomplete or inaccurate attribution model is likely leading to poor decision making and allocation of budget in sub-optimal channels and campaigns. Several companies in the ecommerce industry have seen progress by employing a third-party attribution partner with access to impression level data of online publishers as well as expertise in statistical modelling of attribution. Following a shift to MTA they have successfully readjusted their budgets to spend more on high performing campaigns.

3. Uplift measurement has a place in user acquisition. Within egaming, Customer Relationship Management (CRM) teams are using ‘uplift’ or ‘incrementality’ measurement every day to understand the value of email campaigns and customer retention offers. However, Attribution models alone remain the mainstay of user acquisition measurement and the possibility to combine these two approaches can be overlooked. Industry leaders such as Booking.com and Netflix have spoken at length about how only incrementality can prove the true value of your marketing campaigns and so dictates their decision making. To quote Matthew Gerrie, the Director of Marketing Science at Booking.com, “We avoid spending any money on a channel in which we cannot prove a return through incrementality testing, either immediately, or soon after exposure to advertising.”

While admittedly slower and more complicated than using attribution, incrementality can be leveraged when making large strategic shifts to your media or to provide a “ground truth” for your chosen attribution model to remove unnecessary doubt in the decisions that you are making. Using a robust experiment design can allow advertisers a level of certainty which campaigns drove incremental conversions or had a positive incremental impact on other campaigns or channels — meaning you can be confident in your investments.

While we have seen evidence that these approaches are understood and implemented throughout certain teams and companies in the egaming industry the key challenge is ensuring that they infiltrate day-to-day decision making throughout the whole organisation. Considering these enhancements to your current analytical approach to online marketing can provide much more confidence in increasing or reallocating budget to drive real business growth. The reality is that each day you don’t make these changes money is being left on the table or, worse still, is being wasted on ineffective marketing.

Kate Minogue leads the Marketing Science team for Gaming EMEA. Before joining Facebook she spent a number of years in both Paddy Power and Bank of Ireland and has worked in Data Science roles with a focus on Customer and Marketing Analytics for the past 7 years.