Scatters 2020
Overview
Scatters Casino was launched in November 2019 on a White Label solution delivered by iGaming Platform. The promotional capabilities of the platform itself are limited to Shop functionality, Free Spins, and Deposit bonuses. The Casino wanted to engage with their customers, increase brand loyalty and get the players to stay longer with them. In the beginning of July 2020, Scatters launched Daily Promotions. The Scatters team moved some of their existing promotional budget over to be used in the Unibo Campaign. Circa 20% of the total promotional budget was earmarked to be used with Unibo. The total budget was not increased, and as a reference point, the average bonus to deposit ratio stayed at the same level for the first eight months as the last eight months, roughly 9% bonus given per deposited €1.
The Daily Promotions consist of a set of Missions or a Tournament on any given day, delivered by the Unibo gamification overlay. Some days were Missions, some days were Tournaments.
The promotional funds used were split so that 80% of the funds were spent on Tournaments and 20% on Missions. The reasons for this were two-fold. First, missions are individual and quicker, with a guaranteed reward if you perform the task. Tournaments on the other hand take longer to finish and pay out the players, and Scatters Casino wanted a larger total prize to headline when marketing the daily promotion tournaments. The Daily Promotions were marketed to the players through:
- Promotions Page
- Banner in Casino Lobby Carousel
- Ad hoc Notifications
- Initial intro email followed by ad hoc mail communications over the five months.
- Dedicated games category named “Daily Promotions” in Casino Lobby.
- Near-Game Unibo Widget
You can find more information on Scatters Daily Promotions here:
Hypotheses
After running the Daily Promotions for five months, Scatters wanted to look at the changes in the behaviour of a large cohort of players who were exposed to these new gamification elements on Scatters. The expectations of the Daily promotions were:
Engage the players, make them more loyal
- Assumption: “A player who actively chooses to participate in a Campaign is more engaged and thus more likely to stay with the brand for a longer period”
- Expectation: Customer Life-Time increases
Everyone loves to win
- Assumption: “If there is something more to win, more players will choose to not withdraw and instead continue playing to win the outstanding prizes.”.
- Expectation: Wager to Deposit ratio will increase.
Approach
Our approach to the issue was to study the players who joined and played in the months before the launch of the Daily Promotions and compare that to the players who joined and played in the following months. First, let’s break down some of the basic statistics for Scatters. We looked at data between the 1st of November 2019 and the 30th of November 2020 for player statistics, and Daily Promotions ran from the 1st of July to the 30th of November. During the period, there were:
- 140 Daily Promotions
- 51 Days with Missions
- 89 Days with Tournaments
- 26 Win Chases
- 32 Big Win
- 31 Points Tournaments
- 16,668 Depositing Customers in the whole period
- 7,603 Depositing Customers between 1st of July and 30th of November
- 8,896 Payouts from Daily Promotions
- 1,125 Customers received payouts (14.7% of all depositing players in the period)
To answer our questions above, we looked at Customer Life Time, Deposit amounts, Wager to Deposit ratio as well as whether players of different sizes were affected differently by the campaigns.
The first thing we did was divide the customers into four segments based on Campaign payouts:
Those who had never won anything in any Unibo Campaigns,
- Those who had won between 1-5 times
- Those who had won between 6-19 times
- Those who had won more than 20 times
Customer Life Time
Next, we calculated the average customer lifetime for these players, grouping them again by Signup Month.
As you can see in the table and graph below, there are significant differences already between those who won just one prize, and those who won none. This difference increases with the number of prizes the players have won.
One thing to bear in mind is the fact that anyone who signed up between Nov ‘19 and Jun ‘20 was not exposed to Unibo campaigns in their first month of play. That said, looking into the oldest, still active players, we find that over 75% of the Nov ‘19 sign-ups who were still active in Nov ‘20, had never won a prize in a Unibo campaign. As the Casino itself is quite young, we would expect the later group of players to have lower average deposits and lower life/time calculations (a player signing up in November 2020 will most likely have deposited less than a player signing up in November 2019)
*Player lifetime has been calculated as the number of months between signup and their latest deposit. Figures are based on the number of months from first to last month with real money deposits. As such, all depositors in November 2020 will have exactly 1.00 months of activity.
Deposits
Secondly, we wanted to see whether players who received prizes were more prone to deposit more than those who received no prizes. Similarly to the lifetime calculations above, we grouped the players by number of prizes won, and their month of registration
What we can see in the above table and the associated below graph of total average deposits per group for the year is a pattern. The more payouts a player receives, the more they deposit.
However, we wanted to make sure that what we are seeing is not a self-fulfilling prophecy - “the more they deposit, the more payouts they receive”. So we looked at the top players who signed up after the first of July.
It is easy to jump to the conclusion that bigger players will automatically fall into the top tier, as they are the most active and thus more likely to receive payouts from the campaigns. We looked at the top players signing up after July 1st. From July, 31 new players have deposited more than €10,000 on Scatters. Out of these 31 players, 19 had never received a payout from a Unibo Campaign, and only one player had received 20 or more payouts. Looking at all new depositing players since 1st of July, there were 4,731 in total, out of which 511 had received winnings.
Comparing 12 players out of 31, to our total of 511 winners out of 4,731 players, we see that bigger players do fall into the higher tiers at a higher rate than lower players (38% vs 11%), but not close to the rate one would expect based on large players’ amount of game play.
Wager to Deposit Ratio
The third thing we wanted to investigate was whether the campaigns got the players playing more with each deposit. Would the potential of “just finishing the next mission” or the drive to “just get a few more points in the tournament” make the player more inclined to keep playing instead of calling it a night and withdrawing? If this KPI is increased, both the top and the bottom line is increased. If all your players wager each deposit more, your expected hold will increase. As a comparison, if a player deposits €100 and wagers it 10 times (€1,000 bet) on a 97% slot before withdrawing, the theoretical hold will be 30% (€30). If that same player instead wagers it 15 times (€1,500 bet) on the same slot, your theoretical hold will be 50% higher (45%, €45 revenue). There is also a secondary effect of this increasing the bottom line as well. If players wager more with each deposit, the transactional cost as a percentage of GGR will go down significantly. Compared to increasing Deposits, which by default increases transaction costs, this is the holy grail.
As can be seen in the graph and the table above, the trend line is clear. Players who have been exposed to Unibo and won prizes, tend to gamble every euro they deposit more times. As with deposits before, we want to understand the effect of the opposite (Do Players who wager their deposits more, win more prizes?).
To determine this, we looked at new players after 1st of July 2020, with a Wager to Deposit ratio higher than 15x
There is a clear pattern that those that do like to gamble more, will also win more prizes. However, the fact that over 80% of the players with a Wager to Deposit higher than 15x still have not won any prizes shows that just playing a lot with your deposit is not a guarantee to win prizes.
Player Size Tendencies
The next thing we wanted to look at was whether different player segments are affected differently. We chose to split the players into five player groups based on the amount they had deposited.
Furthermore, as the majority of the promotional funds were allocated to Tournaments and Missions are more individually focused, we wanted to look at both the whole impact and also if we isolated only players playing in Missions. Looking at all of the prize payouts from Unibo Campaigns in the period, we can split our player groups into boxes accordingly. Again, we look at new depositing players from the 1st of July 2020 to 30th of November 2020.
What we can see is the same tendencies as we have seen before. The more you deposit, the more likely you are to win. There are however players with low deposits who have received a lot of payouts (20+ winnings). We’ll look at Missions in isolation to see if there is more to understand.
When we look at Missions, which are purely focused on what the player does and cannot be affected by the actions of other players, we see the same pattern emerging even clearer.
First, we see that there is literally no abuse in the three lowest segments, where no player has received more than 20 payouts, meaning that few low depositing players have been able to find loopholes in the setup in order to receive many payouts with low deposit. As we saw above, this is different from looking at all of the Unibo Campaign payouts.
The conclusion is that there are players who have found ways of winning in tournaments and using the winnings to continuously keep winning. Tournaments are generally limited to one payout, so if you have 20+ payouts from tournaments, you will have played in a minimum of 20 tournaments.
However, one thing to note with the Daily Promotions is the limited amount of Missions which have been available for players. Over the course of 140 days, only 51 had Missions. With the focus for Daily Promotions on Tournaments, fewer players had a chance to play Missions, and we can see that close to 80% of the €10k+ player segment has never received a payout from a Mission.
Highlights
- Average deposit levels showed a steady increase the more active the players were in Unibo campaigns - the average deposit amount of those receiving winnings in Unibo was between 400% and 1,000% higher than those who did not
- Unibo Campaigns got the players playing longer with every deposit. Wager to Deposit ratio showed an increase of 20-70%, the increase was higher the more active in Unibo campaigns the players were!
- Average customer life-time amongst players exposed to Unibo Campaigns was 2.5-3 times longer than those who had not won anything.
Conclusion
- The effect of Missions cannot be more clear. Missions are cheap ways of reaching much higher levels of engagement.
- Tournaments work in driving engagement as well, but Scatters have had issues with lower value players continuously receiving winnings in tournaments without depositing. Scatters should make sure low value players are not able to find loopholes in the setups.
- Scatters has had a low uptake in the Daily Promotions of only 15% of the players, and even less for Missions. We strongly recommend making sure more people are exposed to Unibo Campaigns.
- Winners play more - make sure it is very easy to win something small - then they will keep trying to chase the higher prizes.