Pulse
Betegy: capitalise on March Madness through personalisation
By William - 22 March 2023
With advertising revenue in last year’s March Madness surpassing the $1bn mark, Alex Kornilov, CEO and Founder of display ads automation platform Betegy, explores how operators can stand out from the crowd when targeting players during this year’s tournament.
With sports betting regulation now in place for 36 US states and Washington D.C., competitions such as March Madness offer a wealth of marketing opportunities for operators. The college basketball tournament will run until April 3, and with 64 teams taking part, operators will have close to three weeks to target players across several states.
According to consumer insights agency Interpret, advertising revenue in the men’s competition last year surpassed a record $1bn, and ad inventories sold out for both the men’s and women’s competitions. With this in mind, gaming operators will have to consider how to personalise and target their advertising campaigns in what will be an extremely competitive space.
Personalisation is key
When the market is trying to promote something like March Madness, there are a few tricks you can have up your sleeve, but they should all be related to certain personalisation options according to the schedule. For example, you can push March Madness on your top line, but what will work better is a promotion based on that day’s games.
The highest ROI comes from focusing on who is playing that day, and any kind of promotion is more efficient when it acts as a reminder to a player about their favourite team which may be playing tonight.
The deeper you can go into personalisation, like knowing where the audience is and which teams they follow, the more operators can achieve the highest ROI possible. Going in this direction can be difficult, because you have to create varieties of creative ads every single day for every single event. However, this is how you will stand out from the competition, because a majority of operators will just run a generic promotion.
Adding languages is a good example of this. For example, the Spanish-speaking audience is not as big as the English-speaking audience for March Madness. Including this could give you that crucial advantage though, and that will eventually make a significant difference.
Every campaign is an opportunity to create various options for different regions. You can set them on demand-and-supply platforms, and each ad can automatically change based on the location of the player you’re sending it to. This takes some time to set up, but it is very straightforward once you have it on.
Division of campaigns
You can divide campaigns into new programmatic advertising and re-targeting. The ROI for re-targeting is higher because you focus on customers who have already been on your website. As soon as you go into a re-targeting campaign, there are so many more things you can do. You can take the CRM data point, which allows you to know whether a customer likes a certain team.
Is it a customer who has signed up before? Has the customer deposited? Did they just visit the website once? That’s the first thing, and then the second is working out what kind of bets they make. Once you have all that information, you can make a specific banner ad for that player, in the same way Booking.com makes a personalised list when trying to find you a cheap hotel.
Planning in advance
The great thing about March Madness is that operators can assess players who bet on the NBA. Even when you compare different sports, there is actually little to no difference in the structure of a campaign for something like the Super Bowl or March Madness. They both have their own following, but you need to consider the schedule of the teams, the correct odds, changes in odds and all the dynamic data you need for the event.
You need to build a system which will react to any event, including March Madness, rather than building something just for that event. The stronger operators will have a calendar of events six months in advance or maybe even a year, and they will follow up on their best practices from previous events.
Challenges with ROI
Achieving ROI on a March Madness campaign could be very complex, but my advice would be to run various campaigns, and you will realise what looks promising. As an example, you may work out that running a March Madness campaign for Spanish-speaking players is improving ROI by 20 per cent, so you can increase your budget for this.
You may then see there is a maximum audience you can take that to, so you can then start to look at other options, like re-targeting people who have previously been on the website. It’s a case of constantly monitoring KPIs and looking at how to improve them.
Sometimes the viewability rate is very good, and your banners are being shown, but there aren’t enough clicks, so what do you do now? You have to go in and see if your ad copy is relevant, and maybe test it by running one ad that focuses on the teams playing tonight and one that doesn’t. The bigger the event, the more you need to prepare those campaigns.
Owning your numbers and understanding what works and why allows you to put the night goggles on and realise what’s working. It’s an art, and you need to explore it on a daily basis. Compare, measure, test and find your channels of growth.
