As the gambling industry continues to evolve, operators are looking for any edge to satisfy their customers, and data analysis can play a huge part in that. To walk us through the importance data can play to a site’s operation, Andrew Pearson, Managing Director of Intelligencia, joined our Stephanie Tower.
Through a full set of data, the amount you can learn about a customer, and what you can do with it, adds up to a huge potential advantage for an operator. “So today, if we look at the average person, they’re probably on multiple different social channels,” Pearson said. “They are multiple different loyalty problems, right? So they’ll be buying things on multiple different websites. You want to get to a point where you look at the person’s behavior holistically so that you understand their website behavior, their social behavior, their emailing behavior. You want to understand people’s emotions when they’re buying.”
How can a site take advantage of that data? By knowing your customers, you can market to them at the most opportune times. “So when a Super Bowl finishes, the winning team, anyone who supports that winning team, they’ll be getting emails that are jerseys from that team,” he said. “There’s no reason why sportsbooks don’t do that…We’re at a point right now where that emotion can actually be tracked by our systems. So it helps with selling, and it also helps with the loyalty bond that you’re trying to build with your customers.”
In many ways, operators started buying into the idea of analytics many years ago, but didn’t understand how to capitalize on them. “They then missed out on the most important element, which was understanding the data, and getting the data into areas where you could utilize it,” Pearson told Tower. “Cleansing the data is extremely important. We have a very famous saying, junk in, junk out. And that would be, if you put bad data in, you’re not going to produce models that will be any good.”
The good news is, as the analytics industry has matured, solid solutions have become much cheaper, or even free. “I would say the price of software, there’s a lot of open source software that you can utilize now,” he said. “And a lot of these software companies that used to be selling you modules on top of modules, on top of modules, are now recognizing you can use Python let’s say, instead of some of these high prices analytics software.”
From there, it’s just a matter of putting the data to use. “Taking that data, wrangling it, and there’s a lot of products out right now which can create that data integration, so that you can not only create the data integration, but also start building models on that product,” Pearson explained.
