Parimatch and how it is leveraging the power of data
Parimatch tells us how it is using data to drive experimental betting projects that ultimately deliver a superior player experience.
Opinion.- Parimatch is changing the betting industry, and data is the key to these changes. Together with Head of BI and Analytics Parimatch Anna Gayvoronskaya, we’ll tell you how we applied data-driven approaches to launch the session game Footboss—a new gamified way to involve customers in the betting world.
Parimatch Betting Experiment: game Footboss
Footboss is a simple soccer-themed IDLE RPG game integrated into the Parimatch app: players don’t need to register anywhere else if they already have an account in the system.
Games are designed for relaxation and chilled-out gameplay conventionally, you can go through a couple of bosses, acquire new skills, and win prizes all in the space of 5 minutes! Awards from Parimatch have included a Samsung Galaxy Note 10, an iPhone 11 Pro Max, a MacBook Air 13″, a Sony PS4, an iPad Air 10.5″, and other branded prizes.
Parimatch natively integrated betting into the game: players could place a couple of bets and speed up the progress, but this made absolutely no difference.
How Footboss Engaged Players
The global goal of Footboss is to refresh the betting world: the game was conceived as an antidote to the boring campaigns and promotional offers for Euro 2020. Apart from focusing on high odds, bonuses, and competitions in marginality, the goal was to give players variety and renewed excitement.
Thanks to Footboss, players returned to Parimatch not only because they wanted to place bets or check the odds but to take a break, win a few fights, and get a prize or two in the process. The developers specially made it a session-based game so players wouldn’t get absorbed in it for hours on end but rather get back to their business after a couple of boss fights.
Footboss’s main gaming adventure is to free ten soccer stadiums from invading giants. The main character is the Coach, whose task is to prepare his players to take effective penalties and non-standard decisions day after day.
At first glance, the game seems simple, but with each new level, players discover multiple ways to deepen and develop their characters. Thanks to the random distribution of awards and achievements, the journey is full of surprises: different objects, tasks, heroes are always popping up. And then there’s the added interest of loot boxes: a kind of kinder-surprise for adults.
Ways to Use Data-Driven Approaches
In business nowadays, it’s not enough to be guided by feelings or intuition. We must base global steps on data and analytics because analytics answers the question, “What can we do to make this product better?”
Before the launch of Footboss, a BI team completed a mathematical model of the game, which was the basis for the player’s interactions with Parimatch products. Data specialists also developed a mathematical system for the equiprobable handing out of prizes, whereby players can win prizes regardless of how much money they spend on the game.
“Placing some bets can speed up the game, but it doesn’t affect the distribution of prizes”, said Anna Gayvoronskaya, Head of BI and Analytics at Parimatch.
The Mathematical model based on the data of active Parimatch clients helped to attract the number of players to Footboss, calculate the possible increase in GGR and the costs of the project.
For the developers, data analytics prepared dashboards of the game’s progress, the number of participants, and their activity.
We frequently analyzed players’ engagement during the promotion period and made updates based on this data: adding extra-levels or new characters, for example.
We carried out the work with data at every stage of the project, including calculating retrospective results. Here’s the data we collected for future versions of the game:
1. Number of players
2. Player engagement rate
3. Number of fights
4. Number of completed quests
5. Average and the maximum duration of a gaming session
6. Number of open loot boxes
7. Game speed run
8. Number of registrations on the site and application
10. Conversion of landing pages
11. Email open rate
12. Cost of prizes per active player
13. Financial result of the experiment
Data to Highlight the Pandemic Damage
It’s hard to describe 2020 projects without mentioning the impact of the pandemic. The crisis and quarantine inflicted heavy damage across the entire market, and the Footboss campaign was no exception. Everything went wrong: change of concept due to the cancellation of Euro 2020, anti-crisis measures in the company, limiting the launch of the game to 1 region out of the 7 originally planned.
Along with the positive results, we also calculated what we lost due to the pandemic and the financial crisis:
- Loss of audience and GGR due to the cancellation of Euro 2020
2. Losses due to the launch of the brand’s presence in only one region
3. Losses due to being out of sync with the marketing campaign
4. Losses due to lack of integration with the company’s other entertainment
Data-Driven Approaches for Future Experiments
The fundamentals of data-driven approaches mean that data can be collected not only for retrospective activities but also throughout the entire process. You can build mathematical models at the beginning of the experiment, compare them with real performance, make adjustments, and achieve a positive outcome for the business.
If once upon a time, everyone in betting analyzed only the results of campaigns, now they use the data at all stages. We plan and build the mathematical models, make adjustments based on the results we obtain, and then we conduct a retrospective for future projects. Working with data has now become a continuous process due to the ex post facto analysis of results.
For Footboss, the data-driven approach helped to calculate the number of potential players, the profit from attracting them, and the losses caused by the pandemic.
The first launch of Footboss opened the door to a new approach to attracting players to the world of betting. As CPO Parimatch Sergey Berezhnoy said: “We have built a stadium where we held the first championship.”
So new adventures await the players, and we’re developing new quests and game levels—and all game activities will improve thanks to the data from previous versions of the project.
