If you manage marketing campaigns and marketing budgets, you must know what a pain is to measure the results of each campaign.
This is easy when the actions are online, either PPC, programmatic, affiliates…(***)
But the job gets more difficult when the campaign is offline, as you don´t have any software to show you the data.
(***) Just a thought on that “is easy when the actions are online”. It´s actually not that easy when you have many different campaigns, and a player can see your ad on Facebook, then sees your Ad on Google Ads, then a few weeks later he sees your banner on any other website (thanks to your programmatic campaigns), and that´s when he registers the account.
In that case, where do you allocate this registration to calculate the CPA of the channel?
What is normally done is allocating it to the last click, this is, to the last channel where he clicked, right before registering the account. But he might have never registered should you not have had all the other marketing channels targeting at him…
How to measure CPA in TV campaigns
What is CPA?
Just in case you´ve never heard of this, CPA is Cost per Acquisition.
Each company defines its own KPIs and definitions, so for one company, CPA can mean the Cost per Acquisition of a new registered player and for other companies it can be the Cost to acquire a new depositing player.
Another metric used for this is CAC, which is Customer Acquisition Cost, that some companies use for the cost of a new depositing player so they can differentiate it from the CPA, that would be use for the cost of registered players (whether they have convert to FTD or not).
In this post we will talk about CPA but it could easily be referred to CAC as well.
Measuring CPA without TV campaigns
When you are an online operator, you have to do a lot of tests with different marketing campaigns, in different channels, to be able to find the best way to acquire new players.
Let´s explain with an example how I normally do this.
Imagine that you have programmatic campaigns, PPC campaigns (like Google and Facebook Ads), you are sending mailing campaigns and you also work with affiliates.
All these channels give you data, like clicks, registered players, FTDs (First Time Depositors, also known as NDC, this is, New Depositing Customers).
So, before starting your TV campaign, there is one thing that you should do: find out the Registrations and FTDs of the channel that I call “SEO / Word of mouth / Branding”.
These are the registrations that you would have if you are not doing any type of marketing at all.
As you know your overall numbers (registrations and FTDs) and the online channels give you their numbers, the difference between these two things will be your “SEO / Word of mouth / Branding” numbers.
See the example below:
In this case, you will see in your platform a total of 450 registrations in a given period, and you will see 100 registrations on programmatic, 100 on PPC campaigns, 50 with mailings and 50 from affiliates.
Therefore, you can say that you´ve had 50 registrations from “SEO / Word of mouth / Branding”.
It would be ideal that you can do this for at least a few months, so you can have more reliable data and deduct your average monthly registrations from SEO/WOM/Branding.
Measuring CPA with TV campaigns
Now that you know how many registrations you have on any given month from SEO/WOM/Branding, when you start doing TV you only have to do some calculations to be able to allocate the registrations that are coming thanks to the TV campaign.
In the example below, you will know that your total registrations are 750 players, you assume that SEO/WOM/Branding gives you 50 registrations (based on your previous analysis) and you also know the registrations from your online marketing campaigns, so the difference with all that is the number of registered players from the TV campaign (400 in the example below).
And as I said in the beginning, this is always a headache to calculate and, at the same time, it is super important to do it in the best possible way, because you will have to decide what channels to use for your marketing and acquisition of new players, and if you do it wrong, you can spend money in campaigns that are not working well in terms of conversion and costs per acquisition.
Analysis of the quality of the players
This would need a separate post but I just wanted to mention that another important thing to do on your marketing analysis is analyse the quality of the player.
And that´s not easy to do with offline campaigns like TV campaigns.
What I normally do is match the exact time when the TV ad was shown (your media agency should send you this info) and check the time of the registrations of players, taking a report on your systems where you can see those players registered during those minutes after the ad was shown and checking how many have converted to FTD, how much they have spent, how long have they played…etc.
Conclusions
Analysing marketing campaigns takes a lot of time and it´s not always 100% reliable as there are so many factors that can skewed the results, but it´s definitely something really important for your business if you are an online gambling operator, specially when you are entering in a new market.
