William Hill, a leading online casino company, offers a comprehensive betting & gaming experience through its mobile apps. However, they were facing a number of data quality issues which hindered their ability to:
- Measure the onboarding, retention and monetisation performance of their apps
- Prioritise where to focus their development resources
- Offer personalised gaming experiences
Objective
Our mission at William Hill hinged on three main goals:
- Diagnose and fix the analytics issues that were plaguing William Hill’s mobile apps.
- Implement and enhanced analytics setup, building upon the foundational tracking that was already in place.
- Enable the analysts, product managers and marketers to drive better results for the business using analytics.
Solution
Step 1: Technical Audit
We kicked off the project with a debug investigation into the existing app analytics tracking. We identified and highlighted the following areas for improvement.
An inconsistent cookie-setting mechanism, which was heavily relied upon for distinguishing between the web & app experiences.
Many key events had subpar tracking or no tracking at all, limiting the view on how users were engaging with the apps.
There was limited contextual-based user data getting collected in the apps, limiting the options around user segmentation and cohort analysis.
Step 2: Solution Design and Planning
In this phase, we carefully crafted a bespoke solution to address the unique challenges identified in William Hill’s mobile apps. This step was marked by close collaboration with key stakeholders, ensuring the solution would be both effective and aligned with the company’s broader business goals.
To resolve the web/app data segmentation issue, we proposed a transition from the inconsistent cookie-setting mechanism to leveraging the user-agent string. This strategy called for coordination with app developers and the analytics team, requiring adjustments within the tag management solution to activate user-agent functionality.
Recognising the gaps in event tracking, we designed a comprehensive set of new specifications for each of the apps, targeting the critical events previously overlooked. These specifications were thoroughly reviewed with the app developers and product managers, ensuring mutual understanding and agreement on the proposed enhancements.
To enrich the contextual user data collected by the apps, our specifications introduced additional user-related attributes, such as customer type, initiation trigger, and preferences. Integrating these new data points required collaboration with the app developers and architects. Together, we evaluated the feasibility of extracting this additional information from the apps’ backend systems and feeding it into the data layer.
Throughout this step, transparency and collaboration were paramount. We held regular meetings with our stakeholders, where we presented our proposed solutions, solicited feedback, and refined our approach based on this valuable input. This iterative and collaborative process ensured that the solution was not only technically sound but also closely aligned with William Hill’s strategic objectives.
Step 3: Analytics & Martech Revamp
Once these solutions had been implemented, we revamped the configuration of their analytics & martech platforms and enabled them to make use of the enhanced analytics.
During this phase, we worked closely with analytics team, ensuring smooth integration of the enhanced data between the mobile apps and martech platforms. We also automated several data validation checks to guarantee the ongoing quality and accuracy of the data.
Step 4: Staff Training
Next we trained up the marketing & product teams on how to make the most of the enhanced analytics capabilities. This included:
Educating them on the new data attributes & events, and what they mean for the business.
Providing hands-on training in creating reports, analyzing data, and deriving actionable insights from the enhanced data.
Developing materials such as technical documentation, user guides and video tutorials that were made accessible our stakeholders for future reference.
Step 5: Ongoing Consultation & Support
We then proposed a consulting package which involved ongoing implementation, analysis & reporting support.
They had a lot of app development work coming up and so we wanted to ensure that the new games, journeys & features they were introducing had robust tracking that aligned with what we had just implemented.
The analysis & reporting support was to ensure that their mobile app performances were being adequately measured, analysed and communicated across the business, attracting a higher level interest from the higher-ups and other departments. We were also on-hand to support on any ad-hoc data requests that the in-house teams weren’t sure on how to handle.
Results
The revamp of William Hill’s mobile app analytics led to significant improvements:
- With cleaner, enriched data, the app product teams gained a clearer picture of their user behaviour, boosting their ability o refining their app experiences.
- The training empowered the product & marketing teams to be more data-driven, fostering a culture of informed decision-making and reducing their reliance on guesswork.
- Our ongoing consultation ensured that their analytics strategy remained robust over time and kept generating value for the business.
Over the next 12 months, they were able to improve the user retention across their apps by roughly 14% and the monetisation performance of their apps by roughly 25%.
Thank you for taking the time to read our article. At Swayven Digital, our mission is to help game studios and publishers boost their profitability by refining their analytics & optimisation strategies. If you’d like to learn more about our services and how we could assist you, please don’t hesitate to get in touch with us.
Stay tuned for more insights, and until next time, keep optimising
