SBC News SBC Interviews Tim Axon Maxymiser Principle Consultant iGaming.

SBC Interviews Tim Axon Maxymiser Principle Consultant iGaming.

maximumWith igaming marketing reaching peak saturation and player acquisition costs becoming more expensive, the SBC team caught up with Tim Axon, Principle Consultant for the gaming sector at conversion specialists Maxymiser, to talk about website optimisation and marketing big data issues that affect igaming operations.

Tim Axon has 13+ years’ experience in the customer marketing and return-on-customer space and is passionate about helping brands build profitable relationships that last. Tim has worked as Principle Consultant for Gaming at Maxymiser since May 2012, specialising in testing, personalisation and cross-channel optimisation for the gaming industry.

SBC: Tim, great to meet you! Can you explain to us what Maxymiser does and how it aims to help igaming operators?

Tim: We enable any igaming operator to turn every interaction into an experience with cloud-based testing, personalisation and cross channel optimisation solutions. Maxymiser serves billions of individual experiences across every digital channel that dramatically improves conversion rates and revenue based on real-time data. We served over 20 Billion experiences in 2012!

We have a huge amount of knowledge and experience in the igaming sector, having worked for years with many igaming organisations such as Paddy Power, Bwin-Party and Sky Bet. My job is to help operators understand the way in which customers are flowing through their sites to improve the overall experience, resulting in improved customer engagement, shown by conversion uplifts and revenue increases.

SBC: Website personalisation is common practice in the retail and travel sectors. Why has the take up of this practice been somewhat slow in the igaming market?

Tim: Personalisation  is genuinely quite difficult to do in a meaningful way and I think this is the reason that igaming organisations may be slightly behind the curve. Companies put a lot of energy into areas of the site such as registration and deposit pages and have struggled when it comes to personalisation. The thing about personalisation is that it is a very generic term and it can mean very different things to different people. This can cause a lot of confusion when it comes to clients understanding the true meaning of personalisation versus what we class as personalisation.

Generally the biggest problem is the lack of meaningful measurement. Organisations are prepared to do “personalisation” but they often can’t accurately work out what has or hasn’t worked. For all organisations who want to move into multivariate testing (MVT) and personalisation, it is paramount that they set clear KPIs beforehand; it might also be worth bringing in an expert to help support the program before investing heavily.

SBC: The igaming operators you work with have several products, be it sports betting, bingo, casino, poker etc, and these verticals are operated using third party software platforms. Does this not complicate and convolute the process of gathering data for igaming clients and how do you overcome this?

I wouldn’t say it complicates our process but it can complicate things slightly for the client who needs to get the Maxymiser tag into the different suppliers’ development queues. iGaming is a strange industry in that suppliers often dictate the developments to the customer rather than the customer being able to have more control of their own website. To date Maxymiser has successfully integrated with a host of the main platform providers such as OpenBet, Dragonfish(888), Gtech and Playtech. Along with this there are the payment platform providers and game suppliers. With the advent of HTML5, integration and tracking will become much easier as the difficulties with Flash just won’t be relevant (Thanks to Apple!)

The other way that Maxymiser has been successful in working around the issue of integration is to integrate with Web Analytics that might be passing data into data warehouses which means tracking can be done in combination with the clients’ analytics teams. We have successfully integrated with all major Analytics suppliers – Omniture, NetInsight, Webtrends, Google etc You can read about our experiences and how we overcome tracking what happens inside a download client here:

http://www.maxymiser.com/desktop-download-clients-may-be-becoming-extinct-but-how-do-you-optimize-for-download-right-now.html

tim axon (2)SBC: Data can often be subjective, and to some extent it can only be as good as the method in which it’s gathered and analyzed. How does your team at Maxymiser ensure that the data gathered from your clients’ sites is useful or meaningful to their operations?

Tim: A lot of time and effort goes into the mathematical algorithms that serve our content to ensure that it is random. In addition our reporting is robust, expansive and detailed, which provides our clients with both the tools and insights to impact their revenue and ensure everything we do is scientifically measured. Specifically we do the following:

Before we start a campaign or optimisation program we set clear measurable KPIs and partner with our clients to fully understand detailed use cases of crucial customer journeys and traffic sources to ensure that we are not “leaking” any critical data. All results are measured against the default content (included in the test) and only results that ensure we have a large enough data sample, are stable and statistically robust are things that we firmly conclude with.

If a result is in doubt we can also run AA/BB split testing to ensure that results converge across segments. In addition to statistical confidence in the test, it is important to employ some common sense within the planning stage. E.g. it’s really important that you plan a campaign that can conclude in a reasonable time frame. Stakeholders will lose interest and results will therefore become meaningless without this planning.

Finally it comes down to the client’s preferences; we can provide them with the objective stats and numbers that they need, but ultimately they know their customers better than anyone else and if they feel certain content is right for their website then you have to go with that.

SBC: Data can be hard to consume and understand, especially in fast paced working environments such as igaming. What common mistakes or malpractices are common in new clients taking up your services?

Tim: The biggest mistake we come across with our clients is concluding a campaign too early. A lot of campaigns can show great results after just one or two days and many clients want to stop the campaign at this point, which is wrong. It is important to set aside the excitement of improved conversion rates and hold out until the campaign has run for a minimal period of time (set during campaign planning) and also as mentioned above that it runs to statistical confidence and significance. Without the patience to wait for campaigns to run their course, the data cannot be accurate enough to make a truly informed decision. So, it is definitely the lack of understanding and excitement from some of our clients that runs us into the most issues.

SBC: Do you feel Maxymiser’s vertical specialists change the way marketing teams function, in terms of the way that they report and analyze the performance of their sites?

Tim: I think our vertical specialists definitely change the way the marketing teams function, though how much depends on the maturity of the client. We find that the best engagements that we have with our clients are the ones where there’s a culture in the business of ‘test and learn’. The main shift I see is that rather than looking at general analytics stats, specific ‘cause and effect’ is looked at in more detail. From this marketers and designers tend to start understanding creative in terms of optimal conversion design as well as brand. In fact changes to brand guidelines based upon conversion testing is a great sign that a company really “gets it”.

SBC: Where do you see Maxymiser’s services in the next couple of years, do you feel that data optimisers such as Maxymiser’s platforms will become standard practice in all digital marketing?

Tim: I think the services Maxymiser provides should become standard practice for all organizations looking to increase their conversion rates and optimize their overall customer experience.

From a gaming point of view, the way that Maxymiser works is that we are able to analyze actions as they happen on the page and as a result igaming operators are able to positively affect the customer journey such as changing a losing experience into one that offers an incentive to play on.

I also think that with HTML 5, businesses will be looking to use Maxymiser or similar business because it’s simple and easy, especially with the increase in ‘self serve’ platforms such as our Visual Campaign Builder which allows marketers to execute some of the more simple campaigns themselves, freeing up our time to concentrate on the more advanced campaigns.

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Tim Axon Principal Gaming Consultant

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