Cracking the nut of paid social in online gaming

This is a guest contribution from Alex Bodini, Chief Executive Officer of Spin Brands. If you would like to submit a contribution please contact Bill Beatty for submission details. Thank you.

In late 2019, Lottomart came to us with a problem; they’d been running Facebook and Twitter ads for a year, but with very limited success. Lottomart are a relatively new Lottery betting and slots company operating out of Gibraltar. They had found that new lottery and games players were much too expensive to acquire, and had proved low value once initially depositing. Lottery and Online Casino Games companies are bountiful in the Social Media space, so competitiveness is a relevant crutch for emerging businesses, with every bookmaker in the UK having an arm in the slots business. But no matter which marketing manager you talk to, they’ll all tell you the same thing: no one can make Facebook work.

We wanted to change that.

At first, new players came in at a higher cost than we wanted and at a lower value, Our audiences performed inconsistently and the creatives we tested had low click through rates and the conversion rates weren’t high enough to offset these. We remained optimistic, our paid social experts knew it was going to require rigorous testing of the conversion objectives optimised, the bidding strategy in place, the audiences targeted, the placements used and the creatives displayed with help from our in-house design team.