FEATURE
iGBA: How is your audience and
traffic split between football and
other sports? market share and look to affiliates to assist
more with retention as well as acquisition.
RM: Football and horse racing are the
staple, year-round popular sports to bet on
in the UK and we see a fairly even balance
between them. Many of the other sports
are seasonal but they typically make up
around 20% of interest each month.
We find that most sports bettors in the
UK bet on a range of sports. Some like the
challenge of betting on a sport in which
they are highly knowledgeable but they
may also enjoy placing a bet on a popular
sporting event where they don’t have much
expertise. That’s where our tips product
comes in and it’s why our app has been so
successful. People looking for a recreational
bet can use the knowledge of our tipsters,
who have done all the research for them.
We now cover 25 or so sports, so we can
provide users with help to choose their bets
whatever they’re interest may be. iGBA: You sponsor mares’ hurdles
races during the UK National Hunt
season, including the Cheltenham
Grade 1 in March. That can’t come
cheap, so how do you measure
the impact and ROI of this kind
of sponsorship?
iGBA: OLBG users can bet
without leaving the site or the app.
How popular is that among
your punters?
RM: Making it easy to place bets has
helped us to build a loyal base of daily
users, to the extent that some of them
have told us that they place all of their bets
through our products. With multiple bets
growing in popularity in recent years, the
ease of placing them has become more
important. We’ve developed the technology
to build slips for multiple bets prior to a user
choosing the bookmaker to place that bet
with. That makes it a very smooth process
for the user, who chooses bets within our
products and then – when they are ready
to bet – we show bookmaker options with
different pricing and carry the bet slip
through for them. While we aren’t known
for odds comparison specifically, it forms
a large part of our overall offering.
“As an affiliate you have to make your money go as far
as you can and it’s a challenge to compete alongside
bookmakers, who operate to a higher margin”
The result is that we’re driving thousands
of bet completions every day. Some
affiliates have been charging operators for
bet placements for some years; that practice
will grow in the UK, especially as the larger
operators will want to hold onto their
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iGB Affiliate Issue 70 AUG/SEP 2018
RM: This will be our eighth year
of sponsoring the OLBG Road to
Cheltenham, which has gained our brand
a huge amount of awareness among
regular UK sports bettors. Betting on the
Cheltenham Festival and the need for
good tips go hand in hand so for a brand
that supplies great tips there was no better
match. As an affiliate you have to make
your money go as far as you can, though,
and it is a challenge to compete alongside
bookmakers, who have much larger budgets
and operate to a higher margin.
When we started our sponsorship of the
OLBG Mares’ Hurdle at the Cheltenham
Festival, it was a Grade 2 race that wasn’t
shown on terrestrial TV and didn’t have
a supporting programme. We put a lot
of work into creating a series of races,
which has become the OLBG Mares’
Road to Cheltenham. Now it includes six
supporting races – five of those are covered
live on ITV – and it culminates in what’s
now the Grade 1 OLBG Mares’ Hurdle at
the festival. To go from a race that wasn’t
televised to one that was the most-watched
race on the first day of the festival two
years ago has been a huge achievement.
More people watched and bet on our race
than others that would have cost far more
to sponsor.
We also wanted to make a difference
to the sport that we and our users love
so to play a part in improving the Mares’
programme in the UK has been very
satisfying. It is important to the whole
industry that National Hunt mares have the
opportunity to run for black type in the UK.
iGBA: The regulatory and
compliance environment in the
UK has changed dramatically over
the past 18 months. What are you
doing to stay compliant?
RM: We are blessed with a talented
development team that has plenty of
resources. They have invested a lot of
time in the changes that were necessary