How Bilyoner used Mixpanel to improve user acquisition and boost its monthly retention rate to 94%

Bilyoner is Turkey’s original sports betting company that enables its 4.5 million users to bet on sports — including football, basketball, and tennis as well as offering a range of games and raffles. The company offers services through web, mobile web, as well as iOS and Android apps. Bilyoner aims to make the betting services it offers as entertaining, innovative, and reliable as possible for members at all times and at any place through all possible channels.

Gambling in Turkey is heavily regulated and the centralized establishment is in charge of all odd servings and payouts. For digital gaming companies like Bilyoner, this means they can’t compete by offering better odds. Instead, they must compete on delivering the best customer experience. The company previously used Google Analytics, which took over seven hours to deliver insights. Bilyoner needed fast, powerful, and intuitive product analytics to better understand its users’ journey, enhance the customer experience, and gain an edge over the competition.

Bilyoner started using Mixpanel in 2022. The product team uses Mixpanel to better understand how customers use its app, prioritize its product roadmap, and quickly identify and fix bugs that cause churn and prevent users from placing bets. The marketing team uses Mixpanel to better understand user cohorts, optimize digital advertising campaigns, and improve user acquisition. The goal is to create a seamless customer experience that starts with marketing and extends into Bilyoner’s app.

• 15% increase in daily active users
• 8% increase in active betting users
• 94% monthly retention rate
• 60% YoY improvement in Return on Advertising Spend
• 40% reduction in customer acquisition cost

Why did you choose Mixpanel?

We chose Mixpanel because it’s easy to use and delivers incredibly fast insights. We used Google Analytics in the past, but it took over seven hours to prepare data for analysis, compared to seconds when using Mixpanel. We also love the ‘Alerts’ feature in Mixpanel that tells us immediately when users experience issues so we can rapidly fix them and betting can continue during high-profile sports matches.

Who uses Mixpanel at Bilyoner?

Our product managers, engineers, and designers use Mixpanel daily to understand how customers use our app and to make collaborative decisions on new features. Our marketing team uses Mixpanel to understand the effectiveness of user acquisition and to group users into socio-demographic cohorts for targeted messages and campaigns.

Our senior management, including the CEO and CTO, also regularly receive Mixpanel Boards to understand business metrics — like the number of completed bets, our unique user growth, and revenue performance. This insight contributes to our company’s strategic decision-making. In fact, our senior team is relatively new to the company and we used Mixpanel insights to onboard them and bring them up to speed.

How have the insights in Mixpanel helped you prioritize your product roadmap and accelerate innovation?

We learned that a large number of users were preparing to place bets but were unable to complete the transaction. When we analyzed this cohort of users more closely using Mixpanel Funnels, we discovered they had a very high churn rate and were leaving Biloyner entirely. The problem was instability in the app that caused it to crash at the final moment, just before a bet was placed. Since identifying the issue we’ve prioritized bug fixes and released new versions of our app across iOS and Android, which has helped us achieve a 94% monthly retention rate. Anecdotally we know this is a big improvement but we actually couldn’t track retention effectively with Google Analytics, so it’s a new benchmark for us — far higher than we achieved previously.

More broadly, we use Mixpanel Insights to create a blueprint for our product roadmap from restructuring our tools to improving designs. We use Mixpanel Flows to understand our users’ journey in precise detail and convert it into a user experience flow scheme that delivers an improved experience. In short, we’ve made product analytics a vital aspect in deciding which features to build and how best to allocate our product and engineering resources.

We’ve been able to use Mixpanel Funnels to understand how new users discover Bilyoner. For example, whether they arrived from a referral link, a paid advertising campaign, or from our organic social media campaigns. This insight has helped our marketing team to refine their user acquisition tactics, achieving a higher return on our marketing spend, and has contributed to a 15% increase in Daily Active Users.

Can you explain more about how the marketing team uses Mixpanel?

We’ve been able to integrate Mixpanel with our Google and Facebook ad platforms so we can bring first-party user data into our digital advertising strategy. Thanks to Mixpanel, we now understand which user cohorts are making particular types of bets. We use this insight to run specific campaigns offering those odds, targeted to those cohorts through social media. This has transformed campaign effectiveness.

Digital ad platforms only tell you if someone clicks an ad. But when integrated with Mixpanel, we can see that user’s activity in our app too. For example, did they go on to place a bet? This insight is driving our marketing decision-making and helping us spend more effectively. Overall, since integrating Mixpanel we’ve seen a 60% year-over-year increase in Return on Advertising Spend and our customer acquisition cost has decreased by 40%. While we can’t attribute the entire gain to integrating product data with marketing, it’s certainly had a big impact, helping us to better allocate resources and optimize our marketing channels.

Based on the success you’ve seen to date, what would you have not been able to accomplish without the use of Mixpanel?

Speed is one of the key factors. Today, we have Alerts in Mixpanel that tell us when users experience issues in our app. This fast time to insight is critical for us because if something happens during a big sports match we might lose out on thousands of bets. Our prior solution took many hours to run a query, today we can do it in seconds. That’s been transformational for us.

What is something cool you’ve discovered through Mixpanel data?

We discovered that our elderly users are actually far more active in terms of usage and overall betting volumes. The fact these older cohorts compared so well to younger user groups was quite surprising but the data doesn’t lie, so now we’re working out how we can make simple improvements for our older cohorts, like larger font sizes as well as reconsidering how we can onboard more older customers.

How is Omtera, Mixpanel’s Gold Partner, helping you?

The Omtera team’s availability on the field has provided us with great flexibility. Their prompt approach to address our technical or operational needs have enabled us to resolve issues in a much quicker fashion. Since they are aware of the market conditions we operate in, they have a great understanding of the challenges we face and provide us with valuable insights to achieve our objectives.

What’s next for your team using Mixpanel?

Beyond integration with our digital advertising platforms, we’re investigating the potential to apply personalization technology, which would provide our users with recommendations on bets they might like to make next, based on their previous activity on our platforms. Although we haven’t finalized this implementation, we already know the technology can integrate easily with Mixpanel and therefore will have an effective outcome.

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