How Playtech partnered with Mixpanel to improve the player experience and deliver value to its licensees

Playtech PLC is an online gaming software provider that delivers technology, services and content to online casinos, sports betting, mobile gaming, and other services globally. Since being founded in 1999, the company has fast become the pioneer of omnichannel gaming and gambling technology through its integrated platform technology. Its approach has been centred on the continual development of best-of-breed products and content, with its success being predicated on its strong partnership with its licensees.

Playtech plays a vital role in supporting the gambling entertainment industry by providing essential tools and technology to enable our licensees to deliver exceptional gaming experiences to their players. While providing ultimate flexibility, this comes with a lot of complexity; licensees can take Playtech’s pre-built games, like roulette and bingo, and can configure them in multiple ways. This configuration and the overall performance of Playtech’s games have a huge impact on the player experience and therefore the competitiveness of licensees. Playtech was interested in a solution to help improve the optimization of its systems, as well as provide timely user insights to help customers better understand their players and configure the games.

Playtech started using Mixpanel in 2021. The data analytics and product teams use Mixpanel to quickly identify and debug any issues with its own technology, test hypotheses and understand how its players are engaging with its games, and provide them with advice and insight. As the company’s use of Mixpanel has grown, Playtech has begun to support some customers with bespoke reports and insights from Mixpanel to give them a more detailed view of their player behavior, allowing customers to optimize their business success and ultimately transform the player experience.

• Significant performance improvements through identification of sub-optimal integration
• Quantitative analysis of new feature effectiveness and configuration optimization
• Quantification and reduction in user drop-off points
• Client insight as a USP in the competitive game content delivery market
• Overall cost savings

Why did you need a product analytics tool?

Before adopting Mixpanel, we depended on an internal server-side solution for collecting insights and enhancing our products. While this approach provided fundamental performance data, it lacked the detailed client-side information required to gain a comprehensive understanding of our product’s real player experience. Whether it was finding out players were spending longer than desired loading games, or how our content was being presented by our licensees and whether that was being optimized, it was difficult to have a timely, detailed level of information that we needed to make improvements to service.

Why did you choose Mixpanel?

We chose Mixpanel because it was a solution that could provide the granularity and speed of insight we needed. With Mixpanel, we have both power and ease of use. The tool gives us the means to understand how our licensees are using our technology, what they are struggling with, and ultimately how end-users experience the games we build. If our product teams have a question about one of our games, we can answer it reliably in a matter of minutes. When we evaluated tools on the market, Mixpanel offered a complete solution across these important capabilities.

What have you learned since using Mixpanel?

Mixpanel allows us to gain deep insights into player behavior within the games we create. It allows us to track essential metrics such as average play duration, user drop-off patterns, and user engagement responses like reactions to significant wins or game navigation. Armed with these valuable insights, we can consistently enhance our game experiences, ensuring that players thoroughly enjoy them. This enhancement provides substantial added value to our licensees, who operate in a highly competitive industry where player loyalty holds paramount importance.

While our initial adoption of Mixpanel was primarily for behavioral analytics, we uncovered an advantage in tracking what we term as “client non-functionals.” For instance, we gained the ability to meticulously monitor player wait times during game loading and to assess the true impact of any technical issues on the player experience.

Mixpanel enabled us to quantify the number of potential gaming sessions lost due to extended loading times, ultimately demonstrating a correlation between longer load times and higher exit rates before a game fully loads. This data-driven analysis not only helped us optimize our loading processes but also translated into significant cost savings, amounting to hundreds of thousands annually.

What else has Mixpanel helped you with?

Mixpanel has helped enhance a culture of experimentation between our product team and data analysts, where we work together to test hypotheses and make iterative improvements to our various products. 

Mixpanel also allows us to quickly gauge the success of the features that we have rolled out and answer the question: “does this new feature actually work?” Frequently, we lacked comprehensive insights into the success of feature updates, making it challenging to assess their performance variations across different regions and customer segments. For example, introducing a feature update might’ve been right, but it’s possible that it wasn’t configured optimally on the licensee side, which might have impacted the player experience. Before Mixpanel, our product team found it harder to know if player experience issues were due to features or if problems with customer configuration were to blame. 

We also have a set of powerful back-office tools for licensees. Here we use Mixpanel to understand which of those tools licensee business users are benefitting from and generally how those tools are used. Here we’re tracking a far smaller number of power users and we combine Mixpanel insights with customer interviews to ensure we’re delivering maximum value. 

So you’re becoming more data informed across the product team?

Yes. Since we’ve had Mixpanel in place, our analysts show product teams the type of data we can access and they come to us with a wide range of questions. We’ve built a series of dashboards that answer the key questions across our entire suite of 400+ games and we’ve moved on to conducting experiments.

What does a typical dashboard measure?

Our product teams need to benchmark across some key industry KPIs like average play time, time between spins, exit rates after a big win as well as more basic performance metrics like load times, latency and the stability of each game. These are the metrics that help our teams deliver extremely high performing games at scale and hundreds of Playtech colleagues consult the dashboards on a daily basis. Our infrastructure handles many billions of transactions each year, so monitoring performance is crucial.

How is product analytics adding value for your licensees?

Similar to how we deliver value to our own product teams, we’re also helping our licensees become data informed. We build the games our licensees offer to players but licensees decide how they configure and display them. This tool has enabled us to enhance access to the data needed to gain a clear understanding of how their players are truly interacting with the games.

What are licensees interested in learning from their data?

There’s a lot of potential for our customers to optimize their businesses with product data insights. Our customers invest heavily in marketing to acquire new users and better understand what cohorts are a good match, which can help deliver a higher return from that investment. They can also see if their incentives like bonuses are working as intended.

Generally understanding how users engage with various games can be an important guide for licensees when deciding which games to offer and how best to configure those games. Licensees can choose to display games in pop-up windows, sidebars, or beside another game. How Playtech games and content are displayed is incredibly flexible but previously, in many cases licensees didn’t have the data insights to know which set-up was best for their players until we implemented Mixpanel.

There are compliance benefits too. Playtech is in a good place to really understand the impacts of regulatory technical features and how players interact with them. With these insights we can engage and inform regulatory agencies in multiple jurisdictions about how  future regulations most effectively increase player protection measures.

What’s next for Playtech with product analytics?

Our own product team now has a resource for understanding user behavior, testing the effectiveness of new features and regularly tracking key metrics. So we’re now very focused on expanding our managed service for licensees using Mixpanel, so they can better optimize the player experience and their marketing investments. We’re launching a range of dashboards that answer frequent licensee questions. It’s a key value-add when licensees choose to work with Playtech. After success with instrumenting our Casino games we are now in the process of rolling out Mixpanel across many of our products. This not only allows us to gain insights into those individual products, but allows us to understand how players navigate and engage across multiple products, for example how Sports players might engage with slots content.

We’re looking forward to continuing to benefit from product analytics insights to drive an optimal customer experience.

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