The Challenge

Betlion is a sportsbook and casino business focused on growth in emerging markets. The challenge they faced was 6 months of slowing growth and increasing costs. At the time they were relying on Google to manage their paid search ads and had very little by way of spend diversification. They wanted to move fast to address this and the declining performance.

The Talent

Meet John - one of the UK’s best Google ads experts. We match John for this project because he’s got a ton of international experience and has also worked on some of the most complex Google accounts there are, including Sky, a complex data driven Google advertiser, that spends upwards of £50m on ads each year.

John had a 5 point plan to fix things:

1. Accelerated Transition: from the time of the original brief to onboarding and transition was 5 days.
2. Data Reset: during the audit phase the marketing data and analytics were all reconfigured according to best practice, giving Betlion better visibility of the right performance metrics.
3. Scaled Paid Search: a new keyword analysis and competitor research revealed numerous headroom opportunities and wasted budget. This was accompanied by a full restructure of the account.
4. Facebook Reset: we introduced a new audience strategy and reset the tracking to focus on the right business metrics
5. Programmatic Testing: introduction of this new channel to test and identify new headroom opportunities beyond Facebook and Google.
6. Creative was all localised: this enabled more variation testing

The Results

• In the first quarter Betlion active players grew by 30%
• Google performance saw a 420% increase in search volume while maintaining efficiency
• Facebook generated 120% increase in volume with a 20% decrease in cost per customer