PointsBet is on a winning streak of site optimizations with Contentsquare

The company

PointsBet is a leading online sports betting and iGaming operator that launched in Australia in 2017. In an industry that’s as fiercely competitive as the sports it revolves around, delivering a seamless and engaging user experience (UX) is absolutely critical to survival and success.

Charged with ensuring PointsBet’s UX is match fit is Robert Miller, Head of UX at PointsBet.

“First and foremost, our team is dedicated to continually improving the core user experience to reduce churn and ensure our platform remains engaging and user-friendly,” says Robert. “We prioritize fostering engagement and delivering results that benefit both our users and the business.”

The challenge

Before using Contentsquare, Robert’s team was reliant on traditional analytics tools such as Google Analytics to understand the behavior of PointsBet platform users. 

Unfortunately, the insights they extracted were extremely limited; they were broad, high-level, and strictly quantitative. 

To truly understand user behavior—and particularly what was causing them to engage with or disengage from the company’s digital platform experience—Robert’s team needed to know the ‘why’ behind the ‘what’, which only qualitative analytics insights can provide. 

PointsBet required an analytics upgrade and duly implemented Contentsquare’s experience intelligence platform, which combines highly granular quantitative and qualitative insights to give businesses an unrivaled understanding of digital customer behavior.

The solution

Since implementing Contentsquare, PointsBet’s UX team has used the platform’s wide array of behavioral analytics capabilities to uncover insights that go far beyond what traditional data sources can supply.

Rather than relying on aggregated data, the team can now visualize user behavior in real time. Contentsquare unveils what’s motivating and impacting customer behavior from one moment to the next, so Robert’s team can easily (and precisely) identify where and how to optimize the PointsBet platform experience to create better outcomes.

Contentsquare has given us a much deeper, behavior-driven understanding of how users interact with our platform. This has enabled us to make more targeted improvements that drive engagement and reduce friction in ways that standard analytics tools simply couldn’t capture.

Robert Miller

Head of UX

Contentsquare has helped Robert’s team solve a range of key challenges across user experience, operations, and business strategy. 

4 ways Contentsquare has helped PointsBet improve its user experience

1. Creating a smoother, frustration-free wagering process

Wagering is the process whereby customers research and formulate bets. This is a critical area of the PointsBet platform experience—and it’s also a process that’s vulnerable to failure and frustration.

“Wagering is inherently interaction-heavy,” explains Robert. “Users need to quickly navigate through vast areas of information to find events, explore markets, and research the form of athletes and teams—sometimes within seconds before an event begins.” 

All this complexity results in a dense and occasionally complicated user interface, which in turn leads to friction and drop-offs in the user journey. With time ticking and money on the line, the stakes are high, and this pressure makes users particularly susceptible to frustration when things get confusing. 

Through experience analytics capabilities such as Session Replay, Heatmaps, and Journey Analysis, Contentsquare has helped PointsBet understand what’s causing frustration throughout the user experience, including during wagering.

Journey Analysis in action

Our old traditional tools showed us drop-off rates, but they didn’t show us why users were disengaging. For example, we discovered that users were getting stuck in key areas of our wagering flow due to inefficient navigation paths and confusing user interface (UI) elements, something that wasn’t immediately clear from Google Analytics alone. Heatmaps and zone-based analytics revealed areas where users were hovering but not clicking, indicating unintuitive interactions.

Robert Miller

Head of UX

With enhanced insights into the user journey provided by Contentsquare, Robert’s team is able to pinpoint navigation pain points and experiment with improvements to optimize page layouts and streamline workflows.

2. Improving bet placement efficiency

Wagering is just one part of the platform’s overall bet placement flow, which also needs to be frictionless and frustration-free. 

“A critical key performance indicator (KPI) for us is bet placement efficiency,” says Robert. “The majority of bets on our platform are placed within 30 minutes of an event’s start time, and for some sports, a large portion of those occur within just 2 minutes. Given this time sensitivity, it’s essential that our bet placement flow remains as seamless and frictionless as possible.” 

Contentsquare's Product Analytics product has been instrumental in removing friction from this overall flow. Using funnel analysis and error analysis features, Robert’s team can identify where users are experiencing unnecessary delays or struggles in the process, reduce the friction they find, and ensure users can successfully place their bets within the critical time window. 

By leveraging Contentsquare's behavioral analytics and effort analysis, we’ve been able to optimize bet completion rates, reduce drop-offs, and enhance user efficiency, leading to a better experience and improved business performance.

Robert Miller

Head of UX

3. Minimizing the impact of errors with automated alerts

Staying on the theme of frustration, Contentsquare is helping PointsBet tackle a huge source of user frustration and lost revenue: technical errors. 

“Using the platform’s webhooks integration, we’ve set up automated alerts in Slack for our racing traders for common situations such as races closing earlier than expected or certain bet types not being enabled,” says Robert. “These alerts allow our traders to quickly jump into our back-office tool and reopen races or enable the appropriate bet types.”

In just over a month of operation, the team’s automated ‘Bet Error’ alert identified 17 races with these issues, enabling 1,400 customers (who’d otherwise have been unable to place their bets and were at high risk of churning due to a poor experience) to place their bets.

“Without this alert, the problem may not have been detected until it had a substantial impact on our customers,” says Robert. “Proactively addressing this issue prevented larger disruptions, further improving the customer experience and maintaining trust in our platform. The webhook integration and real-time alerting capabilities were critical features in making these improvements possible.” 

4. Guiding product development and road mapping

Contentsquare constantly gives Robert's team insights into how platform features are performing.

“One of the most valuable improvements arising from Contentsquare has been post-release feature tracking,” says Robert. “Instead of relying on broad engagement metrics to measure this, we can now dive deeper into user interactions, drop-off points, and friction areas, ensuring that every enhancement delivers measurable improvements. This enables us to iterate on features more quickly and assess their impact in a meaningful way.”

The actionable, data-driven insights provided by Contentsquare have been instrumental in helping Robert’s team (and other product teams) define, prioritize, and secure buy-in from leadership for their product roadmaps.

Contentsquare insights really resonate with senior stakeholders. Thanks to the platform, we’re able to present work items and features backed by clear data at our roadmap prioritization sessions with senior leadership. As a result, these sessions have become significantly more productive.

Robert Miller

Head of UX

The results

Contentsquare has given us a much deeper, behavior-driven understanding of how users interact with our platform, enabling us to make more targeted improvements that drive engagement and reduce friction in ways that standard analytics tools simply couldn’t capture.

Robert Miller

Head of UX

Robert’s team has benefited from using Contentsquare in a multitude of ways, but the impact of Contentsquare on PointsBet’s operations has spread far beyond the UX team. 

Initially, teams were hesitant to rely on a new analytics tool, having had bad experiences with previous tools that provided inaccurate or incomplete data. 

However, by running a series of small, controlled experiments with a demonstrable impact on key metrics relating to revenue, retention, and user experience, Robert’s team was able to convince other teams of Contentsquare’s value.

Today, multiple teams at PointsBet actively use the platform, including: 

• Product: to refine feature rollouts and user journeys

• UX: to enhance usability with behavioral data

• Marketing: to assess campaign performance 

• Fraud prevention: to monitor suspicious activity patterns

And Robert sees this usage expanding further in the future.  

What’s next

“Looking ahead, product analytics will play an even greater role in shaping our priorities,” Robert says. “Particularly in collaboration with teams like compliance.”

He also foresees Contentsquare potentially being used by PointsBet’s customer service agents to gather on-the-spot information to better help the customers who contact them. 

Contentsquare has become a core tool across PointBet’s departments, helping us drive both business success and customer satisfaction. By aligning the data-driven insights we get from Contentsquare with strategic goals, we can continue to refine our roadmap, improve efficiency, and enhance the overall customer experience.

Robert Miller

Head of UX