Q&A: Andrew Denning, head of product, Oddschecker

Oddschecker is evolving rapidly as plans to become a one-stop shop for both sophisticated and casual bettors take shape

Sports betting affiliate Oddschecker is on a mission to transform its business from a website where customers come to simply compare prices, to one which offers them a “one-stop shop” for all their betting needs. Like many of the bookies whose prices it features, the CVC-owned firm is aiming to grow its recreational customer base and believes improving its mobile product is key to unlocking that potential.

Indeed, Oddschecker is shifting away from what has historically been a desktop-first strategy to a mobile-first approach. As part of that focus, the firm is working on the launch of a fully native app ahead of this summer’s European Football Championships – and there’s much more to come.

Heading up the team and responsible for driving the product development strategy is Andrew Denning. As head of product, he oversees the whole product suite including desktop, mobile web and native smartphone offerings. Prior to Denning joining Oddschecker a year ago, there was no product team in place but now since then it’s grown to seven with plans to expand the team further over the next six months.

Denning has a solid background in digital, having worked for News UK’s The Sun where he launched The Sun Mobile app on iOS and Android as well as The Sun Tablet app. Prior to that he worked for Deloitte on the UX and implementation of apps and websites.

EGR Mobile Intelligence caught up with Denning to find out more about Oddschecker’s native mobile app launch and how its aim to be much more than an affiliate is shaping up.

EGR Mobile Intelligence (EGRMI): What is your strategy and development plan for mobile?

Andrew Denning (AD): One of the first I noticed when I joined was a big gap in the understanding of our customers. We were well aware of our position in the market which was that Oddschecker is classically known as an odds comparison site with what you might class as more sophisticated bettors. That’s people who understand the terminology and people who have heard of Oddschecker in the first place.

What we wanted as a strategy over the next two or three years was to grow our audience to include not just the more sophisticated bettors but more of the casual betting market, which is a larger opportunity for us.

We’ve tried to approach it in a similar vein to other comparison tools, such as comparethemarket.com, that are really focused on making a clear goal and message for the users, i.e. ‘use us to make the most of what you want to achieve while you’re here’. In the gambling world, the message is to use Oddschecker to get the best value, get the best price and make the most of your bet. This is what we identified last July after a hefty piece of customer research in which we identified the betting journey people go through when they think about placing a bet and checking prices. We saw that we don’t play a part in most of it and we wanted to change that.

One of the changes following on from that is creating the natural transition allowing users to come to Oddschecker to check a price and actually place their bet while they’re here. To that end we’ve integrated with 10 bookmakers allowing customers to place bets on the Oddschecker product suite. But it’s very new for us and our customers. We’ve had some growing pains in understanding that we need to be better about communicating what’s available, what’s possible and how it works. Historically for 11 years Oddschecker was about coming in to check a price and then go to a bookmaker, so it’s a very sudden behavioural shift for a lot of our core users.

EGRMI: How does your mobile business compare to desktop?

AD: Mobile is definitely growing; our audience share is probably 50/50 between the two and now we hope to see the native side pick up as well. Historically it’s been a challenge for us because the grid system we use isn’t naturally built for a small screens, so it’s a challenge to provide the value that Oddschecker offers on a small platform. We’ve looked at an approach of more tidying up and polishing the desktop site so that it is useable for every type of user. Whereas on mobile we’re going to take a different approach, learning from what we do on native and seeing if the same concepts of simplicity, ease of use and convenience can be applied to what we do on mobile web.

The general idea is that we’re shifting now towards a mobile-first approach whereas historically we’ve been desktop-first.

EGRMI: How are your plans to launch a new fully native iOS and Android mobile product progressing?

AD: We’re aiming to launch the native product in advance of the Euros so probably early to mid-May. The aim is that the native mobile app fits that user need of not ignoring our core user base who still use Oddschecker for comparison, but who want to place bets quickly. And also to try and reach out to the more casual customers who still want to place bets but can be slightly intimidated and overwhelmed by the landscape of the number of bookmakers that offer prices. A convenient, simple and easy to use product in the betting world is absolutely essential to reach out to that casual betting audience.

EGRMI: What has the testing process been like and what feedback have you received so far?

AD: We’ve based the app on the research we did in the middle to latter end of last year so it’s all about simplicity, ease of use and convenience. It’s a new concept for the betting world. It’s about switching up the dialogue that a bookmaker has. It’s less about ‘here are all the possible things you could bet on today’ and more about ‘here are the things we think you would want to bet on today’. So there’s an element of trying to personalise the product so the user feels they’re coming to a relevant and tailored experience with a little bit of discovery dropped in. It’s built around not seeing too much information or too much data at any one time. The actual process of finding an event to bet on and placing a bet is all about giving the user the best price and allowing them the choice to bet with another bookmaker or stick with the price from one of their favourite bookies.

Users would ideally like a one-stop shop – they want to be able to view prices, place bets, check results, see what other bets they’ve placed and get updates all in one place. That’s something Oddschecker will work towards in the future. It’s a bit of a mountain to climb, and we’re tackling smaller hills as we go.

There are also features that allow users to do things like see a full record of all the bets they’ve placed across all the bookies, across all the sports, so there’s no need to jump into individual sites to see what bets they’ve placed in one place versus another site. It’s all stored in one area and allows them to manage their accounts in a simplistic way with the bookies. Again, this is about personalising their experience rather than showing them bets for bookies they’ve never touched.

EGRMI: What challenges have you faced when developing the native mobile app?

AD: It’s a tough balance to find the right amount of information to make the context of placing a bet useful to a user and what can be stripped out where they still feel comfortable thinking it’s the right bet to place. That’s a tough balance to strike when you think about the vast differences between racing and football. With racing, individuals would like that more rich context, detail and information about a horse, whereas football users are passionate and vested in the team they love and follow and for no love or money are they going to change what they bet on.

EGRMI: How do you make sure your app differentiates Oddschecker from the competition?

AD: We can never be absolutely sure that it does. We’ve gone with a user-centric approach. The core concept of the app is around recommendations where it’s not a load of bets all shown at once. It’s viewing a bet or tip at a time, having some light information associated with that bet allowing the user to delve further into it or not but personalise it to the user’s preferences based on what we know.

We’re in quite a unique position at Oddschecker as we have users that bet across multiple sports and multiple bookmakers, so we have a consolidated view of that one user wherever they go. We know more about the customer so we can make suggestions and recommendations based on what we know they do across their whole betting portfolio. Hopefully the user finds that their experience is relevant, up-to-date and fresh, and it feels like what they’re looking through is absolutely what they want to be involved in.

EGRMI: How does your back-end technology make you stand out on mobile?

AD: It’s the same thing that makes us stand out on the desktop as well. Having the ability to compare and view prices across 26 bookmakers is something you don’t see anywhere else. The speed and real-time nature of the price updates transfers across both mobile and desktop. We built the infrastructure in such a way that while the presentation method might be different, the goings on behind the scenes are actually the same.

EGRMI: How does Oddschecker plan to lead the way in mobile in terms of innovation?

AD: Hopefully from the native perspective it’s the app we will launch in May and the fact the process we’re going to take going forward is always a customer centric approach. We’re doing quarterly or bi-monthly user research sessions where we sit down with a set of users in a room and ask them questions, understand their motivations, talk to them about the brands they use, what they like and dislike, what they want to see. That now drives the process of building our roadmap for our mobile products. In the future we’ll potentially push online testing communities and we’re taking the same approach with our international products as well.

We’re going to focus on what are the complexities in the user interface that we can remove. I read a great article recently that said ‘assume that your product is unnecessary’. The industry suffers from an influx and overwhelming amount of data and information for a user. While that’s great for sophisticated bettors if we ever really want to capture the imagination of the more mass market we really need to understand that betting is a complex industry and we need to demystify it for the average user.