Building a smarter technology stack with esports leader G-Loot

G-Loot is one of the world’s fastest growing real-money eSports platforms, allowing players to compete against friends and earn real money rewards. Over 20 leading titles are connected to their unique technology, including Fortnite, Apex Legends, CS:GO, Rainbow 6 and Hearthstone. And all this…it’s just the beginning.

In his recent webinar for Optimizely, Chief Growth Officer, Jamie Dunbar Smyth, talked about world domination, a data-driven mindset, and building a smart technology stack from the ground up.

“Our ambition is world domination; we’re out to bring eSports to everyone. We want to make sure that anyone can basically play the games they love and even take the path to pro.”

Show me the data

To achieve that kind of ambition, G-Loot set out a clear goal in August 2019: to be completely data-driven by the end of the year.

“We wanted to be able to create an organization that is extremely nimble and very autonomous. We wanted to be able to create supercell teams and enable them to have the right competencies and the right tools to achieve the relevant KPIs. To do this, we didn’t want to build upon what we had previously, we wanted to buy from the grassroots up.”

Working with a wide range of partners and tools, a team of just two – Jamie included – was able to build the entire stack by themselves. The resulting flow of rich and reliable data has changed the game, from saving thousands of euros in cost per acquisition to honing the conversion funnel to increasing sign-ups.

Creating a data-driven stack

As part of their mission to become data-driven, G-loot had to build a technology stack that would enable insights about their customer across the entire customer journey. They needed to bring together multiple data sources from both their frontend and back-end data. This included game IP data and third party advertising. A tracking plan ensures their teams have the relevant metrics to make the right decisions.

From a centralized warehouse, teams can further enrich this information, enable a bi-directional flow of data, and interact with players in extremely smart and personalized ways.

Understanding customer behavior

By building a best-in-class tech stack, G-loot allows teams easy access to all the interactions for specific kinds of user groups to build personas to gain a deep understanding of user behaviors and customer journeys. Looking at their analytics, they are able to identify opportunities for how to improve the user experience. G-loot then uses experimentation at every step of the development process and at any level of the stack to develop, validate, deliver and optimize their user experiences. 

“Take a certain landing page where we send people from ads,” explains Jamie. “We’ve done a lot of experimentation on this page to optimize it as much as possible. Overall we run a lot of experiments, actually tens of experiments. And I’d love to really give a shout out to the team of Optimizely. Because when we actually decided to kick things off, we told them we wanted the experiments to go live one week off the signing with them.”

Empowering experimentation heroes

In fact, one key to G-Loot’s success is to ensure that everyone is encouraged to feel like they can experiment. They even have a term for it, experimentation hero, defined as someone who brings a data-driven mindset to the organization.

Experimentation heroes go through a training program and, once certified, are able to run experiments supported by a dedicated experimentation handbook – a range of different resources put together to enable them to run these experiments. The results are making a tangible difference to the business.

“This [experimentation] is what’s helping fuel our growth efficiently and intelligently, month on month.” – Jamie Dunbar Smyth, a chief Growth Officer, G-Loot

“We have saved tens of thousands of euros simply in the cost of acquiring our plays, because of the great improvements we’ve made to various parts of our conversion funnel. We also decided to create a new overview approach and have seen it increase signups by 3%.”

The outcome of a smart technology stack is a constant flow of high quality, real-time user data into their software development loop, which facilitates iteration and improvement. Then with Optimizely, they can release the right products with the right quality faster, smarter, and more safely.