Rome wasn’t built in a day. Neither is a sports betting app.
There is a lot that goes into making the app located on your mobile device work. Some of that work is obvious, based on call and response to user feedback.
There are also a lot of inner machinations, such as integrating systems, relaying content, and markets and odds that change on the fly during live betting. They all swirl together in what can best be called a constant speed game designed to make the app able to accept a wager in that specific moment in time a bettor wants to place it.
The goal is to create what BetMGM Director of Product for the Sportsbook Brittany Dunbar calls “brilliant journeys that are really easy and clean and intuitive for our players to understand.” And for Dunbar’s team, the journey to this year’s new features ahead of the start of the NFL regular season is a continuation of the path from previous years.
Instead of hub and spoke, bar and wheel
A sportsbook’s level of success often rides on two frequently intertwined marketplaces: the NFL and parlays. No sport has a more clear dovetail of its evolutionary process than football. Legalized wagering traces its roots to fantasy football. And no sport has integrated itself into the day-to-day lives of sports fans and sports betting fans more than the NFL.
Dunbar discussed the innovations being released for the upcoming NFL season with InGame, and it starts the moment login is complete. There is a revamped landing page that includes a scoreboard carousel.
Scroll down a little bit, and there is a parlay-building module that includes live same-game parlays (SGPs) for the first time in a NFL season. Dunbar said the BetMGM app began live SGP rollouts during MLB play, and they will extend to the NBA when that season starts.
“This year marks a big step forward for our product … to a more seamless market discovery, investing in improving the speed and performance of the app, upleveling our parlay journeys, elevating live user experiences, and enhancing our rewards ecosystem,” she said. “We’re really excited.”
Specific to the NFL, Dunbar and her team heard the call for a better way to wager on alt lines (a different offering than the standard spread) and exact scores. For alt lines, BetMGM now provides a slider bar. For exact scores, there is now a wheel for bettors to get their desired outcome that quickly provides the corresponding odds to a projected final score.
“What we’ve gotten from feedback over the past three years from our players is that they love to bet alts, but they find betting into those markets really difficult,” Dunbar said. “They can’t easily find the alt line that they want to bet quickly and efficiently. We heard pretty loud and clear that this was a pain point for players.”
Dunbar likened it to solving a puzzle centered around a crucial question: “How do we alleviate that friction point for our users?” Dunbar has a sports-specific design team of seven. They took the user feedback and tinkered and created specs to submit to the development team, a process that repeated itself with the invention of the scoreboard wheel.
“We can have something like 100 different market options for a correct score,” Dunbar said. “It becomes really tough to either shop price or shop the score you’re looking to bet. So introducing this wheel where the user can quickly set the score for the market and get a visual indication of what the price is going to be for that score.”
Swiping ain’t just for Tinder
Loading all that content onto the BetMGM app is great, but getting to that point requires a process that goes back to the word friction. The less friction, the better, and Dunbar discussed the everyday action of swiping as a key component for a good betting experience.
Dunbar said her team got extensive feedback on issues navigating within the app, using a catch-all term of “janky” in the attempt to place wagers. She said the integration of “native gestures” while swiping — similar to how Google and Spotify apps work — along with increased speed and performance have the potential to be game changers in BetMGM navigation.
“A user is going to be able to pull down from the top of the screen and that’s going to swipe that sheet away,” she explained. “You’ll be able to do a similar swipe mechanic from left to right.
“Asynchronously, we’ve cleaned a lot of that up. You’re not going to feel like it’s taking time for pages to load as you’re navigating across the app. It’s going to be a much smoother, much more performant experience for users.”
Building rewards
A good product builds loyalty, and a good rewards program maintains it. Another key integration this year is a more interactive app in terms of a player seeing the progress of BetMGM Rewards Points (BRPs).
Bettors will be able to see how many BRPs they earn with each wager. Navigation to a centralized location from the home page to one that provides all relevant reward information will be simpler. In the case of VIP players, that landing page will provide a way to access to their host as well as link their Marriott Bonvoy accounts.
“We got feedback from our users that they didn’t really understand the rewards and benefits that they got by playing with BetMGM,” Dunbar said. “That really drove a large body of effort around starting to think, ‘What are all the disparate rewards items that add value to our users who play with BetMGM and what’s the best way where we can really, one, drive awareness, and two, drive engagement for our players?'”
Trying to grow market share
Even with all the integrations Dunbar’s team has put in place over recent years, finding public data points that define true growth are hard to come by. Illinois is the only state that provides an operator’s volume of wagers by sport category in addition to handle and revenue. But even with the breakdown, football wagers are not separated by pro and college.
The data looks largely positive. Though the volume of BetMGM’s football wagers in Illinois from last September through February decreased 6.8% from the same period in 2023-24 to 1.6 million, its football handle surged 31.2% to $105.3 million. The average football wager also jumped more than 40% to $65.39.
Where BetMGM has an opportunity to make a bigger impact, though, is with the live SGPs. The volume of parlay bets increased 73.1% to more than 4.9 million, and parlay handle improved 78.6% to $117.7 million.
Dunbar is confident in-game SGPs can be a game changer, noting their success during baseball season marked a point “where we can say we have the wind behind our backs and feeling really good about the momentum that it’s been a multiyear journey to get to.”
But like sports, sports betting comes down to wins and losses. Dunbar was pensive in response to what would be labeled as a “win” when BetMGM’s enhancements are unleashed within the app.
“A win is delivering value for our users,” she said. “I think hearing from feedback that we’re alleviating pain points, that we’re meeting their needs and expectations for what a sports betting experience for BetMGM should be.
“And ultimately, we’re delivering value for our business.”
