Choice! Everyone wants lots of it, however, few can sort through it all. 

Simply walk into your grocery store and take a look at the mustard section. For those who are just looking, it can be a very overwhelming experience. Not only that, it takes time to sift through all the options. 

This problem is similar to what slot operators and analysts have to deal with on their gaming floor. 

When it comes to making decisions on changing the slots floor, there is an overwhelming abundance of data and metrics. How do you provide insights promptly? 

In this post, we will explore how Average Wager and Peak Time Utilization, two well-known KPIs, can be used to help make better and faster decisions to improve your slots performance. These will help answer questions such as:

• Should we increase or decrease the number of units?
• Should there be more or less leased products?
• Should I increase the denom? 

A picture says it all: Peak Time Utilization

In the scatter plot below, the peak time utilization and average wager of a hypothetical casino’s games are plotted, where the bubble size indicates the theoretical win per day for each unit, which of course, will take into consideration RTP/PAR settings. 

By including the median lines, we can separate the plot into four quadrants to broadly measure game performance.

Now, let’s review each quadrant and discuss the best opportunities for improvement.

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A. Add Units: 

Games in Quadrant A are highly utilized and have a high average wager. Clearly, these games are the casino’s top performers – they consistently have the largest theoretical win of the four quadrants and will be the units that an operator may want to add more of to the floor. 

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‍B. Increase Popularity per Unit: 

Games in Quadrant B are not highly utilized but have a high average wager. Operators may want to consider why the games have inferior utilization - is it through poor placement or is it simply an unpopular game?  This will form the basis of the decisions on what to do with the product - move, reduce or remove.

                              The key will be found in the analysis of your top patron data to ensure that high-quality                               customers are always able to get a seat on their favorite game

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C. Remove Games: 

Games in Quadrant C are not highly utilized and have a low average wager driving low win. These games are great candidates to remove from the floor. Before removal, operators should consider the loyalty of customers to that product - are the customers likely to move to different machines?

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D. Increase Denomination: 

Games in Quadrant D are highly utilized but have a low average wager, which may be limiting revenue optimization. To increase the revenue bubbles, consider increasing the average wager by installing higher denominations of the same game or decreasing RTP/PAR settings on (some of) these machines where possible.

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The utilization vs average wager plot can provide a new view on understanding your slot floor and provide strategic direction for optimizing it for your patrons. Not only that, this type of plot can be broken down for each of your floor segments providing more insightful and location-based decision-making. 

Conclusion

This BCG style matrix is commonly used by businesses to evaluate product performance, and there are numerous other KPIs that could be added to further increase analytics insight, such as the growth rate on the x-axis and revenue on the y-axis.  Having the right data insights in a timely fashion where you can act on them quickly, could be the difference between making your target revenue in a given quarter or missing it. This slot performance overview provides a guide to questions we sought to answer, what is the right number and type of units that your floor needs and at the right price? Answering these questions can help move your slots floor towards what your patrons want most.

The choices are yours! Coincidentally, we both prefer the traditional yellow mustard.

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At Tangam, we are at the core of prescriptive analytics to transform how operators get the most out of their gaming floor, blending a wealth of knowledge in software development, data science, machine learning, visualization, and casino operations best practices. At the time of writing this blog, our slot optimization product, SODA, has more than 300+ different metrics to choose from, and that list is still growing.

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