A player’s journey starts before the click

For years, performance marketing in iGaming has been built around a relatively simple equation: acquire the player, measure the conversion and optimise the cost. That model is becoming harder to defend. 

Speaking with us, Christoffer Grönlund, Founder and CEO of Mindboogle Marketing and an iGaming specialist with more than 15 years experience, explains how, as acquisition costs rise, attribution becomes more complex and first-party data grows in importance, the quality of the experience surrounding the click matters as much as the click itself.

The result is a rethink of where acquisition ends and player experience begins. From the first advert to registration, deposit and retention, each interaction now forms part of the same commercial equation. The operators that understand that connection are not simply buying traffic more efficiently; they are building a stronger case for why a player should arrive, stay and return.

Q: Performance marketing has traditionally been judged by what happens at the bottom of the funnel. How should businesses think differently about the relationship between acquisition, traffic quality, and the player experience once someone actually arrives?

Christoffer Grönlund: Start with attribution. Marketers staring blindly at last-click are not doing themselves a favor, and last-click simply doesn't credit the channels that assisted along the way. Last-click has been outdated for a while now, especially for brands running a genuine full-funnel strategy.

Player experience doesn't start when someone lands on your site, it starts at the very first touchpoint. I break it into three stages: pre-visit, first site visit, and post-visit. If you only judge performance by what happens at the bottom, you're optimizing the wrong end of the relationship. A campaign that drives cheap clicks but sets the wrong expectation will always show up later, not just as a marketing cost. Choose your marketing funnel and traffic channels wisely.

Q: Google, Meta and other major platforms can change their algorithms, targeting rules or economics overnight. How can operators build a growth model that is resilient to changes in any single acquisition channel?

Christoffer Grönlund: If we are talking about organic search, we're genuinely at Google's mercy, a core algorithm update can wipe out your visibility overnight, and Google has zero commercial incentive to protect you from that, since you're not paying them. Paid media is a different story: Google and Meta make their money from advertisers spending more, so they're not incentivised to break the paid ecosystem. 

But the risk could show up in a different way, perhaps through tightening targeting rules, gambling-specific ad certification changes) and through rising auction prices, as more advertisers, often running away from organic volatility, bid up the same inventory. Affiliates carry a third kind of risk, a commercial risk: a top partner renegotiating terms or walking away.

Resilience means building a growth model that can take a hit on any of these fronts without falling apart, not just spreading your budget around. That's where The Omni-channel Marketing approach comes into play: when they are synched with CRM instead of running in silos, one channel having a bad week doesn't sink the whole funnel, because the others simply pick up the slack. Spreading your spend around isn't enough on its own. 

As a marketer, you need to utilize the modern marketing opportunities that are available, now, let your marketing channels actively back each other up, not just sit side by side. That can keep one bad week from becoming a bad quarter.

Q: A great advertiser can win the click, but what happens next determines whether that click was worth buying. What separates an effective acquisition campaign from one that simply generates traffic, and where does the player experience begin to influence conversions?

Christoffer Grönlund: Winning the click is the easy part these days, anyone with a budget can buy traffic. What actually separates a campaign that generates traffic from one that's genuinely effective is what it's optimized against. Targeting is king. An effective campaign is judged by what happens post-click, deposits, LTV, retention, and that only works if the data from those later stages feeds back into how the campaign is targeted and optimized in the first place. 

That's the same CRM-informed logic I mentioned earlier applied one step further towards the mid and upper funnel: it's not enough to know you want the right players, the campaign itself must be built to find more of them, not just more clicks, as some clicks can be absolute crap. Again, it comes down to your marketing funnel and active choice of traffic channels.

If we are looking at where player experience begins to affect conversions, it doesn't start at the landing page, it starts at the very first touchpoint, the pre-visit stage. What happens at the first site visit is really the moment of truth, where whatever was promised earlier in the customer journey either holds up or falls apart when visiting the site. I tell all my clients the same thing: you only get one chance to make a great first impression, so take it. 

A click that arrives to a site that delivers a broken promise isn't a customer, it only adds to your bounce rate, and no amount of lower-funnel optimization fixes a mismatch that happened before the player ever landed, not even a flawless retargeting strategy can win back a broken first impression.

Q: There is often a disconnect between the promise made in an advertisement and the experience a player encounters after clicking. How important is message continuity across the entire funnel, and what does a genuinely joined-up acquisition-to-product experience look like?

Christoffer Grönlund: It's everything. I think of the funnel in terms of Why, What and How, When. The branding side owns the why and what and the performance side owns the How and When, but they have to be telling the same story end to end. That story also has to travel through every stage of the funnel - See, Think, Do and Care, 

A genuinely joined-up experience can look like this: the TV ad sets the brand tone at the See stage, The Programmatic channels such as Video, Native and display carries that same look and feel through the Think stage as the customer consider their options, the Paid search ads and the landing page match the exact offer they expect once they're ready to act at the Do stage, and the Affiliate listing or Review page they clicked through from isn't promising something the operator can't back up. 

When that chain breaks anywhere along See-Think-Do, you create what I call a false handshake, the customer feels invited in by one version of the brand and meets a different one at the door. Brands just need to get it right. Alignment across the entire journey isn't really optional; it's what protects your CAC and LTV.

Q: Conversion-rate optimization is increasingly being treated as a product discipline rather than simply a marketing function. Why has CRO become so important, and which parts of the player journey offer the greatest opportunity to improve conversions today?

Christoffer Grönlund: Because conversion rate is one of the few KPIs that sits at the intersection of everything,  marketing spend, product design, and player trust. I honestly can't understand why so many brands are still not more active with CRO, given it's one of the top KPIs across the entire industry. 

The registration flow and the first-deposit flow are where I see the biggest overlooked opportunity, small improvements like split-testing form fields or payment steps can move FTDs by double digits. A +15% lift in FTDs or re-deposits from optimization work most brands haven't bothered to do properly is very real, very possible to reach, and it drops straight to EBITDA at the very end.

There's also another huge benefit here that often gets overlooked: CRO isn't just an internal victory, it strengthens your relationship with Tier 1 affiliate partners too. When your funnel converts better, the same traffic from an affiliate suddenly earns them more, without them changing anything on their end. 

That's not leverage you use against a partner, it's proof that earns you priority placement and more traffic coming your way, and it puts you in a genuinely strong position whenever a commercial renegotiation does come up.

Q: If you look across the funnel, at acquisition, landing pages, onboarding, registration, first deposit, first transaction and beyond, where do businesses most often lose players, and why are those points of friction so frequently overlooked?

Christoffer Grönlund: Most often right at the registration-to-first-deposit handoff, and then again immediately after that first deposit, before any real customer relationship has been formed. Those points get overlooked because they sit between two teams, acquisition marketing hands the customer off, and CRM/retention hasn't started engaging yet, so nobody truly owns that moment. It's the classic gap, like a black hole between departments rather than a gap in the customer's actual journey. The brands that win are the ones who treat that handoff as a single experience rather than two separate jobs with two separate KPIs.

The fix is granular, behaviour-triggered retargeting that bridges exactly that gap, catching a player at the precise moment they're in, whether that's an unfinished registration or a first deposit that hasn't been followed by a second session, and communicating properly, instead of a cold start. 

We run that through our programmatic channels and CRM, email, app push, SMS, rather than Google Ads, remarketing lists aren't even available for real-money gambling there in the first place. When done right, that's not about overloading to stop churn, it's about being relevant enough, at the right moment, that the player never had a reason to walk away in the first place.

Q: The industry has access to more data, testing capability and behavioural insight than ever before. What should businesses actually measure to understand whether a player experience is working, beyond the conventional metrics of CPA, conversion and immediate revenue?

Christoffer Grönlund: To understand true player value, you have to look at Lifetime Value (LTV) and churn through data-driven multi-touch attribution, rather than last-click. Last-click attribution will never tell you the real story of what drove a high-retention customer versus a short-lived one. I'd also look at return visit behavior before first deposit, engagement with free-to-play content, and how customers respond to CRM communication in the first 30 days. 

A player who stays three years with steady, healthy engagement is worth more than a whale who deposits big and churns after three months of heavy action, but you'll only see that difference if you're measuring behavior over time, not just the moment of conversion.

Q: Where should the boundary between brand and performance marketing sit today? Can brand activity genuinely improve lower-funnel performance, and how should businesses think about the point where brand, product and performance become one growth equation?

Christoffer Grönlund: Honestly, that boundary is completely outdated. It's the same organizational silo in a different form, brand and performance running on separate scorecards rather than driving a shared revenue goal.In See-Think-Do-Care terms, brand often owns See and Think, performance owns Do and Care,  but they're describing one customer, not two separate jobs. 

Brand, product and performance become one growth equation the moment you stop measuring them separately, and increasingly, the moment you stop buying them separately too.

Q: There is a growing recognition that retention is not something that begins after acquisition, it is shaped from the first interaction. What responsibility does a brand have to create an experience compelling enough that players want to stay, return and explore, rather than simply converting once?

Christoffer Grönlund: A brand has full responsibility, and I'd argue it starts even before the site visit, with what the marketing promised in the first place. If we, as marketers, sell an offer as a shortcut to winning rather than as entertainment, we've already set the wrong expectation before the operator even gets a chance to build a relationship. 

A brand's job is to keep proactively giving players a reason to stay engaged, synced CRM, personalization through a Customer Data Platform (CDP) with relevant offers instead of generic ones. As I've said throughout this conversation, I'm firmly of the opinion that retention isn't a department, it's a continuation of the same promise acquisition made.

Q: Looking ahead, what do you believe will be the next major innovations in player gamification, and what role will technology, real-time data and personalization play in creating player experiences that feel genuinely immersive, relevant and different from what we see today?

Christoffer Grönlund: Before we even get to the next big thing, most brands haven't caught up with the current one. Something as fundamental as activating your own CRM data through tools like Google Customer Match is still rare in this industry, not because operators aren't interested, but because very few have solved it end to end, both the technical side and getting the consent right with players. 

That gap is closing fast, as third-party cookies are disappearing and first-party, CRM-informed targeting is quickly becoming one of the only mechanisms that still works. The brands that solve that early will have a real head start.

Beyond that, I think the next real shift is full personalisation of the player journey, not just offers, but pacing and communication that adapt to how someone actually plays, instead of treating every player the same. Customer Data Platforms (CDPs) will become as standard as CRM is today: think of it as the Casino Netflix model, serving recommendations based on real behavioral signals rather than broad segments. 

But the smartest use of that won't just be pushing more engagement, it'll be adapting to a player's own patterns and limits, so the same technology protects the player just as much as it grows the business. 

Get that balance right, and trust becomes your biggest growth driver, not just good PR.

Christoffer Grönlund is Founder and CEO of MindBoogie Marketing, with more than 18 years’ experience in iGaming spanning player acquisition, performance marketing, affiliates and growth strategy. He began his iGaming career with Betsson and later co-founded Winlandia, helping build the business across multiple markets. Today, he advises iGaming brands on full-funnel growth, bringing together performance, data, partnerships and player experience. 

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