Science and iGaming should be friends, believes Lev Polonuer – owner and director of Pepper Partners, which brings together a number of affiliate projects, including the global affiliate network. In an exclusive interview for SiGMA News, he spoke about his unique method of optimising products for clients around the world, inspired by a decade of SEO experience in iGaming.
In his interview, Lev focuses on how iGaming market’s gap has become a driver of innovation to create win-win situations for users and products.
Having always been at the intersection of traffic and product, Pepper Partners (PP) looked for service opportunities that could improve both product and traffic. They were looking for a way to make the product’s marketing more instrumental and modern to measure customer reactions. “So we started building a toolkit,” says Lev.
The team developed CRM systems for webmasters, for managing the betting and gaming affiliate division, for products. “It turned out that most of the calculations were done in Excel, which is quite funny considering the amount of money, responsibilities and amounts that go through our market. That’s where we started,” Lev continues.
Great chance
As the company continued to focus on SEO, it was also looking for a way to rethink the way it built websites and products. “I happened to be talking to the vice-chancellor of a university that was training students for a second MBA in cyberpsychology. And I saw that there was a huge potential for application in our field,” tells Lev. In classical marketing, for example, neuropsychological methods are used to assess the effectiveness of advertising when studying focus groups. But there was no application of this approach in the iGaming space.
Lev says that PP were the first to apply cyberpsychology methods to their products, i.e. SEO sites. Google responded perfectly, the behavioural factors increased many times over. Lev realised that the team could expand its activities: “For four years we had been perfecting this method on our products, and at some point, about a year ago, we realised that we were ready to offer it to the market. We are ready to work on larger products with different approaches to analysing customer behaviour factors.”
Market demand
Practice has shown that there is an incredible demand for this service. Many products on the market are made on similar aggregator platforms, apart from general visual copying. “Even products made from scratch, whether casino or betting, copy each other’s mistakes,” Lev points out.
In PP’s approach, changes to a product are made not because the designer thinks so, not because A/B testing has been done, not because competitors have done so, but because there is a clear scientific rationale. The team argues why something in the product needs to be changed, and exactly how. This could be a registration and payment form. It answers the question, ‘Why do these promotions work better for this audience and these work worse?’.
“It is impossible to work with traffic and customers in Spain and Germany in the same way, even in Germany and Austria, Canada, India, Brazil,” stresses Lev.
The further a product goes geographically, the greater the difference in mentality. Products have to be tailored to the target groups, because they have a completely different way of using and perceiving the product. This is what the PP team fights for.
Agreement with academics
There are two universities in the world that teach cyberpsychology. The company has agreements with both universities to send the best students for internships. And therein lies the uniqueness of the people PP has been recruiting for the past 5 years, who have formed a fairly large department – about 25 psychologists with specialist training.
This team processes huge amounts of data from research and draws patterns of specific problems and reasons for them. And if the brand makes changes based on the focus group, the results improve in a certain way. That’s how the Pepper Partners product works.
Expansion as a plan for 2025
“We are expanding as much as possible right now,” says Lev about the plans for 2025. For example, one of the main topics of discussion at SiGMA Europe for PP was cyberpsychology. This is something they are keen to share with product company representatives. “We are seeing a lot of interest from the market. We already have a large number of meetings scheduled for next month with directors, founders and managers to start working on their products. And each one will be unique,” concludes Lev.
The method first introduced to the iGaming community by Lev Polonuer will be effective for operators of all sizes around the world. That is its versatility. The company was the first to talk about it and so far has no competitors. Pepper Partners’ cyberpsychology techniques are described in more detail in a recent article, based on a company presentation. The insights presented relate to UI design based on various measures of user reactions to online merchant websites.
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