How effective is Betfair marketing?

Maybe they should increase their Premium Charge payments, the UFCs?

Give them £100 each and a free laptop to attend a basic computer skills course.

These punters are the ones Betfair need to be getting onboard. Those betting whilst off work, on holiday, etc etc.

Time for Betfair to develop a high street presence.....

Betfair seemingly only want the chess players and are happy to leave the draught players to the bookmakers. Who got the best deal there? It reminds me of the old joke "why did God give the Arabs the oil and us the potatoes" to which the reply is "he gave us first choice".

City boy clowns imo.

If Alexander The Great had the betfair mindset he would've taken over 5% of the known world and be known as Alexander The Quite Good.

If Bill Gates had it he would've tied DOS to IBM and ended up hosting programmes like The Apprentice.

You can take the boys out of the city but you can't take the city out of the boys.

lol

What more can you do than put the price on Betfair beside the bookie price on the channel? Spells out the value for them.

As much money as you spend you can't teach an old dog new tricks sometimes.

What is betfair please?

Don't worry Savaloy, it'll never catch on.

LeinsterBeliever, the problem is they've got to attend university and get a maths degree before they'd be capable of making the comparison because of the complex commission system,

You'd be amazed at the amount of punters who say "i just don't understand how BF works" so they don't use it.

Betfair could really do with improving the website for newcomers. It's far too complicated to find a market you might want to bet on.

They should have a simple, plain frontpage with a big Search box, very google-like, so if someone types in 'world cup' then they get straight to the most popular bets for the event.

Try that search in the tiny little search box right now, and you get 2151 results, pages and pages of crap, mostly unrelated markets. The search is useless.

Markets should have a simple, uncluttered list of choice of what to bet on, and the odds on offer. I know Betfair have their 'simple' market views that don't show market depth or the lay side, but the appearance is still crap and complicated, the new punter is just left with looking at a list of numbers that they don't understand.

Basically, the site deters newcomers, who can easily visit another bookie and find the bet they want there.

There is no question decimals odds, back and lay, market depth can deters new customers but as Mr. Magoo points out not all of them are there when you go to a racing market the first time. Apart from the decimals (and you imagine most punters have had a bet on the tote before if they're punting on 50/1 shots on ATR) showing people just the back odds, can you get any simpler, it even has an each way option?

There are some valid points about navigation however, just click 'horse racing' at the top of the page and you've all the races for today spelt out easily in front of you.

I personally don't think Betfair is that complicated to new comers, look at some other sites. See Paddy Powers, often they 4 to 5 options alongside enhanced win only, each way, place only, faller insurance and it can look much more cluttered.

Add in the fact when you go to Betfair it invariably has the most popular market or next race on the TV on a big banner you can get to the markets quickly. Type in world cup into any bookies sites and you get 10 pages of markets, no one can change that.

What where the place prices on here for that horse?

Finding a market in Betfair is only easy once you are used to the site - there's always a quick way to get there, but only after you are used to the website. Just look at how many links and tabs and stuff are on the front sports page. Which one should someone click?

The search *can* be improved - Betfair's search is like the prehistoric days of Altavista, where all that mattered were the number of search results returned. It should instead be highlighting the most likely results - if I type in 'Newmarket' then it should show me an overview of races from Newmarket, for instance.

My hunch is that people still aren't as familiar with decimal odds as you might think - the 'beginner' view of markets could express something like '£1 returns £x.xx' for each runner.

another problem is that the markets on here don't really get going til much later in the day. So with that horse yesterday i'm sure alot of punters would rather have a little e/w on with the books b.o.g. rather than sitting on here all day waiting for their bet to get matched.

I agree with you on the decimals Mr. Magoo. Most new or non punters aren't that comfortable with them. I see it when I'm out doing demos etc or in the trailer.

However, people watching ATR on a Mon/Tues as referred to at the start of the thread, really should be able to grasp it. Even with massive value kicking them in the face to get someone to switch their bookie is extremely hard and costly.

and the t0te win was even better than betfair sp at 137.90

the introduce a friend payment scheme they have changed and is also very ropey.

£1. EACH WAY 66/1  CASH . 2 minutes after race CASH  in pocket.   big advantage.

They are trying to reach them through the innovative Betfair Front Room ad campaign.

where is the free DVD they can give away TO 95% of punters that do not use betfair