GOLF PERFORMANCE APPS. WHO BUYS THEM. AND WHO IMPROVES: GATHER WHITE PAPER #9
If you’re in the business of selling golf technology, knowing who buys it and who benefits from it is critical.
Understanding how a technology benefits players can inform your marketing strategy. And knowing who is more likely to buy it will identify the customer segment ripe for growth. Business owners often have a hunch about who their customers are; big data can support these hunches or expose a few surprises.
Gather and Hole19 partnered up to provide a case study on how big data can reveal trends about the Hole19 app; its users, whose golf game most benefits from the Hole19 app, and who is more likely to upgrade from a free to a paid subscription.
What is the Hole19 app?
The Hole19 app is a game-enhancing smartphone app used by over 2.9 million golfers of all levels worldwide. It has recorded over 30 million rounds of golf to date. The Hole19 app provides GPS yardages, distance tracking, performance analysis, scoring functions and live leaderboards. For the purposes of this paper, Hole19 can also tell us whose golf game benefits from its use, and who pays for it. For this analysis, we limited it to the UK and US market.
LET’S START WITH SOME BASICS
Who is our sample of 20,000 golfers using the Hole19 on-course app in this analysis?
Question: Do golfers who pay for extra app features benefit from them?
Like many apps, Hole19 has a free and premium version. The features in the app’s paid version include increased wearable functionality, club recommendations, shot-by-shot tracking, and individual club statistics (there are more…). If paying subscribers benefit from the app with lower score, this is something that marketers can shout from the rooftops. So, do they?
The bottom line is ‘Yes!’ Golfers who pay for Hole19’s extra app features improve their games more than players who use the free version. If golfers are invested in improving their golf performance, they should pay for Hole19’s app.
We took a random sample of 20,000 Hole19 golfers who played an average of at least one round per month. For those golfers, we looked at their performance over a 6- and 12-month period and compared the handicap change of free app users to paid subscribers. (We used the app-generated handicap as the performance metric.) This is what we found.
On average, golfers with a paid Hole19 subscription started with a higher handicap than golfers using the free version. But within a year that trend had reversed; twelve-months later, paid app users were outperforming free app users. What’s more, the difference is unlikely to be by chance – statistically, it is a significant difference.
Question: DOES GEOGRAPHY MATTER?
Geographically, we were interested in examining if UK and US golfers benefitted equally from the paid Hole19 app. Golfers in the UK started with a lower handicap than their US counterparts (19.66 and 20.27 respectively). After six months, both groups improved (18.07 and 19.01 respectively) but UK golfers improved significantly more than the US golfers. The trend continued after 12 months (17.79 and 18.75 respectively). Golfers in the UK and the US improved by using the paid Hole19 app. Statistically speaking, UK golfers benefitted more.
Question: IS THIS AN APP FOR WOMEN GOLFERS?
Yes, women golfers enjoy and improve through technology use. Both free and paid users of the app reduced their handicap in twelve months, but the improvement difference between the groups was not statistically significant. This means that at this point the jury is still out. Did this sample of women golfers using the paid version of the Hole19 app benefit more because of the extra features, or because of chance.
Question: Who is most likely to benefit from a paid subscription?
Next, we analysed data of only paid Hole19 subscribers (n = 8185) and built a statistical model to find out which golfers were likely to benefit from a paid subscription. The results were interesting.
For every additional round a golfer played each month, performance improved.
Golfers who started using the app with a higher handicap improved their performance more than golfers who started with lower handicaps (in terms of handicap reduction).
Women using the paid app were less likely to improve than men.
As golfers’ age increased, their performance improvement decreased. Younger golfers were significantly more likely to improve than older golfers.
In a nutshell, the characteristics of golfers most likely to benefit from a Hole19 app subscription are younger, less skilled, men golfers who play frequently.
Question: Who is most likely to buy a paid subscription?
With data, we were also able to predict who is more likely to pay for a Hole19 subscription. By looking at the patterns across almost 20,000 golfers the following trends emerged.
Being based in the US is the biggest predictor of app subscription. Higher handicapped older men golfers, and players who rack up more rounds per month, are prime candidates for paid Hole19 subscriptions.
Even though men were more likely to buy a Hole19 paid subscription (more men play golf, so that isn’t a surprise), there is more to the story. When we looked at the percentage of men and women golfers who use a paid Hole19 subscription, women were significantly more likely to have upgraded. Yes, you read that right. Forty-four percent of women using the Hole19 app paid for it. This compares to forty-one percent of men using the app.
Question: Whose performance is more likely to improve with the Hole19 app?
As there are two versions of the app, we ran two analyses. Whose performance improves most with the free and paid version of the app? And are the trends similar when we look at a six- and twelve-month period?
Predictors of improvement with 6 months of app use?
Predictors of improvement with 12 months of app use?
Although we know from previous analyses that paid app users improved their performance more than free users, we wanted to know if the free and paid versions of the app showed the same trends for which golfers improved their games with app use. The trends for who improved with the Hole19 app remained similar across free and paid versions, and a six- and twelve-month time frame.
The more golfers played, the more they improved; that old practice-makes-perfect thing.
Golfers who started using the app with the higher handicaps improve more; there is more room for improvement.
Men using the app improved more than women.
Golfers in the UK were more likely to improve than those based in the US; this trend existed for both the paid and free version of the app, and over a six- and twelve-month time frame. This is a headscratcher. Especially when American users of the paid app play significantly more rounds per month than those in the UK.
Younger golfers are more likely to improve their performance than older golfers. We can only hypothesize about why; younger golfers may be more technologically savvy and use the app to its potential.
Conclusion…
Knowing who buys and benefits from technology is a marketer’s dream. With data, hunches can be supported, or challenged.
Streamline your marketing budget: Knowing the demographic of who buys your product saves marketing dollars.
Know your selling points: Being able to say that golfers improve more when they upgrade to the app’s paid version is valuable.
Incongruence. Recognize that who most benefits from your product may be incongruent with who buys it. That’s okay!
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