Victorian greyhound racing has experienced significant wagering growth over the past 18 months, attracting a new and regular audience to the sport. Through this audience growth, national turnover on Victorian greyhound racing in FY21 grew by 29% to reach a record $3.35bn. That same growth trend is continuing into FY22.

The increase in volume of unique customers now regularly wagering on Victorian greyhounds, has come predominantly from the younger 18-35 segment. As such, GRV needs to increase efforts to retain and nurture the 18-34 segment and deepen their engagement with the sport of greyhound racing, which includes investment in digital enhancements.

GRV has identified a suite of digital initiatives aimed at building and promoting unique, contemporary digital products and content to engage the younger, digital savvy wagering customer more deeply with the sport whilst also delivering a high-quality digital user experience to better meet their needs to retain and cultivate the growing customer base.?

These initiatives include the repositioning and redevelopment of the GRV website as the front-door to greyhound racing in Victoria.

About the GRV Website

GRV’s website www.grv.org.au is a WordPress based site and has been operating with the current visual design and information architecture with only minor design and content architecture changes since 2005. As content has been added to the site (including 6,880 of indexed pages and a large library of linked documents), the information architecture and navigation have become increasingly complicated and difficult for users to navigate, resulting in declining visitation and engagement with key users.

There are a number of opportunities that have been identified to engage with our core and growth audiences. These include:

• migrating the relevant audiences from Fasttrack (fasttrack.grv.org.au - our legacy racing database and form guide portal) to the GRV website and Watchdog (www.watchdog.org.au - our fan-focussed racing website and app) to provide a more contemporary and engaging digital experience;
• more effectively highlighting racing content and information throughout the site to bring racing to the fore and create a more dynamic experience;
• making it easier to discover key information and content and provide recommendations on best next steps in the journey;
• creating targeted experiences for key audiences with the ability to segment journeys for greater relevance to the customer.

Problems to solve

The following user problems need to be solved to enhance engagement, visitation, and growth of the key audiences on the GRV website.

1. Navigation: the navigation and structure are complicated and create a frustrating experience for visitors to the site
2. Untargeted experience: the site is trying to serve multiple audience segments, but none is being served as well as they could be
3. Homepage is unfocused: the homepage is not currently facilitating the key jobs to be done and is missing an opportunity to drive awareness of key racing content and information
4. Key racing information not prominent: the current experience is not integrated with the Watchdog form guide app and consequently key racing information (e.g. next race to jump etc) is not available or prominent enough on the site to serve the key growth audience.
5. Inconsistent design: the current design templates are complicated and limited when building new pages which creates an inconsistent and fragmented experience for the audience
6. Poor on-site search experience: content search is hard to find and is sub-optimal, creating difficulty discovering news and relevant information
7. SEO for organic growth: legacy SEO and meta-descriptions are appearing in Google search, driving audience to older parts of website and restricting organic growth 

• Consequently, a complete redesign and restructure of the site is required.