Identifying your VIP players early, in 5 steps

Identifying your VIP players early, in 5 steps

A small fraction of players generate most NGR. Spotting them inside two weeks lets you protect the cohort that actually pays.

▸ Step 1 — Rank players by cumulative deposit at day 14. The top decile typically drives the majority of eventual NGR.
— Step 2 — Flag the early VIP signal: 3+ deposits in the first week, or a single deposit above 5x the cohort median.
— Step 3 — Track their churn separately. VIP churn is more expensive and often more sudden than mass-player churn.
— Step 4 — Don't dilute VIP cohorts with reactivation offers built for low-value players — wrong incentive, wasted margin.
— Step 5 — Feed the VIP signal back to source-level reporting: which traffic source actually produces whales, not just FTDs.

The lesson: two sources with identical FTD counts can differ 3x in VIP yield. FTD count alone is the wrong scorecard.

Benchmark of the day: across ~15 tracked cohorts, the top 10% of players by day-14 deposit produced 55-70% of 6-month NGR.