Navigating through uncharted territory
The Indian Premier League (IPL) auction was just around the corner, the annual holiday season was fast approaching and the burgeoning Fanalytics team at Sportz Interactive was faced with a challenge like never before - figuring out a way to engage fans of a completely new sport as compared to their usual repertoire. A highly engaging Predictor game was about to Go Live on the website of an International Federation and meticulous plans to drive awareness about it among the fanbase were being chalked out. The game went Live and the Fan Acquisition marathon began.
Solving the Fan Acquisition puzzle
The fan profile for this particular sport was markedly different from the usual distribution seen otherwise, with a disproportionately higher contribution from the female audience and the 45+ age bracket. In addition to that, these fans had never quite experienced such a Game earlier unlike in other sports like football or cricket with significant penetration of fantasy operators. Apart from driving awareness through Email Newsletters and through the placement of easily visible banners on the website landing page, running of targeted Paid Media campaigns over Social platforms was a key part of the Fan Acquisition strategy.
Sportz Interactive helped the federation to arrive at the right segments of potential fans to target and for the design of creative assets across all the channels. While thousands of fans were being redirected to the Website by virtue of Click-Throughs on the Paid Media campaigns, the number of fans actually submitting their responses was still observed to be quite low. This trend raised alarm bells among the Consultants at Sportz Interactive & it was then uncovered that there was a significant drop-off among the fans when asked to register on the platform to start playing the Predictor game. In the original user journey, the visiting fans were redirected to the Registration flow immediately upon clicking on the Play Now button, which probably had led to the dropoff. The team thus realised that they needed to solve a Conversion problem and not an Awareness problem.
Registration Flow - A critical component of Fan Acquisition
User flows form a key component of the Engagement strategy for Owned Digital Assets like Websites and thus the solution was quite apparent - rewiring of the fan registration flow. A direct signup flow had worked very well in other versions of the game for football and cricket teams that were worked upon by the Consultants at Sportz Interactive. But in this case, giving the fans a taste of the gameplay was critical to ensure final conversion by encouraging tryouts and building trust with the platform.
As advised by the Fanalytics Strategy unit, the Game development team modified the Fan Registration flow such that fans were now able to go through all the questions of the Predictor game seamlessly and the ‘Login’ nudge was introduced only at the end. This ensured that the fans who showed interest in the game were able to engage with it and encouraged them to Register with their predictions locked.
Measurement of impact
The modification in the flow went Live on 19th Dec 2024 and the resulting impact was visible immediately thereafter, as can be seen in the trends below.
- A mere 16% increase in the Paid Ads Spend per day (aimed at maximising the impact of the flow change) resulted in a 68% corresponding increase in Daily Registrations
- From a campaign efficiency perspective, the average Fan Acquisition Cost reduced by 23% as compared to the previous period
SI’s Fanalytics Strategy practice aims to supercharge fan acquisition & commercialisation for all sports organisations, using best practices in First Party Data Strategy and Product Design.
- contributed by Aaditya Ranade (Manager, CEO's Office)