PAC-12: EVENT TEMPLATES

Challenge

Deciding what to add to event pages when, to maximize viewership and fan engagement. The key was identifying the best content for before, during, after events.

Solution

We discovered two things. Fans hitting event pages near the start time were looking for how to watch. Fans most often set alerts at the team level.

Outcome

As we added more useful content and tools, the engagement level and viewership on event pages continued to increase as well.

What content and tools mattered to fans, when?

Part of what we had to determine was what content and features should we prioritize in what order on the Event Templates based on whether it was before the game, during, or after.

E.g. Knowing how to watch the game was most important before and during but not after the event. Highlights and analysis were important during and after, etc. We worked with the content team and the product team to map those priorities out by stage and by sport.

Additional priorities

If an event was being televised on Pac-12 Networks the traffic to that event page peaked from 5 minutes before the start to 20 minutes after the event started We discovered much of that came from people trying to find out how to watch the game. And tv viewership, whether through a tv set or app, was our most important business metric.

So we created a flow to help people determine if they could watch Pac-12 Networks and have a route to get Pac-12 Networks immediately See: Pac-12 How to Watch.

We also prioritized setting alerts for teams or games. Many users didn't want alerts for higher level categories such as for all football games or all teams for a given school. But the event and team levels were where fans signed up for alerts most often.

Maximizing the value of "Olympic" sports

Many people assume that because college football and men's basketball tend to have the highest general viewership that those event pages would have the highest traffic.

But that's ignoring who else has content related to those events. ESPN and many other sports sites have college football scores, stats, and highlights. Pac-12 fans have many options for Oregon football info.

That's not as true for the so-called Olympic sports like women's gymnastics, softball, wrestling, volleyball. Because there is less content out there -- and Pac-12 has a disproportionately large amount of it for our teams -- these events drew more traffic and engagement than some football games. This was also true on social media.

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