We analyze the presence of bookmakers on the Internet
Russian betting shops online
Most of the traffic to the websites of bookmakers that are members of the VTB League falls on direct visits, followed by search traffic. Social networks and email marketing are clearly not a priority for bookmakers: traffic from them is almost zero.
According to social networks, only Lokomotiv-Kuban, Zenit and Nizhny Novgorod stand out. We also considered the volume of traffic: CSKA – 303 thousand visits, Lokomotiv Kuban – 115 thousand, Khimki – 84 thousand, Zenit – 71 thousand, Unix – 51 thousand.
Other clubs have these indicators very small: SimilarWeb cannot analyze incoming traffic.
Number of requests in Yandex, thousand
The number of requests in Yandex per month and the number of subscribers of basketball clubs in social networks are comparable.
By the number of requests in Yandex first places occupied by: Zenith, Khimki, CSKA and Nizhny Novgorod.
These same clubs have the highest rates in social networks. CSKA and Zenit have the most subscribers, followed by Nizhny Novgorod, Lokomotiv-Kuban and Unix.
two clubs absolutely not on some platforms: CSKA is not on Facebook, and VEF is on VKontakte.
PBC CSKA
PBC UNICS
PBK LOKOMOTIV-KUBAN
BC ZENIT
BC AVTODOR
BC Khimki
BC PARMA
BC VEF
BC Nizhny Novgorod
Active audience
We will consider active subscribers who over the past 30 days have put at least 1 like / wrote at least 1 comment / made at least 1 repost. The nine football clubs under consideration have a percentage of active audience that does not exceed 3. At the same time, most of the active subscribers are people from 18 to 35 years old.
Interestingly, most of the active audience is underage users. We calculated the ratio of the active audience to the general one, and this is what happened. Interestingly, on average, the active audience of betting shops is higher than that of FC. This may be due to the lower prevalence of basketball in networks, so that only interested users subscribe to their pages.
Engagement Rate per post
Recently we prepared similar material about football clubs. Interestingly, within the framework of sports marketing, digital is developed exclusively within the football and hockey industries.
Basketball clubs are still in their infancy. Content formats for them are defined, but they are mastered rather according to the scheme of repetition – after football. Another question is what original content strategies can be developed for basketball clubs?
Basketball clubs use standard content formats:
– information about matches, players, statistics;
– photo reports, mini-competitions and video inserts from past matches.
It is interesting to look at the dependence of the occupancy of BC stadiums on popularity in the network.
According to Wordstat statistics, Parma and Lokomotiv-Kuban are below Zenit, but this does not prevent them from having occupancy statistics above 58%.
The top betting shops after Zenit are Khimki, CSKA and Nizhny Novgorod. Of these, only Khimki justifies its position with 63%, while for CSKA and Nizhny Novgorod this percentage does not exceed 16.
*statistics taken from sports.ru for the 2016/2017 season
Problems of Russian betting shops
It's kind of a tradition within the sports industry to lighten up the main site and implement ticketing or an online store on subdomains. This gives a lot of confusion with conversion and traffic tracking.
So, when you go from the main site to the subdomain for buying tickets, the utm-tag is reset. This does not mean that such a scheme cannot be implemented, but the site developers, together with the ticket system developers, must implement a system in which utm tags are not reset, but are transferred from the main page to the subdomain page.
Basketball as an industry, and basketball clubs in particular, has tremendous growth potential in terms of ticket sales. Basketball historically
sport number three after football and hockey in Russia, and the indicators of marketing efforts and the result from them, respectively, are proportional to the arena occupancy.
However, basketball, like hockey, has a big trump card that is extremely important for Russian realities – a warm and comfortable room where you can easily come in bad weather with a child, which gives a strong advantage for this type of leisure.
A clear plus is the overall strong game of the teams and the presence of top European teams in the country. We think that in the near future the basketball segment will have a good development trajectory in terms of attendance, with, of course, professional actions from the management teams, as well as the promotion of the league.
