Champions League Final 2023: How to Prepare Your Website For the Event?

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The UEFA Champions League Final is getting close! June 10 is the biggest date for soccer fans this year. Attracting more than 400 million live viewers annually, this game can’t be but a tremendous traffic boost…for everyone, not just sports publishers!

Yes, you can get your piece of the pie even if you run an anime website or, say, a food blog. This happens because advertisers are going to spend HUGE budgets on their Champions League Final iGaming campaigns — and this will cover most of the Internet, with all sorts of websites and apps.

So, you still have time to get prepared for the unprecedented generosity of advertisers! 

Don’t know how to do it? No worries. We will show you what Monetag publishers did last year and what they got — so are you ready for action? 

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Learning from the Past: Champion League 2022 Case Studies

Let’s start with the proof that the UEFA Champions League Final is worth your attention. We took our publishers’ websites, sorted them by type, and compared their stats for May 28, 2022 (it was the last year’s Final). 

Here are our top earners by category:

Website Category	Sports Site	Content Hosting Site	Anime Site	News Site
Earnings on May 28	$17 916.70	$30 074.81	$5 292.50	$10 581.91
Comparison with May 27	+$13 917.77	+$700.05	+$220.38	+$5 119.05

With sports ahead of the game, we clearly see that others were enjoying traffic spikes and earnings boosts as well. This result was mainly gained thanks to Popunder ads — but we have more takeaways from these inspiring numbers.

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Sports Websites

If people can watch game highlights on your site, you are the luckiest. Your results on June 10 will be more than impressive, even without a particular strategy. Just make sure your website won’t lag when thousands of users switch the ‘Play’ button!

Still, video content is not so obligatory! Any sports site can gain thousands of views and generate nice income during the Champions League Final if you do some homework. 

Here are the last year’s stats for one of our sports publishers (The day before the Champions League Final/The Champions League Final day):

Key Takeaways from the case study:

• The traffic spike might be extremely high.
• Although Onclick is usually supposed to be the top format for monetizing sporting events, this publisher won from Interstitials. So, don’t be afraid to test!
• As Onclick still remains a top format for sports publishers, try making the most out of it. Ask customer support or your manager to increase the frequency of Onclick ads.

Suggested Strategy:

• Make sure your website is ready for traffic spikes. This requires some technical preparation: for example, you can use ZIP compression of the files to make your website download quicker and use a Content Delivery Network — a service that also accelerates your site’s performance.

• Create content that will engage. The main intrigue of this Champions League season is if Man United wins or not — and this causes plenty of rumors, predictions, and speculations. Join the discussion: do interviews with experts and ask your users’ opinions. Surveys on sports, quizzes, and polls also work great! By the way, it all makes a perfect match with SmartLink.

• Check your SEO optimization. Does your site have relevant keywords to stay on top of the Google search results? Here are some best ones we found with the help of Google Keyword Planner:

• Consider push notifications as a part of your marketing strategy. This is your chance to be the first to inform users about the game’s start or its main highlights. Make them engaged with something like this:

• Is your website user-friendly? We mean, does it contain tags, convenient search, and a perfectly working video player for watching a game?

• Be interactive! For example, you can add a chat where people can discuss a game in real-time or make their predictions. Another idea is reaction streams like Twitch stars do. And if you don’t have the legal right to broadcast a match, audio/text streaming is still an option, and it’s also on hype.

• Test different formats. You can go with Multitag to show all ad formats — and it won’t be too intrusive or overwhelming thanks to the format’s smart rotation. Alternatively, you can stick to the evergreen mix of Onclick and Interstitials.

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News Websites

News, predictions, quizzes, interviews with sports experts, tips for iGaming fans — the number of content strategies for a news site on the threshold of a big event is immense.

Here is what our news publisher got last year:

Key Takeaways from the case study:

• A combination of Interstitial + Push ads is perfect for news websites.

• Although the CPM rates might not rise too much, the earnings can significantly grow thanks to an impressions boost.

Suggested Strategy:

• Go social. Share your content on social media and motivate users to share it, too.

• Play around with various content types. Although the latest news, including the Champions League schedule and game highlights, usually brings the most impressions, you can also find other keys to extra user engagement. 

For example, this is what BBC.com did for the most avid soccer fans:

• Are you mobile-friendly? In most countries, people read news from their smartphones, not laptops. Here is just one example — but the situation is the same almost everywhere. And, by the way, advertisers tend to target mobile traffic heavily, too — so make sure your content is well-adapted for small screens.

• Experiments with formats are welcome. The top combinations for news platforms are Vignette Banners+Interstitials and Interstitials + Push Notifications. You can also spice it all up with SmartLinks: for example, try adding them to the news titles.

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Non-Sports-Related Websites

Yes, you can have nothing to do with sports but still be caught by the big-budget rain. Look how it happened to Monetag publishers last year:

Key Takeaways from the case study:

• You can get a significant traffic spike and higher CPM rates during big events, even if your site is not related to sports

Suggested Strategy:

• No problem if you stick to ad formats you already use. They will keep working effectively thanks to higher traffic volumes. 
• Change your Popunder settings: show Popunder ads more frequently than usual. It might be about 3-5 Popunders per half an hour.
• Try something new. Your website shows ads with some offers, right? And why don’t you run such offers yourself — in other words, try on the affiliate marketer’s role? For example, you can check out Survey Offers from ZeyDoo — they will definitely work out during the Champions League:

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To Sum Up

We hope you are already in your Monetag account, setting up ad formats, and waiting to enjoy your CPM rates during the Champions League Final!  

Not yet? Well, it’s high time you began.