Britain’s sporting summer continues to lift engagement with our sport content, writes Senior Agency Sales Partner James Phillips
Britain’s sporting summer - which I focused on with an Ozone blog post earlier this month - is now in full swing following England’s huge victory over Germany in the last 16 of Euro 2020.
With Ozone’s massive reach of millions of sport fans nationwide, we have decided to take another look at the performance of our sport category - and that of our football, tennis, rugby and Olympics content within it - to follow the national reaction as Britain’s sporting summer continues to unfold.
First, looking at the overall performance of the sport category, we saw a significant spike in engagement when Euro 2020 began on Friday 11th June. In that week and up to midnight on Sunday 13th of June, the tournament’s first weekend increased the overall sport category’s weekly page views and unique users by +15% and +23% respectively.
While the sport category’s engagement spike appears with the initial buzz of the start of the Euros, when focusing on football content specifically we see that average weekly page views and unique users in the last four weeks are still +18% and +25% higher than the prior four-week period. It’s worth noting that in the four weeks before the Euros kicked off, engagement with our football content was already high due to the FA Cup final, the conclusion of the English Premier League and the Europa and Champions League finals, both of which featured English clubs.
Looking at the daily performance of our football content from the day before Euro 2020 kicked off and upto midnight on Tuesday 29th June when the two final Euro 2020 last 16 matches took place, we see engagement spiking around key matches featuring the home nations. Notably, with England progressing to the quarter finals thanks to their victory over Germany, page views and unique users both grew by +30% compared to the prior day, with similar or higher rates of growth expected depending on how far England progress.
Elsewhere, our rugby and Olympics content has experienced a similar boost in engagement with key events taking place. Last week’s British and Irish Lions warm up match against Japan grew rugby page views and unique users by +44% and +46% respectively week on week.
And news of the athletes selected to represent Team GB at the Tokyo games - including Sir Andy Murray, but sadly not Sir Mo Farah - weekly Olympics page views and unique users increased by +111% and +104% respectively.
We expect to see a similar spike in tennis engagement across the Wimbledon Championship, which we’ll take a look at soon.
