[Exclusive] How Sports Events Impact iGaming & Push Traffic
Here we are at the most festive time of the year: major holidays, otherworldly sales, and key sporting events.
Let’s talk about sports, shall we?
This season, the Europa League and the Champions League have drastically changed their formats and, subsequently, their match schedules. This has resulted in many, many more games being played more often – while the players do not seem to like it, the fans definitely do, as they get to enjoy sports much more frequently.
You can evidently see the abundance of games in our sports events calendar.
And that’s the pattern: the more fans watch, the more money advertisers are prepared to dish out to capture the attention of what is undoubtedly a huge audience.
Obviously, we wanted to check this out and understand how sports events can affect Push traffic – that’s where we were seeing the biggest spikes even before our research.
Konstantinos Kafkalias, our Account Strategist Team Leader, came to our aid and explained everything that’s going on with Push traffic, iGaming, and sports in general.
Why is Push Traffic Growing?
“We saw a spike in push traffic from about the beginning of June, and then it just kept going up. I think the main drivers were the Euro 2024, Copa America, and the Premier League,” says Konstantinos.
Aside from sports, another factor behind Push growth has been the introduction of new features that have significantly simplified the experience for iGaming media buyers and brands.
“First and foremost, of course, it’s the auto creatives because they’re already tested and working options; they also save time and are pre-approved by our policy, which means there are no occasions when your campaign will be banned due to creatives,” continues Konstantinos.
In other words, here are the core reasons for such serious growth:
- The change in Europa League and Champions League fixtures
- Euro 2024 and Copa America tournaments
- The start of the Europa League, Brazilian Serie A, and Premier League seasons
- New features that improved the advertiser experience – auto-creatives
Push Traffic Performance
Let’s see the performance of Push traffic over the last months (June 1 – Oct 22, 2024):
As you can see, the number of impressions in iGaming push traffic has been growing steadily through the summer, reaching a peak in July, although we still expect to see the peak in late fall/winter; we will come back to that shortly.
Sports really do make a difference, not only in terms of traffic volume but also in terms of quality.
iGaming x Push CTRs and CRs
Speaking of quality. The performance of your sports campaigns depends on the angles you choose and the tools you use. Especially if you innovate and test new targeting and campaign setup options, you tend to get better quality audiences.
Konstantinos has collected the statistics of regular push iGaming campaigns and compared them to campaigns using auto creatives.
Period: June 1 – Oct 22, 2024
| CTR (%) | Peak CTR during games (%) | |
| Push (all iGaming) | 0.91 | 1.72 |
| Push Auto Creatives | 2.63 | 5.92 |
“At first, I was surprised to see these numbers, but then we discussed them internally and found out that most of the features, while still new, lead to an increase in CTR. Another aspect is that these auto creatives are hand-picked by our optimization team, so we know these creatives are indeed top performers. Combined with a serious traffic spike during the games, it resulted in a tremendous performance,” explains Konstantinos.
While click-through rate is an important metric, we all want to see conversions. Let’s see what happened to CR over the same time period.
| CR (%) | Peak CR during games (%) | |
| Push (all iGaming) | 1.4 | 2.65 |
| Push Auto Creatives | 1.82 | 4.1 |
We can notice the same dynamics as with CTR; the conversion rate tends to go higher during the big sporting events.
Note that even though auto creatives work really well, you should always combine strategies and make creatives varied, as burnout happens faster. Auto creatives will give you a very good stable result, but a great (even stellar) result – you have to look for that yourself and make your own creatives.
Konstantinos: “A lot of my clients are scaling with push now because it’s a really hot period. They are spending more on push campaigns and seeing a rise in overall engagement.”
Top Performing GEOs for iGaming Push Traffic
Now, it is time to see which GEOs are the biggest winners in terms of iGaming Push traffic:
June 1 – Oct 22, 2024
| GEO | Impressions | Average CTR (%) |
| Brazil | 369260358 | 1.25 |
| South Africa | 890174138 | 0.88 |
| Nigeria | 217635684 | 1.15 |
| Ghana | 133869234 | 0.95 |
| Australia | 14614267 | 0.61 |
| Zambia | 255368642 | 0.5 |
| Angola | 65837536 | 0.61 |
| USA | 83929496 | 0.42 |
Interestingly, even though we had Euro 2024 and Copa America this summer, the countries that have grown the most are predominantly outside Europe and LATAM.
This leads to the curious conclusion that major European tournaments are watched globally and can be translated into real conversions in Africa and the Asia Pacific.
What Creatives Did Our Advertisers Use?
In addition to brand creatives, our advertisers actively used two other types of banners:
- Auto Creatives
- Tailor-made creatives for each game (VIP service for our Gold & Platinum customers) – talk to your personal manager to make a request.
Let’s see what benefits each option has.
Auto Creatives
- Pre-approved by policy. This is very important in iGaming as there’s a lot of room for error in this very restricted vertical.
- Multiple languages: Automatically selected based on browser language – no need to re-size in different languages.
- Proven performance. With years of experience, we know what kind of creatives are most likely to convert, so you get everything ready to go – no guesswork.
- Saves your time. We take care of creatives so you can focus on campaign optimization.
Tailor-Made Creatives
- Creatives for specific games. We can provide creatives for specific events because mentioning the dates and games leads to higher conversions.
- Policy-friendly creatives. We know what our moderators don’t like 🙂
*This exclusive service is available upon request to your personal manager.
Regardless of the type of creatives, we have noticed certain patterns – and we have grouped these creatives by type:
*These are not actual images used by our advertisers. However, they are very similar.
- Offering bonuses
- Showing which teams are playing
- Attractive fans
Is it groundbreaking? No.
People tend to click on simple and clear messages without fancy wording and hard-to-understand images with too much detail.
To Sum Up
Push CTRs & CRs are known to surge during sporting events. And several tools like auto creatives and dedicated services offered by Propeller, make it super easy to launch campaigns during this peak season.
As Konstantinos says: “The world is in awe” – we have entered the golden season of sports with a lot of too-hot-to-handle events.
Follow the schedule of the most watched sports events and launch your push campaigns with literally little effort.
What are you waiting for?
