How to target sports traffic

Introducing: our new #TipsbyTarmo column that will provide useful industry insights to improve your performance. To start off, the first article will focus on how to target sports traffic. Learn how to create the best performing campaigns or what the most efficient setup is for monetizing sports traffic.

Tarmo Tammel is our Performance Advertising Expert and has been working at Adcash for 7 years. During this long period, he’s worn many different hats and thus has a large pool of knowledge to share. Having the experience from both sides, Tarmo’s tips are relevant and useful to advertisers and publishers both. His knowledge of the inner workings of the Adcash platform can help to improve your performance significantly.

So, enough of the intro, let’s get down to business. Sports events offer huge benefits for advertisers and publishers. That being said, it only brings great results when you know how to target sports traffic. To make things clear as day, Tarmo has prepared a checklist for you.

 

How can advertisers make use of global sports events?

There are various ways to target Adcash’s high volumes of quality sports traffic and set your ROI on fire. We have 300+ exclusive sport supply sources and the average conversion rate on sports supply is 2,38%, including all campaigns and ad formats that ran on this supply. So, how to target sports traffic?

Leading up to and during the major sports events, we recommend running your sports-related campaigns across the board without any specific targeting. That’ll guarantee maximum exposure for your campaigns. However, since we do have a large sports supply, there are a few different ways you can target only such traffic. Be creative with your landing pages and keep the content sports-related. Including bonuses or welcome offers can also create excellent results.

Multiple campaigns. In order to access sports traffic in the most accurate way, we recommend setting up additional campaigns. Create a campaign for solely Adcash supply (as the supply source). Make sure that “allow traffic from new supply sources” is disabled so new external SSP sources will not be added. When setting up your cappings (on the budget page), ensure that “spread budget throughout the day” is not set, otherwise, you’ll miss out on a traffic peak during the live sporting events. 

Whitelist only the following categories:

Create another campaign to target external supply sources (SSPs), select “all” and untick Adcash. Then you’ll be getting only the indirect traffic from Adcash’s external partners. Again, whitelist the previously mentioned sports-related categories and make sure that “spread budget throughout the day” is not set. 

Campaign setup tips. Another way how to target sports traffic is to use User Interest Targeting by selecting only the sports category. Then your ads will be targeted at users who have shown interest in sports-related websites. Select all supply sources when using this targeting method and remember to use the spread option on cappings, to avoid spreading your budget too quickly. If you wish to target sports sites only, target sport as a site category.

Additional tips 

All our ad formats bring great results, so choose the one that fits with your offer. Adcash has all the top ad formats like Native ads, Pop-Under, Push Notifications, Banners ads and Interstitial. That being said, the highest volumes of targeted sports traffic are being delivered via our Pop-Under format. 

A high budget goes a long way, making sure that your campaign gets the expected results. In terms of frequency capping, you can rely on our defaults. Use weekly distribution (in the budget step) for your campaigns. That way you can set up your campaign to run only during relevant sporting events. In case you’re able to use pixel tracking, definitely go for the CPA Target bidding type to get the best results. If you wish to maximize volumes from sources that you’ve already identified then create a whitelist and choose CPM bidding type.

For a Sportsbook campaign, if you can use pixel tracking and CPA Target, we recommend tracking 2 events:

• Paid events on sign up
• Informative event on deposit

This will give high-value data to the Adcash ad server about best-performing segments and the platform can deliver supply according to that. By the way, we deliver about 5000 deposits a month with higher peaks on popular sporting event days among all our sportsbook and gambling campaigns. By now, almost all of your questions about how to target sports traffic should have answers. 

 

Make the most of your monetization with sports events

The hottest sports events can help you boost your earnings with the right strategy. There are lots of perks to using sports campaigns on your site. By focusing on sports events, publishers will receive more targeted high-quality campaigns, higher payouts and exclusive offers related to your site’s content. For example, if you have NBA mentioned on your website’s URL slug or have NBA related content on your domain then we’ll send you NBA related ads. Same with NFL, Soccer, F1 etc.

Keywords. Use specific sports-related keywords in your content and page URL to target top offers and receive better results. Plus, let’s not forget the SEO benefits this will bring, making your website more visible.

Exclusive partnership. To fully benefit from our top offers you should work with us exclusively. We can then be more flexible with premium payment conditions and rates. The exclusivity changes the earnings quite drastically, as you can see on the photo below. It’s also highly beneficial for the user experience and loyalty to have fewer and more strategic ads. That way you won’t be bombarding your users with many different ads at the same time.

 

Integrate your tags correctly. Oftentimes discrepancies appear due to two Pop ads being triggered at the same time which will be then blocked by Google Chrome. Make sure that you integrate your tags correctly – they should always be positioned in the body section of the page. 

 

The right setup. The setups can be very different from site to site. We recommend getting in touch with our experienced Publisher Managers or Support team. They’ll help you in identifying what works best for your website.

 

Nail your digital advertising strategy

Now that we’ve given you all the tips we can think of, make use of the sports events and rock your advertising or monetization game! You should know exactly how to target sports traffic. On the other hand, if you still haven’t signed up, then right now is the perfect time to do so. We’ve basically done all the thinking for you, just open our platform, make some clicks and you’ll be up and running in no time! Ace it! 👊