eSports

eSports.com is  a media platform (one of the leading platforms in Germany?)  that covers everything related to the field of eSports with a lot of content focused on the most popular games. They cover news, events, as well as general entertainment content. As an established reference in the industry, they welcome around half a million monthly visitors. Their team of editors is always striving to provide their readers with the best and most current content and aim to be the one-stop-shop for all eSports related news.

The challenge

Despite the high-quality content and new branding look, their website was still not living up to their KPIs. Our task was to join them in detecting the sources of these issues and solving them. As a website covering several popular games on a regular basis as well as more general news about the eSports and gaming scenes, the challenge was to structure the content and present it in a way that is helpful to the different types of users while still highlighting parts of it to all.

OR    How can you provide different content to different audiences in one platform? How can you make sure that each reader finds what they’re interested in and guide them in a smooth and intuitive way?

The solution

The key point was to understand that the readers were interested in content related their preferred games and certainly weren’t going to spend time searching for it. Finding all the content related to one’s game of choice should be intuitive and straightforward. With this in mind we redesigned the navigation and layout of the Startpage to meet the needs of the readers. By providing distinct sections featuring the highlights of the most popular games on the Startpage, the page was given purpose in guiding the readers towards their interests. Doing so resulted in a significant decrease of both the bounce rate and the exit rate. By acknowledging that the Startpage in this type of website is really a stepping stone, we also integrated and put emphasis on a navigation element so that each reader can be directed to a specific game page easily. That element saw a high increase of clicks, confirming our initial thoughts. The game pages were then redesigned to ensure consistency throughout the website and also to present the contents according to game-related topics for an easier browsing experience. These changes led the bounce rate on those page to also decrease. The articles were also rethought to ensure the best reading experience and provide the editors with special content elements to present the content in the best way for their readers. Along with the introduction of evergreen content and recommendations more tailored to the audience and topic, the articles enjoyed an increase in X and decrease in Y. // The point here is to say that people read more article and read for longer times – can we get some numbers on articles’ performance? Also, would it make sense to talk about the introduction of the tagging system?

The result

With the relaunch, it was clear that the changes had immediate effects on eSports’ KPIs. Readers are no longer overwhelmed or disinterested by unstructured content. Instead, they are now guided to their games of choice and to the content they seek.