In our last blog, we talked about why you need to be collecting marketing data for your eSports brand.
Now you know why you need to be collecting data, you are probably wondering what data you need to collect.
There are so many marketing data points available to eSports brands these days. With millions of users playing and watching eSports, there are massive amounts of data that your brand has access to. It is a waste of time and resources to monitor them all. Instead, you need to collect and analyse the ones most important to your brand.
In this blog, we will cover the essential marketing metrics that your eSports brand should be monitoring and how that data is collected.
In the eSports industry, there are two main sources of raw data. The players themselves and the viewers watching the games.
Player data such as game statistics and player statistics can be downloaded directly from the game server via APIs.
Viewer data, however, is what marketers will want to focus on. These are things such as viewership and market patterns. This data is often collected by software development kits (SDKs) or through market research techniques such as surveys to your customer base.
Now you know where to go to find your data, let's look at what metrics you should be monitoring.
Your retention rate is the percentage of players that return to your game during a specific period of time after they have installed it. This period of time is typically measured at 1, 3, 7, 14, and 30 days.
Your retention rate is a key indicator of how engaged your eSports audience is. A high retention rate indicates that your game and tournaments provide value to users. They enjoy your eSports and this causes repeat usage of your game.
Retention will also tell you about the quality of your audience. If you have a low retention rate then you have a low-quality audience. You may then want to put more of your marketing budget into viewer acquisition and take more time to understand what your audience wants to see in your eSports tournaments.
AMA or Average Minute Audience is the average number of viewers watching your eSports event. This is calculated per minute during a specified period of time over the duration of the event or stream.
AMA is an important metric for your eSports brand because it can be used to calculate the popularity of your esports content.
There are two ways that you can calculate AMA.
1. Divide the total hours of video watched by the video duration.
2. Work out the average number of viewers per minute of the video.
AMA is a popular metric with eSports brands because it is comparable to the average number of viewers, which is a commonly used metric for TV and traditional sports.
Peak Concurrent Users is the highest number of viewers during a stream/broadcast/tournament.
PCU is a slightly more exciting version of AMA and is a must-measure metric for any big eSports events.
PCU can be influenced by many factors such as time zone. If your event has a global audience it is hard to schedule a time at which all of your audience will be able to attend.
This metric is great for understanding and comparing the popularity of events held in the same region or time zone. You can quickly establish which events are more popular and put more of your marketing resources into further growing that event.
Data is essential to the growth of any eSports brand. By understanding and collecting user engagement metrics you can better understand your audience. Through analysing the data that we have mentioned above you will be able to gain audience insights into what is performing well within your eSports event and build stronger relationships with your audience by giving them more of what they want.
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