Bleacher Report is the leading digital destination for team-specific sports content and real-time event coverage. Sports fans around the world keep up to date with the latest news at home, via bleacherreport.com, and on the go with the Bleacher Report mobile app, Team Stream™.
For digital media companies, the audience is everything
Bleacher Report’s appeal to advertisers is the size of its O&O audience and its social reach. When Bleacher Report noticed changes in user engagement and retention, Ross Schwaber, director of product management, was tasked with delivering a new set of analytics tools to help the product team figure out how best to convert, engage, and retain users.
Understanding user behavior wasn’t simple for Ross and the team. The team wanted to build a system to provide industry-leading visibility into critical metrics around user behavior or how well particular pieces of content were driving new users to the site; and with a small data engineering team, wanted to be able to move faster.
Reducing time to insights by 95%
When it came to evaluating different analytics solutions, Ross and his team wanted something that was flexible, simple, and could get them the insights they needed quickly, which is why they chose Scuba Analytics.
With Scuba in place, Bleacher Report was able to retire several niche data analytics tools and reduce time to insights from months to minutes. Bleacher Report’s business units then use these insights to plan and prioritize future content for their site.
Building a data-informed culture
Another reason Bleacher Report chose Scuba was how easy it was to put data in the hands of the other departments to make data-informed decisions about content production. Data has been a part of Bleacher Report since its founding, and they are always looking for ways to improve. Says Ross: “The thing that most excites me about Scuba is putting data in the hands of more people. With Scuba, we can share dashboards with our content, business development, sales, and marketing teams quickly and easily so they can get the insights they want when they want them. Then Scuba lets them dig deeper. It’s data on steroids.”
Bleacher Report created Scuba accounts for users across several of the company’s departments. Here are just a few of their uses:
| Department | Uses |
| Product | Increasing user conversion by identifying difficult steps in the onboarding process; using user behavior data to influence major app and web redesigns to create a more engaging user experience |
| Marketing | Building out user personas to understand how different personas are affected by different content and streams |
| Content | Planning and prioritizing new content based on user engagement |
| Business Development | Tracking referrals to external sites to create and strengthen partnerships with advertisers |
Bleacher Report’s teams have created multiple dashboards such as “Top 10 pieces of content this past week” and “Top video plays by type and team,” to provide insights into what was attracting and engaging users most.
“We’re just getting started.”
While streamlining processes, reducing time to insight, and fostering better collaboration between business units have been a great start, Ross is already identifying new ways Bleacher Report can drive growth, and save money and time. One example is that Ross and his team are using Scuba to make data-informed design decisions to optimize user conversation and engagement to better prepare for a major up-and-coming platform release.
“We’re just getting started with different ways we can use Scuba here at Bleacher Report,” Ross said.
