2.6M Actions From 89k Entrants at ESL One Cologne

Overview

In July 2016, ESL ran a Gleam giveaway during ESL One Cologne, their $1M prize pool Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament.

16 teams played at the LANXESS Arena.

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Introduction to ESL

ESL runs eSports tournaments around the world for games including CS:GO, Dota 2, League of Legends and StarCraft.

ESL was founded in 2000.

ESL gave Gleam three reasons for running giveaways at their events:

• Give the audience a fun and rewarding way to interact with our sponsors & partners.

• Provide value to sponsors by growing their social accounts.

• Allow ESL to convert viewing audience into social audience and increase the engagement around our events.

ESL One Cologne 2016

ESL’s first goal for a campaign is ticket sales, so the early ones run in the months before an event and during the qualifiers.

During the event, ESL ran a raffle with gear from six sponsors and promoted it as an ad on the stream.

The campaign is promoted mainly during the show itself. The majority of the promotion happens during commercial breaks where a screen promoting the giveaway is displayed in the pause. It is usually part of a rotation of other graphics with e.g. tournament information and brackets.

Johannes Schiefer from ESL

The first few seconds of this replay show the raffle ad:

42 Ways to Enter

ESL’s Cologne campaign had 42 Actions.

ESL’s 89,157 Entrants completed 2,626,650 Actions, 29.5 each.

The first 3 Actions on the widget link to ESL One New York, IEM Oakland and the ESL Shop. ESL used the Cologne audience to promote their next two events.

From all the tools on the market that we’ve looked at, Gleam has the widest tool kit of gates and features, the best interface and overall the best value for money proposition. Due to the high amount of potential participants we also need a provider with good enough servers to handle thousands of requests a minute, and Gleam has been the one to do that best.

Johannes Schiefer from ESL

89,157 Entrants From 189,339 Impressions

The campaign ran for about 7 days. The report shows Actions from 5 to 11 July 2016.

• Conversion Rate: 47.1% of the 189,339 people who saw the widget entered.

• Total Actions: 2,626,650. The busiest day, 5 July, logged about 580,000.

• Actions per Entrant: 29.5

• Actions per Impression: 13.9

Key Growth Takeaways

What can other eSports organisers take from ESL’s Cologne giveaway?

Have Dedicated Landing Pages

If you’re running a campaign at an event you absolutely must have a memorable URL for attendees to easily type into their devices or remember.

ESL uses the same consistent URL: https://eslone.com/raffle

That URL redirected visitors to the Gleam-hosted landing page.

Prizes From 6 Sponsors

ESL brought their core sponsors into the giveaway. The prize pool came from:

• NVIDIA GeForce

• ASUS ROG

• Logitech G

• HyperX

• NEEDforSEAT

• paysafecard

The banner lists 44 prizes, including a GTX 1080, a ROG Strix GTX 1080, two NEEDforSEAT chairs and 20 paysafecard vouchers worth 25 euros each.

Five of the six sponsors got four Actions each on the widget (a Twitter follow, a Facebook visit, an Instagram visit and a YouTube subscribe). NEEDforSEAT got three, with no Instagram Action.

In the case of Cologne, we were interested in a CS:GO interested audience and not just in people who want to win amazing hardware (pretty much anyone). Hence we restrict our advertisement of the giveaway to the show itself to better target that exact audience. As the shows have a lot of concurrent audience, it can happen that 400k-800k people are watching when a raffle is displayed. Even a small percentage of conversion will result in huge participation.

Johannes Schiefer from ESL

400k to 800k Watching the Stream

Johannes Schiefer puts the stream audience at 400k to 800k when a raffle slide is on screen.

I think it’s always extremely important that when you are making a giveaway you know beforehand what you are trying to achieve with it, who your target audience is and how you are looking to reach them. It’s only then that you can start thinking of mechanics or innovative ways to reach people.

Johannes Schiefer from ESL

The giveaway gave those viewers 42 Actions across Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Snapchat, Twitch, Steam, email and ESL’s own pages.

Cross-Promote Your Next Event

If you run several events a year, use the audience at this one to sell tickets for the next.

ESL places these actions at the top of every campaign:

The third Action sends Entrants to the ESL Shop, where they can order team and ESL gear for delivery, which helps anyone watching from home.

What a Giveaway Adds for Sponsors

When you think about how Sponsors typically get exposure at an event it can usually be:

• Logos on Screens or on Stream.

• Advertising between games or matches.

• Booths or Segments in the program to promote their products or services.

• Showbags or merchandise being given out at the event.

• Showmatches or games named after them.

A giveaway adds things those placements can’t:

• Follow and visit Actions on each sponsor’s own channels

• A count of Actions per sponsor to set against the sponsorship fee

Run Your Own eSports Giveaway

Do you want to engage with your audience and incentivise powerful actions for your eSports event?

Use our template below as a starting point: