Find 50 Football Quiz Case Study | Reflect Digital
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86k visitors through Gamification - The Find 50 Football Quiz Case Study

Gamification is one of the most revolutionary movements in user engagement in recent years. We wanted to apply gamification principles to our content marketing strategy and so the idea of Find50 Football clubs was born!

The Brief

As a digital agency, we are passionate about sport and work with a number of sporting businesses. We wanted to create a piece of content that was fun and engaging, showcasing both our creativity and technical development skills, that would give us exposure to sporting business and demonstrate our ability to engage a global audience. 

It’s easy to fall into routine practices when it comes to aspects of digital marketing such as outreach, link building, social media, lead generation and PR however, these aspects of marketing are at their very best when you create something really special.

Our aim was to show that by using gamification principles we could create one relevant, innovative, shareable piece of content that would be successful across all digital channels and practices. The brief was to show that by creating gamification content, businesses can achieve huge brand exposure, grow an email database of relevant and engaged contacts, supercharge their online visibility and grow their business in the process.

Our Solution

The design team mocked up a ‘say what you see’ image which contained 50 football clubs. Each ‘clue’ represented the name of a football club. To really ramp up the difficulty level, the design team included teams from the Scottish division as well as obscure teams from the top leagues around Europe.

Our original aim was to target football fans in the UK, however, we were certain the content would attract a diverse range of users across several countries due to international appeal of the sport. From our early test players, we discovered that the quiz was also liked by those who do not follow football as in reality, the ‘clues’ also represented towns in the UK and Europe. Due to the nature of the quiz and type of challenge, we could position the game to attract very different audiences, which increased the potential reach of the content.

In terms of outreach and exposure, our target websites were sporting sites; social sites with a sporting angle; local news sites and general quiz-style sites. We knew we would need to get social working hard for us, as it’s the kind of addictive game that users would want to tag their friends in.

Play Game

The Process

Several Months prior to launch

We started to design and develop the quiz several months before the due date, which was the first week of the new premier league season.

2 weeks before the campaign

Our marketing strategy started 2 weeks before launch. We wanted to generate early interest in the quiz and create anticipation ahead of the launch.

To achieve this, we shared teaser graphics with a number of sports journalists and relevant websites, showing them a snippet of the game to help them to visualize the game itself. This helped us to start up a conversation with SPORT Bible who would later feature the quiz on their site. We also created a BuzzFeed teaser quiz, which had great interaction and initial feedback.

We also prepared a landing page with optimised content designed to rank well in search engines. Our strategy was to feature editors and writers for the blogs we’d like to feature, on the page.

1 Week before the campaign

We created a list of contacts to outreach the quiz to generate relevant and high traffic links. We went for quality over quantity when selecting influencers to pitch the quiz to, generating a list of 40 quality contacts including football pundits, editors for leading football websites, quiz websites, fan blogs, football forums and local businesses.

Quiz Launched Week 1

As soon as the game launched we put £150 behind some paid FB ads to help drive initial interest.

We initially publishing the quiz on football forums and Reddit…

Having already been contacted via Twitter and seen our teaser content, the quiz featured on SPORTBible (part of the popular LADBible group), which really enhanced our profile and exposure after sharing the content with their 1.28million Twitter followers and 10million+ Facebook fans.

Week 2

From the SPORTBible success, we quickly noticed that our outreach campaign using Twitter direct messaging was allowing us to target relevant influences quickly and in a more efficient manner than just using email. We then set out to emulate this success with other football-related blogs. We managed to secure a feature and social post on:

  • whoateallthepies.tv
  • planetfootball.com
  • Betfair (social media post)
Week 3

Due to the outreach success, we were able to put together statistics into a media pack. The media pack was then distributed to local news editors who then republished the content to their websites as well as their social media accounts:

  • Kent Sports News
  • Kent Business / Kent Online
Week 4

On the fourth and final week of the competition, we managed to secure a feature on Squawka, a very popular site renowned for its football quizzes.

As seen on...

Find 50 clubs - As seen on

The Results

Results after 5 weeks

The quiz was a great success as it attracted over 86k sessions. This was a great success as the traffic was accumulated through social media, referral visits from websites who had linked to the quiz, direct visits as well as visits via search engines. 

The quiz performed well against every KPI including:

Site traffic

The quiz was a great success as it attracted over 86k sessions!

  • 86k sessions
  • 54k unique users
Organic traffic

We wanted to show that we could rank the quiz for a high competition phrase such as ‘football quiz.’

  • The site appeared in the ‘top stories’
  • We achieved first page position on Google Search for ‘football quiz’
  • The campaign generated nearly 7,000 visits from SEO traffic.
Links and media coverage

From an SEO perspective, we wanted to generate relevant links that actually brought referral traffic.

Key Points
  • Referral traffic was one of the highest sources of traffic to the site
  • Links from high value, relevant sites such SportBible, Planetfootball, Whoateallthepies.tv
  • 12k visits coming directly from just four of those links
  • Local coverage
Social engagement

Visit via social media were by far our biggest source of traffic, the quiz attracted thousands of engaged visitors from all over the world.

Key Points
  • 12k visits generated via Twitter
  • 8.8k visits generated via Facebook
  • 10,680 Post engagements on Facebook
Site engagement

The gamification element really contributed to great site engagement.

Key Points
  • 12 minutes average time on site
  • 15% of users spending 40+ minutes
Brand Exposure

We wanted to show that gamification can really enhance brand exposure.

Key Points
  • The quiz was played in 159 Countries - football has a huge global appeal so it was unsurprising that there were many visitors from all over the world.
  • We had many visits from high profile football clubs (lead forensics). By using our IP tracking software we could see the game has been played at the following businesses:
  • FA, FIFA in Zurich, Manchester United FC, Manchester City FC, Leicester City FC, FA Ireland, Barcelona FC
  • We found that users were searching for phrases such as ‘Reflect Digital quiz’
Data Capture
  • Account Signups: 9.77% of users gave their email address (with GDPR consent to contact)
  • Male Signups: 81%
  • Female Signups: 10%
  • Did not say: 9%
  • Male Completion Rate: 33.84%
  • Female Completion Rate: 49.05%

The Highlights

Work with us and see how we can bring gamification to your content!

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