UEFA Euro 2012 online marketing

UEFA Euro 2012 Football Championship will kick off on Friday, June 8, 2012 when Poland plays against Greece. The Internet has been inundated with news and marketing material related to the tournament. While the official Euro 2012 website, www.uefa.com/uefaeuro/index.html, dominates Google SERPs for a number of key “euro 2012” queries, I’ve done a quick look at the Euro 2012 Google rankings and how UEFA utilizes social media marketing tools to promote the event and its website. I’ve included the screenshots and brief analysis of my research.

Euro 2012 SERPs

First, let’s look at how many URLs are out there that contain the phrase “euro 2012.” A quick Google inurl: search shows that if we sum up the URLs that contain either “euro2012” or “euro*2012” phrases, we’ll get 5,330,000 search results.

The search query “euro 2012” brings 2,650,000,000 results on google.co.uk while google.com only shows 1,670,000,000 results. What a difference! Not quite sure how to explain this, but it must have to do with the fact that Americans are not that much interested in “soccer” as British, and that’s why Google decide not to clutter the SERPs. Any ideas?

UEFA link profile

Using OpenSiteExplorer, I’ve looked at www.uefa.com and www.uefa.com/uefaeuro link metrics. While the home page of the site has quite a strong link profile, the /uefaeuro page only has 247 linking root domains with 2,459 total links. www.uefa.com/uefaeuro outranks www.uefa.com on Google for “euro 2012” query. The latter is due to the fact that the euro specific landing page (/uefaeuro ) has much more relevant content focused around Euro 2012 tournament than the main home page of the site.

UEFA social media sharing buttons

By looking at the official Euro 2012 landing page, we can only see the Facebook Like button that has 353K likes. While the number of likes looks pretty good, UEFA is missing out on Google+ button as well as Tweet button. Even though UEFA dominates the SERPs and do not need G+ and Tweets for rankings, they can definitely benefit from additional traffic coming in from additional social media channels.

The teams page (www.uefa.com/uefaeuro/season=2012/teams) benefits from an effective Facebook Like button integration. After landing on this page, a user feels like there is a competition to get the most likes for your country (gamification) going on right on the screen.

One more instance where UEFA uses social media sharing buttons is the photo and video embeds. Here they successfully utilize both Facebook Like and Tweeter Tweet buttons.

UEFA social media profiles

Finally, I looked at the official UEFA social media profiles and found out that they extensively use Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and YouTube; however, the footer links of the main site do not have any reference to their Google+ account (I was only able to find it on Google).

Euro 2012 online resources

I’ve also taken a brief look at various Euro 2012 online resources created to promote the event as well as the parties who developed the sites listed below:

Do you know any other relevant and credible Euro 2012 online resources? What do you think about UEFA’s inbound marketing strategy? Are there any recommendations that we can pass along to www.uefa.com?