The CEO of DiscountIF, Lewis Holland, continues to analyse and share his findings on football club’s online merchandise stores within the UK. The original post can be seen here.

There has been a lot of talk over the last 5 to 10 years about growing your audience and engaging with them. That has kept a lot of people busy setting up social media channels and creating relevant bits of content to intrigue wider audiences. Whilst this is a really important part of a clubs activity it also led many people to concentrate on ‘fluffy’ KPIs. I’d like to explore the indicators that actually link up to business results…ultimately revenue.

A critical part of a football clubs commercial activity is their merchandise sales. I see this is a barometer of the commercial performance. Given the amount of work going into creating audiences, a crucial action is turning the audience into a purchasing customer.

I’ve got many years experience managing sports related digital assets and ecommerce sites. So, I was curious to see how well football clubs are doing in converting ‘interested’ audiences into traffic to their online merchandise store. My first stab at it was to compare Manchester United & Leeds United on a couple of conversion metrics 

I’ve now come up with 4 metrics I think every Head of Retail/Merchandise/Commerce at a football club should track.

Club to Store Conversion

The amount of online traffic on the merchandise store as a % of the Clubs main website online traffic. This should be measured monthly

Merchandise stores are usually separate websites so this would give us an indication of how much traffic is being ‘sent’ to the merchandise store from the main club website.

£ per Social Media Follower

The revenue from the merchandise store divided by the number of social media fans. This should be measured monthly, and also annually.

This is a ‘broad’ metric, but in a certain way it’s an ‘all encompassing’ metric. There is a lot of talk about fan engagement, but not a lot about fan monetisation. A social media like or follow shows some form of ‘interest’. Having a person showing ‘interest’ is the first stage in a sales funnel. 

Social Media to Store Conversion

The amount of online traffic to the merchandise store as a % of the clubs social media following. This should be measured monthly.

This is a good ratio that links up the clubs wider audience, with the amount of traffic they get on their merchandise store for direct sales.

Social Media to Club Conversion

The amount of online traffic to the clubs website as a % of the clubs social media following. This should be measured monthly.

This is a good ratio that links up the clubs wider audience, with the amount of traffic they get on their club website.

Caveats: We’ve noticed that for Club to Store conversion the metric is ‘easily’ comparable across clubs. When it comes to Social Media related statistics, there are some skewed results for the largest clubs.

We’ve measured this for every football club in the UK for January 2017. For Premier League & The Championship clubs we’ve extended our tracking for the first 6 months of the season to formulate a digital merchandise index. We’ll be sharing this in the near future. Added a sneak peak below…