WMT Digital and USA Basketball have partnered and successfully launched a rebrand of the USA Basketball website for fans before the 2024 Summer Olympics.
The new build includes a custom live-stat integration to account for different competitive matchups happening all over the world, as well as streamlined roster-building and stat-tracking processes. USA Basketball’s last website refresh came ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo, Japan. Before that, the site also received revamps in 2008 and 2016.
USA Basketball is a “one-of-one brand.” Inside the USA Basketball bubble, star NBA, WNBA and college players enter and exit throughout Olympic cycles, and with them comes a massive following of fans. USA Basketball wanted to be able to capitalize on that interest as well, making for a complex riddle for WMT to solve.
Any project or build WMT Digital partners on, tries to organize data as seamlessly as possible. A college athletics site and app – which WMT has done many at this point, such as Notre Dame, Clemson and Ohio State, to name a few out of the over 40 division one programs it currently is partnered on – illustrates a much simpler process. Rosters change during the offseason, but for most part, they don’t really change after that. The players, with specific info like bios and stats, are only usually associated with only one team.
A ready-made product wouldn’t cut it for USA Basketball though because they oversee a complex, layered schedule featuring men’s and women’s competitions for 5×5 and 3×3 with varying age groups. Some teams only play every couple of years. Some games are exhibitions, while other games that have much higher stakes, require different presentations. Some players appear on multiple teams.
WMT Digital created a database for USA Basketball that allows for a multi-tagging feature so a player can appear on multiple USA rosters. Player bio and stats go from there to the multiple rosters. WMT also provided an update for USA Basketball staff that only requires one update for information that will automatically be applied to all of the pages in which it appears, as opposed to updating a player bio in multiple places at once. Two other benefits from the redesign: enhanced historical record keeping and a site structure that placed editorial content on an aesthetically pleasing pedestal.
WMT prides itself on programmatic SEO, and with that comes some machine learning to seize the moments of interest when Kevin Durant, Angel Reese or any other superstar dons the red, white and blue.
Packaging that marketing nimbleness with the easier-to-navigate features of the new site has yielded positive results for the second half of the calendar.
Comparing that timeframe to the same from last year, site users’ average engagement time (the time a page is pulled up and is being navigated or focused on) matched the average site duration (the time a page is pulled up, whether it’s being focused on or not) from last year. USA Basketball has also seen a 25% increase in users and a doubling in the number of average page visits for users during a single visit. SEO has boosted USA Basketball’s organic search acquisitions (acquiring users without paid search or advertising) as well.
For more information, visit: WMT | Full Service Agency | Development and Digital Marketing