Here at Arena, we’re big fans of football / soccer, so we used some of our out-of-the-box features to create live feed coverage of all the games in the World Cup. If you’re in media, publishing, or just a huge fan, we’ll show you how to do this on your site as well. This is a fun way to cover the event, even if you don’t have people on-site, but can also help you boost digital property metrics like average session time, registration rate or even CTR for direct or programmatic sponsorships.
Step 1: Create a free account
To build a custom version of this, you’ll need an arena account, or you can just DM us in the chat on any of the pages and we can send you the snippet you can add to any webpage or app. Still, creating an account is easy and free: just click here.
Step 2: Create an event for a match
We bet this is simpler than you picture. When you create a sports event in the Arena Dashboard, you can already pick “soccer”, the exact tournament you’ll cover – World Cup, in this case – and the list of matches will come right up!
This is when you can enable automatic sports features that make your life much easier:
- Countdown the match
- Live score update
- Automatic play-by-play
These are features that will work automatically and set you free from updating everything that happens in a game, like goals, yellow cards and substitutions.
Step 3: Embed the Live Blog in your web page
Next thing is to add the embed code in your page. It’s usually just a copy-and-paste process, but it can vary depending on the platform you use (WordPress, Webflow, etc). If you have any difficulties, check Arena’s Help site.
Step 4: Add some social accounts for automated publishing
To create a live experience that also filters for more brand-safe content, we set two high level filters:
- We pulled in any twitter post with the hashtags #WorldCupQatar2022, #Qatar2022, #WorldCup, etc but set a filter for only accounts with over 1,000,000 followers. This gives us global reach that can pull from any publisher, influencer or player post, but also ensures random garbage doesn’t clutter the feed.
- We selected several official accounts, like FIFA World Cup, FourFourTwo, ESPN, etc to pull in any of their posts related to World Cup.
Next we add the countdown clock, then set live score counter to auto update. Now, anyone who comes to the page early will know when the experience will go fully live, but, for our team, it was basically “set it and forget it”.
Step 5: Enable the Live Chat
For engagement, we added a Live Chat to the right side which allows the community to engage with each other when the match starts. Since we’re NOT a publisher, and our website traffic is much lower than, say, pretty much any online media company, we opted to create a single chat that spans over every game, but, we could just as easily have created dedicated chats for specific game audiences. For high traffic sites, setting different chats for different segments of your audience can be a good idea.
Step 6: Add Conversion Cards for CTAs
After that, we added direct calls to action with Conversion Cards. For our purposes, we added two:
- For our fun Chrome extension
- For our new publishing solutions page
For these, we’re basically just promoting some cool content we made, but these could just as easily have been sponsored ads from partners, or even programmatic ads from a DSP.
Finally, we just toggled which match we wanted & copied and pasted this on to different pages and within about an hour, we had set up live coverage experiences for every game in the World Cup. For a list of all the pages, please see below!
World Cup calendar and live coverage links
Group Stage
Nov-20 Qatar vs Ecuador
Nov-21 England vs Iran
Nov-21 Senegal vs Netherlands
Nov-21 United States vs Wales
Nov-22 Argentina vs Saudi Arabia
Nov-22 Denmark vs Tunisia
Nov-22 Mexico vs Poland
Nov-22 France vs Australia
Nov-23 Morocco vs Croatia
Nov-23 Germany vs Japan
Nov-23 Spain vs Costa Rica
Nov-23 Belgium vs Canada
Nov-24 Switzerland vs Cameroon
Nov-24 Uruguay vs South Korea
Nov-24 Portugal vs Ghana
Nov-24 Brazil vs Serbia
Nov-25 Wales vs Iran
Nov-25 Qatar vs Senegal
Nov-25 Netherlands vs Ecuador
Nov-25 England vs United States
Nov-26 Tunisia vs Australia
Nov-26 Poland vs Saudi Arabia
Nov-26 France vs Denmark
Nov-26 Argentina vs Mexico
Nov-27 Japan vs Costa Rica
Nov-27 Belgium vs Morocco
Nov-27 Croatia vs Canada
Nov-27 Spain vs Germany
Nov-28 Cameroon vs Serbia
Nov-28 South Korea vs Ghana
Nov-28 Brazil vs Switzerland
Nov-28 Portugal vs Uruguay
Nov-29 Netherlands vs Qatar
Nov-29 Ecuador vs Senegal
Nov-29 Iran vs United States
Nov-29 Wales vs England
Nov-30 Tunisia vs France
Nov-30 Australia vs Denmark
Nov-30 Poland vs Argentina
Nov-30 Saudi Arabia vs Mexico
Dec-1 Croatia vs Belgium
Dec-1 Canada vs Morocco
Dec-1 Japan vs Spain
Dec-1 Costa Rica vs Germany
Dec-2 South Korea vs Portugal
Dec-2 Ghana vs Uruguay
Dec-2 Cameroon vs Brazil
Dec-2 Serbia vs Switzerland
Round of 16
Dec-3 Netherlands vs United States
Dec-3 Argentina vs Australia
Dec-4 England vs Senegal
Dec-4 France vs Poland
Dec-5 Japan vs Croatia
Dec-5 Brazil vs South Korea
Dec-6 Morocco vs Spain
Dec-6 Portugal vs Switzerland
Quarter-Finals
Dec-9 Netherlands vs Argentina
Dec-9 Croatia vs Brazil
Dec-10 Morocco vs Portugal
Dec-10 England vs France
Semi-Finals
Dec-13 Argentina vs Croatia
Dec-14 France vs Morocco
Play-off For Third Place
Dec-17 Croatia vs Morocco
Final
Dec-18 Argentina vs France
