Radar entertainment & sports playbook

by Radar Team on March 7, 2019

Industry-leading entertainment & sports apps like DraftKings use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

In this playbook, we explain how the smartest product and marketing teams are using Radar to:

Change the in-app experience when a user is at a venue
Send contextual push notifications when a user is at a stadium
Power automatic check-in when a user is at a venue
Build segments based on place visits
Understand whether users are making purchases at a venue
And more

Radar overview

Radar allows you to add location context and tracking to your apps with just three steps and a few lines of code:

Configure context types. Create custom geofences, enable Places (place, chain, and category detection), enable Insights (home, work, and traveling detection), or enable Regions (country, state, DMA, and postal code detection).
Integrate SDK. Integrate the SDK. In the foreground, change the in-app experience based on user context. In the background, listen for events. Or, before integrating, test with our toolkit apps for iOS and Android.
Enable integrations. Create a webhook or enable server-side integrations to send Radar events and user context to other systems.

For entertainment & sports use cases, you might enable the following context types:

Create custom geofences with tag venue, tied to venue ID, to generate user.entered_geofence events
Enable Places to generate user.entered_place events for stadiums or sports bars
Enable Insights to generate user.entered_home and user.started_traveling events

With these tools, let's get started!

Example 1: Change the in-app experience when a user is at a venue

After creating geofences tied to venue IDs, you can check geofence state to determine if a user is at a venue.

You can then change the in-app experience, showing content specific to that venue or event, prompting the user to open their e-ticket or make a purchase, and so on.

Radar.trackOnce { (status, location, events, user) in
    user?.geofences?.forEach { (geofence) in
        if geofence.tag == "venue" {
            // user is at venue, change in-app experience
        }
    }
}

Contextual in-app experiences can improve the user experience, increase conversion, and increase engagement.

Example 2: Send contextual push notifications when a user is at a stadium

You can send push notifications in a marketing automation integration like Braze, Iterable, Urban Airship, or Leanplum, or in a custom webhook.

For example, you can trigger a push notification when a user enters a geofence with tag stadium or enters a place with group major-us-sports-venue-stadium. In Braze:

Contextual push notifications can increase engagement and increase spend.

Example 3: Power automatic check-in when a user is at a venue

You can also power automatic check-in, listening for events server-side with a webhook, Google or Firebase Cloud Function, or AWS Lambda Function:

app.post('/webhooks/radar', (req, res, next) => {
    const event = req.body.event;
    if (event.type === 'user.entered_geofence' &&
        event.geofence.tag === 'venue') {
        // user is near venue, trigger check-in flow
    }
});

Example 4: Build segments based on place visits

You can build segments in a customer data platform integration like Segment or mParticle, export events from the Radar dashboard, or send events to AWS Redshift, Google BigQuery, or another data warehouse through a custom webhook.

For example, you can build a segment of users who performed the event user.entered_place with category sports-bar more than 3 times in the last 30 days. In mParticle:

Personalization with segments can improve the user experience and increase engagement.

Example 5: Understand whether users are making purchases at a venue

Finally, you can enrich behavioral events like app installs, app opens, searches, or purchases with location context using behavioral analytics integrations like Amplitude and Mixpanel.

For example, you can enrich purchase events with geofence state to understand whether users are making purchases at a venue.

Enriching behavioral events with location context can help you understand how users engage with your app in the real world.

These are just a few examples of ways that you can use Radar to build contextual experiences, delight users, and increase engagement.

Ready to take your entertainment & sports app to the next level? Sign up or contact our sales team. We can't wait to see what you'll build.

See our other industry playbooks for more examples and inspiration: