How to Increase Tournament Engagement Through Notifications

In this post, we’ll explain how to boost player engagement in tournaments using “tournament notifications.”

Tournament Participation Mechanics 🎮

First, let’s describe how a player joins a tournament on our platform. To participate, the player needs to:

1. Visit the tournament page;

2. Click the “Join” button.

After completing these two steps, the player will start earning points for bets made in tournament games.

Hypothesis Description 💡

As part of a task to improve player engagement in tournament activities, we formulated the following hypothesis:

If we develop a system of tournament notifications and show them to players, tournament engagement will increase.

Based on this hypothesis, we created three types of notifications:

Notification 1: appears 24 hours before the tournament starts;

Notification 2: appears 30 minutes before the tournament starts;

Notification 3: appears 24 hours after the tournament has started.

Each notification is a small card in the corner of the screen, displaying the tournament name, prize pool, and a “Learn More” button. Clicking the button takes the player to the tournament page.

A/B Test Description 🧪

To test our hypothesis, we launched an A/B test.

Control group: sees no changes.

Test group: receives tournament notifications.

We selected 200 players based on the following criteria:

— The player made more than 500 bets in the previous week;

— The player had never participated in local tournaments before.

Both groups were offered the same tournament with identical conditions and duration (1 week).

Results 📊

First experiment:

Control group:

 — 7 players registered for the tournament;

 — 87 players were active during the tournament (made deposits or bets but didn’t register).

Test group:

 — 38 players registered for the tournament;

 — 78 players were active during the tournament.

We decided to repeat the experiment with a new player sample (all other conditions remained the same).

Second experiment:

Control group:

 — 9 players registered for the tournament;

 — 79 players were active during the tournament.

Test group:

 — 42 players registered for the tournament;

 — 90 players were active during the tournament.

Conclusion ✅

Based on the test results, we see that the hypothesis proved to be effective and attracted significantly more players.

As a result, we began using tournament notifications but implemented the following rules:

— Tournament notifications should not appear when a player is in the cashier or in-game. We should not interrupt the player during key actions (deposits and bets).

— Tournament notifications from different tournaments must not overlap. The player should not see multiple tournament alerts on their screen simultaneously.