Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

Introduction

The subject chosen for this case study is FC Kairat. The club was founded in 1954 as

Lokomotiv Alma-ata and was the most successful club from the Kazakhstan region

during the Soviet era. The club has not been as successful in the modern era since the

Soviet Union broke up with a financial crisis in 2007 precipitating relegation. It has since

recovered to some extent with top 3 finishes in the last few years and also winning the

Kazakhstan Cup twice over the same period. While these triumphs in the Kazakhstan

Cup gave Kairat the opportunity to play in the UEFA Europa League qualifying rounds it

managed to pass the play-off stage, its best result being last season when it cleared 3

rounds of qualifiers but failed in the final play-off to Bordeaux. It last appeared in the

UEFA Champions League qualifiers in the 2005-2006 season just before it financial

crisis. In terms of performances in recent past, Kairat has fallen behind FC Astana and

FC Aktobe but an improved performance in the last 3 years has made the club’s

supporter hopeful of better things to come. The club is currently placed 2nd in the

Kazakhstan Premier League.

The best club in the KPL by order of recent performances is FC Astana which gained

entry into the UEFA Champions League proper in 20015-16 season and played out

some creditable draws against Benfica, Galatasaray and Atletico Madrid, finishing

bottom of their group in the end but remaining undefeated at home. In terms of financial

and institutional strength, the general perception among football fans is that Kairat and

Astana enjoy the greatest advantages with Astana despite being a very young club

enjoying the greater financial clout among the two.

For the purpose of this benchmarking study, 3 teams have been chosen to establish a

comparison with Kairat. These are FC Astana, currently top in the KPL, FC Irtysh

Pavlodar currently third in the standings and FC Aktobe which is currently 6th in the

standings but has been one of the most successful clubs over the last 10 years. These

clubs have been used in direct comparison with Kairat to examine the percentage of

traffic share each captures in comparison to others. Additionally some data has been

added about FC Krylia Sovetov Samara, a club in the Russian Premier League that is

currently at the bottom of the standings. This is in order to provide some perspective on

how well these clubs are managing their marketing resources, in comparison to a club

that is currently at the bottom of another league such as the Russian Premier League.

In this benchmarking exercise, we will analyse the quantitative aspects of the clubs’

digital marketing interactions and also provide a qualitative overview. The main

platforms on which the clubs’ interactions are evaluated are the: Club Website, SEO

information, Twitter, Facebook and Youtube. From this, exercise we seek to determine

the level and frequency of the club’s interaction, the nature of its interactions, the level

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

of engagement with fans and whether the totality of its interactions follows a cohesive

framework that can be used to capitalize on the available marketing potential.

Note: The most popular social media site in many Russian speaking countries including

Kazakhstan and Russia is not Facebook but VK (VKontakte). However analytics tools

for VK are not as easily available as that for other social media platforms. In view of this,

where possible a qualitative statement indicating the general nature of interactions will

be added for the clubs where possible.

Official Website and SEO Information

Quantitative Review

Global

Rank

Country

Rank

Bounce

Rate

Daily

Pageviews

per visitor

Daily

Time on

Site

Percentage of

Visitors from

Search Engines

Sites

Linking

In

Location of

Visitors

FC Kairat 496050 6271 30.80% 2.5 2.16 min 30.80% 196

61.8% KZ,

30.6% Ru

FC Astana 955332 15281 29% 4 2.56 min 29% 172

61.5%KZ

5.5% BL

FC Irtysh 1943621 28.10% 3.5 3.06 min 6.30% 53 69.8% GE

FC Aktobe 1934015 10181 48.20% 3.5 6.04 min 11.10% 100 91.80% KZ

FC Krylia

Sovetov Samara 162006 7775 40.60% 2.7 3.5 min 8.10% 371

Data Source: www.alexa.com

We see that FC Kairat performs reasonably well as compared to the other Kazakh clubs

but falls short in its score as compared to the Russian club, FC Krylia in its page score.

Some improvements that helps its metrics is increase the number of sites linking in. The

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

pages per visit is quite low according to alexa.com but the details presented below from

www.pro.similarweb.com paint a different picture.

Infrastructure and SEO Analysis from Woorank

An analysis of www.kairat.kz is presented in a separate attachment with analysis from

www.woorank.com. The Woorank score for Kairat is the highest even considering the

Russian club Krylia indicating that its website infrastructure is reasonably good. The

overall score is 51.5 as compared to 34.9 for Astana and 41.9 for Krylia. Some

important points from this analysis are

Its Meta Description is missing. This means that no description of the club will

appear on the search page. This would reduce the number of people accessing

the site as they may not identify it easily.

It also has poor keyword consistency which reduces the chances of search hits.

In-page links were scored well and also there were no broken links on the pages.

The website is quite clean and quick to load as it doesn’t use flash and other

applets.

The website rated low on Mobile-friendliness as it is not specially optimised for

mobile access.

Below is a comparison of the website with that of the other Kazakh clubs from

www.pro.similarweb.com. In this analysis, data is aggregated over the 4 clubs, Kairat,

Astana, Irtysh and Aktobe.

Overview of Presence on Different Platforms

Platforms Website

Mobile

adapted

Website Twitter Facebook VK Youtube Instagram

RSS

Feeds Google + Own App

FC Kairat Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No

FC Astana Yes No Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No No No

FC Irtysh Yes No Yes No Yes Yes Yes No No No

FC Aktobe Yes No Yes Yes Yes No Yes No No Yes

FC Krylia Sovetov

Samara Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes No

Website and SEO Analysis

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

We see that Kairat is the best among the 4 clubs when it comes to the frequency of site

visits. Contrary to the data from www.alexa.com, it also has a low bounce rate and

higher visti duration and pages viewed per visit.

Demographics of Visitors by Country

It is interesting that Kairat attracts the highest number of visitors from Kazakhstan by a

large margin. This perhaps indicates its relative popularity since it is an older club and

has an established identity in the country’s consciousness. Also there is a fair amount of

interest from Russia because there is greater Russian ethnic profile in Kairat’s home

city of Almaty and also perhaps because it was the only Kazakh club that competed

frequently during the Soviet era. The interest from UK is surprising and while there are a

number of expatriates from UK in the region of the city, it does not explain the high

percentage of interest from there. Astana has a higher percentage and this may be

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

influenced by FC Astana having met Scottish clubs in the qualifying rounds of the UEFA

Champions League in the last 2 years (Celtic and Aberdeen).

Traffic Share by Source

We see from this that a large percentage of the traffic to the sites of these clubs is

through direct access and organic search. A smaller percentage is through referrals and

social media. Paid searches and ads do not contribute to the traffic attracted to the site.

Traffic Share from Referrals

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

The traffic from referrals appears to be from varied sources rather than from sports

related sources. This is interesting and shows that keywords can be better matched to

concentrate traffic to these sites.

Traffic Share from Searches

When the aggregate of searched hits on the 4 clubs’ sites are taken it is found that FC

Kairat takes about 71% of this traffic.

Paid searched contributes nothing to site traffic indicating that these clubs do not use

these services.

The media content on these sites is not the reason that user searches lead to them.

This indicates that the quality and quantity of pictures and videos hosted on the site can

be improved.

Google and Yandex contribute the largest amount of traffic from searches.

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

Traffic Share from Social Media

With regards to traffic directed in from social media networks we see that VK (or

VKontakte) is the biggest influencer followed by Twitter. Only Kairat manages to net

some traffic from Facebook. This is largely because VK is far more commonly used by

Russian speakers than Facebook. A look at Kairat’s Facebook page also confirms that

a signifcant portion of the following on it is from outside Kazakhstan.

Ougoing Traffic

This picture provides an indication of what the visitors of the site are interested in. The

keywords and topics indicate which types of sites they have visited after the leaving the

clubs’ websites.

Keyword Matches by Club

кайрат 39.36% fc astana 29.42%

фк кайрат 30.23% astana fc 19.12%

Кайрат 7.94% астана 13.55%

fc kairat 4.95% фк астана 9.94%

kairat 3.55% fk 6.15% крылья советов 42.42%

кс 12.27%

krylia sovetov 9.02%

иртыш 68.66% актобе 66.21% krylya sovetov 7.89%

irtysh pavlodar 8.78% АКТОБЕ 11.19% кс самара 6.83%

фк 6.03% Актобе 11.10%

football club 4.67% fc-aktobe.kz 3.85%

иртыш павлодар 3.42% fc aktobe 3.12%

FC Kairat FC Astana

FC Irtysh FC Aktobe

FC Krylia Sovetov Samara

Data Source: www.alexa.com

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

We have a very interesting detail in the highest keyword matches. FC Kairat is the only

one of the 5 clubs here whose name does not immediately reflect the name of the city,

Almaty, that it plays in. Though the club is the biggest in the city and has been closely

associated with it throughout its history, a search for keyword “Almaty” will not easily

lead you to FC Kairat. If “FC Almaty” is searched which is a very likely error for many

uninitiated who want to find the biggest club in Almaty, the website for Kairat is the 5th

or 6th result on the page. One of the first results is in this case is the Wikipedia page for

Kairat which indicates that keyword optimisation can be done better so that Kairat turns

up as a higher ranked result when people are searching for information related to

Almaty.

Analysis related to Content

News

Club and

Team Info Ticketing

Interactive (Polls,

Comments, etc) Blog Mechandise

Pictures

and

Video Additional Verdict

FC Kairat Yes Yes Yes Polls No No

Yes (but

limited

content)

Information for

suppliers and

vendors

Average, not

unusually interesting

or special

FC Astana Yes Yes No

Discussion Forum,

Polls, Chat Forum No No Yes

Content is very well

organised

FC Irtysh Yes Yes No none No No Yes

Old Magazines in

a reading app

Poor, content can be

more interesting and

not a single

interactive app

FC Aktobe Yes Yes No

Discussion Forum

and Polls No No Yes

Old Matches

available on

Streaming

Content is well

organised and

interesting

FC Krylia

Sovetov Samara Yes Yes No none No No Yes

Poor, site is not

interesting to access

Twitter

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

Twitter Account Tweets Followers Following

Media

Content

Percentage of

Media content

Tweets

per day

User Mentions

per tweet

Links per

tweet

Percentage

of Retweets

Percentage of

Favorited tweets

Avg. no. of

Hashtags per tweet

FC Kairat "@fc_kairat" 20174 3274 30 3660 18% 10.83 0.09 0.52 17.8 26 0.25

FC Kairat "@fckairat_eng 586 1207 13 166 28% 0.67 0.04 0.12 21.84 27.13 0.33

FC Astana "@fca_kz 2624 910 30 1531 58% 5.58 0.11 0.37 18.19 24.86 0.92

FC Irtysh "@irtysh_pavlodar 6644 944 59 0% 3.59 0.03 0.9 4.7 4.1 0.11

FC Aktobe "@ofcaktobe" 736 1653 84 401 54% 0.47 0.07 0.23 17.39 46.6 0.57

FC Krylia Sovetov

Samara "@fckssamara 36888 66732 140 9679 26% 23.86 0.11 0.35 69.69 50.17 0.2

All the clubs tweet various promotional material, news and information about players

besides photographs and videos. The relative percentage of media content is an indicator of

whether the club also tweets updates during matches. FC Astana is the only club that does

not seem to have in-match updates. The following for the twitter account seems to reflect

the relative popularity of the clubs. The far larger figures for Russian club indicate the gap

between poopularity of clubs in Kazakhstan as opposed to others. In general, Kairat is quite

active on this platform but does little to distinguish itself from the others. It is notable that

Kairat also has an English language official Twitter account that has more than one third the

followers of the Russian language account.

Facebook

Page Likes

New Page

Likes

People

Talking about

this

No. of posts

last month

Approximate

Likes Per Post

(last month) Content

FC Kairat 2570 (↑1% from last week) 26 (↑271.4%) 290 137 13 News, Information, Pictures, Video

FC Astana 2250 (↑4.4% from last week) 94 (↑1075%) 197 165 9 News, Information, Pictures, Video

FC Irtysh

FC Aktobe 525 (↑1.5% from last week) 8 (↑300%) 37 171 1 News, Information, Pictures, Video

FC Krylia Sovetov

Samara 1438 (↑0.5% from last week) 7 (↑40%) 27 42 3 News, Information, Pictures, Video

Source: Facebook, www.sociograph.io

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

Kairat makes better use of its Facebook page than the other clubs under consideration. It

also attracts more support and interest through this. The communication is morely

informative than interactive. Few comments can be found for the posts and it is very unlikely

that Kairat would respond to any comments. The platform acts more as a supplementary

medium.

VKontakte (VK)

VK is the most important social network among Russian speakers and the largest parts of all

the clubs social media activities are through this platform. However analytics to evaluate VK

are extremely hard to find. Some analytics are available with the site administrators

themselves but this is usually not published. VK is also more susceptible to spam and

therefore data gathered from the site may not always be reliable.

The more informal tone on VK allows fans to connect more easily and far more comments

and are visible than on Facebook. Also the posts from the club are more informal and

engaging though the club still does not respond to comments on posts.

Additional media present on Kairat’s VK site includes: songs, videos, discussion forums, ads

for shirt sales, photo albums and administrative contacts (for the VK page). Most of the

pages of competitors was similar though all the others did not display ads for merchandise,

they did have some prominently featured interactive discussions and interactive activities to

capture the attention of fans.

FC Kairat has 90 011 subscribers whereas FC Astana has 91 630 subscribers.

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

Youtube

Youtube

Videos

Posted Subscribers Views

Estimated Frequency

of Uploads Streams Content

FC Kairat 636 9786 3339916 5 per week U-21 matches Interviews, Training, U-21 games highlights

FC Astana 77 1492 302330 2 per week None Match Highlights, U-21 games highlights, interviews, training

FC Irtysh 36 136 49954 2 per month None Match highlights, interviews, full matches

FC Aktobe X X X X X X

FC Krylia

Sovetov Samara 1866 5111 3799380 10 per week None Full matches, training, interviews, promotional material

Kairat is reasonably active on Youtube and uploads quite regularly. The content gives an

insight into the training of the players and in general represents material that would not be

available elsewhere. The Youtube channel could be used a little better to generate

excitement on the eve of the match. Average number of views per upload is in the

thousands and not many comments are generated per upload.

Analysis and Verdict

What do they do?

FC Kairat uses its digital media platforms to disburse information about the club, allow fans

to connect and show affiliation to the club from their own social media profiles, keep visitors

to the site engaged and lastly sell tickets for the matches. Kairat’s digital marketing

presence was manifest from relatively early (compared to the other Kazakh clubs)

establishing itself on some platforms as far back as 2007. A fan of the club will find reason

to occasionally visit Kairat’s portals if he is in search of additional information, videos or

pictures. The Twitter and VK accounts are used to generate some excitement before and

during matches.

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

What they don’t do!

Kairat does not sell merchandise, run a blog which with the use of a greater number of

related keywords will attract more visitors, interact with fans or visitors or try very hard to

engage peope who are not already fans of the club.

Where do they do it?

Kairat’s most active platforms are its website, VK and Twitter. i.e it engages fans across

both horizontal and vertical networks. Its subscribers and user numbers are the best among

football clubs in Kazakhstan but compare poorly with clubs in other countries and do not

seem on par with the excitement that football usually generates.

How do they do it?

All of Kairat’s activity is uniderectional in that it does not respond to posts by fans or visitors

to their pages. On its VK page, it does make some forums available for fans to discuss,

socialise and thus create a sense of community. But there is far too little of this. Interacting

more with its fanbase and facilitating greater intereaction within it will generate a greater

sense of community and belonging and bind fans closer to the club.

The website provides information on the club’s history and its current team but it does not do

a good job of engaging and capturing the attention of a casual visitor. The website of both

Astana and Aktobe are far better designed and more exciting to visit and check content. The

fact that Kairat does not share its name with the city and the lack of a blog attached to the

website reduces its SEO rating and ability to direct traffic by keyword searches.

When do they do it?

Updates and posts on most platforms are reasonably regular with some surges on

matchdays. Little specific action is taken to create a great sense of excitement before key

events such as UEFA Europa League qualifiers or the match against Astana. The use of

digital media platforms seems almost a defensive strategy in that it does little add value to

the brand, interest new visitors or win over new fans. The strategy seems directed more

towards retaining or not losing existing fans because of the lack on an adequate profile on

the internet.

Who does it?

No specific information is available on who updates the pages in the various platforms. The

“About” page on the club website is a dead link. The only information available on who

provides content generation in on the VK portal where it appears that a third party agency is

reponsible for posting and updating the page.

Digital Marketing

Case Study: Analysis FC Kairat

Conclusion

FC Kairat is without doubt the most popular club in Kazakhstan with fans from its home city

of Almaty, the rest of the country as well as internationally. The analysis of its digital

marketing profile provides sufficient indicators of this existing popularity. However it provides

no evidence of a clear strategy to expand, engage, excite or build a sense of identity within

this fanbase nor to interest new patrons. Kairat’s digital marketing presence will at best

sustain the interest of its existing fanbase with the content and media it makes available

online. There is a lack of any coherent narrative that builds excitement or interests a

bystander across the various digital platforms.

This is a poor verdict considering that the club has bought some high profile players in the

last few years such as Andrey Arshavin (formerly of FC Arsenal) and Anatoliy Timoshchuk

(formerly of Bayern Munich) and have also made some inroads in Europe progressing to the

play-off round of qualifiers. It would appear that this is the right time to gather more support,

enlarge its fan base and promote a clear identity for the club while also cashing in on

potential merchandise sales. But in order to do this the digital marketing strategy has to be

clarified and be effectively implemented.