Sport
Push notification best practices for sports sites
How often to send, what subscribers signed up for, what holds their attention and the mistake that loses it, for sports sites.
Updated · By the SharePush team
- Usual cadence
- 7–28 campaigns a week
- How solid this is
- Reasoned from the opt-in No independent study of push in this sector has been published. This follows from what the subscription promised, so weigh your own numbers above it.
What do people expect from push notifications on sports sites?
They subscribed to a team, a competition or a moment, not to your site in general. Relevance here is almost entirely about which match this is.
How often should sports sites send push notifications?
The usual band is 7–28 campaigns a week. Volume follows the fixture list rather than the calendar. A match day can carry several sends that a quiet Tuesday cannot.
That band is a starting point, not a target. Your own click rate is the better judge: it moves before the unsubscribes do.
What works on sports sites
- Let volume follow the fixtures: bunching sends around live events beats a flat daily quota.
- Segment by team or competition before you segment by anything else; it is the axis your audience actually chose.
- Live moments (goals, results) need to land in seconds or not at all: a late score alert is worse than none.
- Keep the off-season quiet; a channel that goes silent between competitions is easier to re-earn than one that padded through.
What is the most common push notification mistake on sports sites?
Sending every result to everybody. A subscriber who follows one club and receives another club's goals learns to ignore the channel entirely.
The rules every site shares
Your sector changes the volume, not the rules. Chrome runs three systems against every site that sends web push (on-device spam warnings, automatic permission revocation and push API rate limits), and the same five habits keep you clear of all of them.
- Earn the permission before you ask for it The prompt itself is scored. A low acceptance rate pushes you into Chrome’s quieter UI and counts against you in the rate-limit formula.
- Treat volume as a budget, not a lever Volume is only half of every Chrome penalty: the other half is time spent on your site. Five pushes a day is fine for a daily-visit audience and disruptive for a once-a-month one.
- Write copy the classifier does not flag The model reads your title, body and buttons. It was trained largely on synthetic examples, so it is unpredictable: write like a newsroom, not like an ad.
- Send to the people who asked for that thing Relevance is the only input you fully control that raises engagement and lowers volume at once. It fixes both sides of the ratio Chrome measures.
- Prune before Chrome prunes you A dead subscriber is not neutral. They are the denominator dragging your engagement ratio under the revocation threshold, and they take the live subscribers down with them.