Calciomercato.com

Calciomercato.com is one of the largest and most visited football news sites on the Italian scene.

With dozens of original articles published every day, read by millions of unique visitors every month, it offers a professional and competent look at the world of football, not just the transfer market. News, exclusive interviews, opinions of well-known journalists in the sector, reports on injuries and formations, videos and reports from social media have made up an offer much loved by enthusiasts for many years.

Calciomercato.com iOS and Android apps form its heart. Present for many years on the stores of the two main mobile operating systems, they needed a complete makeover both for monetization reasons (creating new units on Google AdMob within articles) and for technical reasons.

The policies of Google and Apple in fact require that in order to be able to update the apps, and therefore take advantage of all the latest generation features offered by the operating systems, steps must be taken to adopt the latest SDKs provided, which was no longer the case with the previous apps possible, due to the deprecation of the framework used.

The challenge was therefore twofold. On the one hand keep all the features that users loved from the old apps, speed, ease of use, comments, notifications, and on the other implement new ad units to increase monetization .

We started from the analysis of the available mobile apps, the mobile website and all the integrations with external suppliers, with an eye above all on advertising. The customer provided us with the designs of the mobile app, asking us to maintain the family feeling between site and app, improving where possible performance and usability in accordance with the native features of smartphones.

The choice of the React Native framework, one of the most popular mobile development frameworks, created and supported by Facebook and largely maintained by companies and communities, allowed us to quickly arrive at a prototype integrated with the new mobile site APIs, and to gradually insert the new features, starting from native integrations with Firebase such as push notifications and Analytics data, up to the crucial part for the client’s business, i.e. the advertising services.

On this front we have moved in accordance with the latest offers from Google on mobile ads, integrating AdMob with new in-article and interstitial units, increasing customer monetization with an eye to user experience, both in terms of homogeneity of navigation and in those, fundamental, of the protection of personal data.

We have hereby followed Apple’s guidelines regarding the AppTrackingTransparency integration, as well as Google’s guidelines with the Funding Choices platform, which provides a versatile and compliant with European data protection laws tool, embodied in a platform to collect and manage tracking consent.

The new apps are in full continuity with the new look designed by the customer for their mobile site, maintain all the functionality of the apps they replaced and provide new monetization opportunities thanks to the inclusion of new, purpose-built ad units.

The automatic update process on user devices ran smoothly, leading to the complete migration of the installed base in just a few weeks. The new apps, strengthened by an agile development process based on close integration between the SparkFabrik team and that of Calciomercato.com, are now constantly and flexibly updated.

The choice of React Native has reduced development costs and allowed to share part of the assets just created for the new mobile site. The integration with Google AdMob’s native advertising has allowed a boost on monetization, while maintaining the user experience.

Push notifications, social logins and comments have been migrated with the aim of making the update completely transparent to the end user.

The choices rewarded in terms of prototyping speed, creation and release of new apps. All project objectives have been achieved, paving the way for future improvements.