Case Study: World Surf League achieves 30% higher live event viewership and 70% off-season cost reduction with Google Cloud Platform

World Surf League Riding a wave of digital marketing analytics

The World Surf League (WSL) is a digital-first sports league that streams global surfing events to fans via web, mobile and apps. After consolidating live events onto its own platform, WSL needed deeper insight into fan behavior — who watches, who becomes a superfan, and how to improve viewership and engagement across unpredictable event windows.

WSL teamed with Analytics Pros to deploy Google Analytics 360, load data into Google BigQuery, and move infrastructure to Google Cloud Platform for fully managed, scalable analytics. The result: a 30% increase in concurrent live viewers, a 31% rise in web/mobile sessions, more than double the efficiency of engagement campaigns (cost per conversion down >50%), analytics responsiveness up to 80% faster, and a 70% reduction in off‑season infrastructure costs.

World Surf League

Chris Culbertson

VP Marketing