Fantasy Sports, particularly Fantasy Football, has become one of the most popular activities among sports fans. 53 million US adults played fantasy sports from May of 2024 to June of 2025, according to the Fantasy Sports & Gaming Association, with 79% of them playing fantasy football. It has reached an $11 billion business, with participants and industry value continuing to rise. Meanwhile, in the ever-growing world of pay-per-click, a 2025 report by DemandSage says 80% of businesses worldwide rely on Google Ads for PPC advertising. Both fantasy and PPC make up a notable chunk of the activity among the 4.77 billion internet users worldwide.
Six Strategic Parallels Between PPC and Fantasy Football
Properly managing a fantasy football team requires proactive dedication that can be compared to a digital marketer managing PPC accounts. From pre-draft research to in-season management, one develops a strategy and makes adjustments based on past, current, and future projected outcomes, like a marketer constructs and executes an ad strategy.
1. Platform Similarities
Both the PPC and fantasy sports industries feature a multitude of platforms built on the same overall concept. These platforms also share some similarities in interface layouts, while also having unique functions and rules to follow. PPC has Google, Microsoft Bing, Meta, LinkedIn, X (formerly Twitter), and others. Fantasy football can be played on outlets like the ESPN app, NFL.com, CBS Sports, or Yahoo Sports.
2. Pre-Launch Research and Strategy
Before starting advertising, internal and external resources are used to research and plan an ad strategy, which includes gathering keyword and market data. Similarly, before a football season, fantasy players research to see which NFL players are ideal targets for their team. Google’s internal keyword planner provides volume and click cost estimation data, while fantasy sports platforms offer projected points data, the percentage of players being rostered, and other information. Marketers can seek outside resources, such as Semrush for organic keyword search data, and football gurus can read up on draft strategy from leading football data outlets such as PFF.
3. Seasonality and Adjustment
It’s a grueling 17-game NFL season, and like markets and the economy, there are peaks and valleys. Certain days of the week, months, or seasons in an industry being down could be compared to having a player(s) on a bye week. An effective marketer will understand the seasonality of a business in preparation to run timely ads, target specific audiences, promotions, and ad spend fluctuation. Fantasy owners factor in bye weeks when drafting, so that too many players don’t overlap, and prepare for when to make key roster adjustments when guys are not playing. Both can require multiple tweaks to test the effectiveness of said adjustments, whether that be a bid or ad type vs. subbing an inactive player(s) on a team.
4. The Importance of Ongoing Management
Once a strategy is outlined and the campaign or team is assembled, it’s a proactive game of adjustments and evaluation of real-time results. While today’s automated ad strategies can give the illusion that “set it and forget it” is effective enough, like neglecting a fantasy team, it’s not. Sure, a campaign can work for a while unsupervised, as someone can forget to set a weekly lineup and still win a game, but it won’t work long term.
5. Monitoring and Optimization
A marketer will monitor key metrics such as search traffic, cost-per-click, cost-per-acquisition, lead quality, ROAS, impression share, etc. They still need to evaluate how effective their ads are, even when running with automation. There are always levers to be pulled when an ad strategy needs to be tweaked. Fantasy team owners need to set lineups every week, as players will either be hurt, on bye, or the on-field matchups call for players to start versus others to be benched.
6. The Role of Trends
Trends are also key factors in both fantasy football and PPC campaigns. A player unexpectedly getting hot or cold can determine changes made on a roster. A quarterback can go down, with a backup or rookie coming in and start playing great, which results in people jumping to pick him up. Marketing trends help optimize advertising, whether types of products are selling at a higher or lower rate, industry demand, or how audiences search for certain products or services. This can include the recent impact of AI overviews in searches, and optimizing a campaign or site to show in those results.
Competing for the Win
In the end, it’s a fierce competition for both marketers and fantasy owners. Whether fighting for business or wins, it’s a battle with people using similar resources and platforms to achieve it. Not all hard-fought fantasy owners will win, but they won’t if they don’t strategize and be proactive all season. Not all marketers can win the most business if they have a limited budget or are in a tough market, but they won’t reach their goals if they are not proactive and don’t conduct effective research and optimization.
Always play to win, even if you won’t always win.
