After experiencing our first dip in year-over-year traffic in December, our Website has come back strong on the heels of two big playoff wins and the anticipation of the AFC Championship game.
Here’s a chart of page views from November 1 to January 17.
The dots across the top indicate games we’ve played. As you can see, our site traffic is regular as a heartbeat during the season. We have a big spike on game day, and a bigger spike the day after, then things settle down a bit.
In this graph, the dot on the far left happens to be our regular season matchup with the Patriots on November 5. We saw 273,000 page views on game day, and traffic rose to 522,000 page views the following day. After that national TV matchup, the biggest spikes were games against the Eagles and Bengals, both also on national TV.
There seems to be a clear connection between TV audience and Web traffic. NFL stats from last season indicated that 50% of avids had watched the game on TV while simultaneously surfing the Web. Apparently fans like to visit team sites during the game. We are thinking hard about ways to engage this audience. How can we offer content and experiences not available through the TV network? There’s a ton of stuff that comes to mind, but more on that in another post.
Why did traffic dip in December??
Despite a thrilling victory over the Bengals on Monday Night Football, our site traffic during the month of December was down 25% from last December. The team had a very similar record, but this year we had played a few very tough games in which our defense, in particular, had a lot of trouble. This seems to have shaken the confidence of the fans, and caused them to invest less time with our site.
I have no evidence that there’s a direct correlation between the amount of rushing yards we allow and the number of page views we get. I’m just guessing that the two are related. And I mention it here only to shed light on a particular sports marketing challenge. How do you keep fans engaged - whether your team wins or loses?
We have experienced so much success over that past 5 years, that winning is expected. During this time we have been working hard to increase our marketing efforts - both online and offline - with the hope that we are building firmer bonds of loyalty with our fans. I can’t say that our December dip indicates we’re suffering from “Atlanta Braves Syndrome,” as some have suggested.
How can we produce MEASUREABLE increases in fan loyalty whether we win or lose. That is the question? But it’s tough to figure out the answer because by the time you start losing games, if your audience starts dropping and you haven’t taken the time to benchmark any indicators, you have no way of knowing what to do.
Perhaps the December dip has less to do with fans’ loyalties to the team, and more to do with the way fans value the website? Maybe they don’t love the site as much as we think they do? Perhaps they are saying “we can live without it if the team’s not winning”.
Geographic location of fans seems to have some effect. Typically our site traffic breaks down 25% or less from Indiana, and 75% or more from the rest of the U.S. At our low point on 12/30/06, 30% of our traffic was from Indiana, which tells me that the local audience sustained better during our tough times. As of yesterday, the local percentage of traffic was back down to 23%.
Or maybe it’s just the nature of entertainment media. Surely the local daily newspaper feels drops in circulation after the Colts lose. Most people are not as interested in reading about losses. Still, we are still trying to learn how to cultivate an online audience, so it wouldn’t surprise me to learn that our content leaves something to be desired among even our most loyal fans.
But then everything changed
As Howard Cosell used to say, “seemingly out of nowhere,” the defense re-emerged in the first round of the playoffs against the Chiefs (see second dot from the right). But page view totals for that game were only equal to the Bengals game. Not as high as I expected given the way the Colts played.
Then came the Ravens game - and as you can see (dot at far right of chart) - that victory seems to have brought many of the bandwagon jumpers back on board. And we welcome them back with open arms!
Interestingly, while the Ravens victory did a lot to boost fan confidence and attract people back to our site, it was the Patriots win at San Diego that sent traffic through the roof. The PATs victory meant the Colts and PATs would meet - in Indianapolis - for for the AFC Championship. Literally 20 minutes after that game ended, our site traffic spiked so much that it brought our servers down for almost half-an-hour!
We had anticipated additional traffic during the playoffs, and we had implemented a backup caching system, but we had not offloaded all of our caching because we didn’t expect the Patriots Chargers game to have such an impact on our site. This is new ground we’re walking on - apparently brought on by a resurgent defense and the anticipation of a heated matchup with our arch rival, New England Patriots.
The town is BUZZING. And so is the site. Go Colts!
