Super Bowl Spikes Web Traffic for Cluckbucket.com

Everybody knows that football and chicken wings go together, but what you may not know is how big of an impact the Super Bowl (the football game of all football games) has on the world's top provider of chicken wing recipes, restaurant reviews, and other wing information. Using the online marketing analytics service provided by WebTrends I'm able to share some specific impact on how big of a boost the Super Bowl was for Cluckbucket.com. Here are some figures:

First let's take a look at some trends comparing the week of 1/23-1/29 (a pretty typical week) to the week of 1/30-2/5 (the week leading up to and including the Super Bowl).

• Number of "Unique Visitors" - Increased 142% (from 586 to 1,422)
• Number of "Pages Viewed" - Increased 180% (from 1,661 to 4,647)
• Number of "Visitors who visited more than once" - Increased 120%
• Number of "New Visitors" to the site - Increased 153% (from 522 to 1,325)
• Number of "Returning Visitors" to the site - increased 70% (from 54 to 92)

It's important to note that I didn't do any form of out of the ordinary marketing to new or existing visitors during this timeframe, so it is safe to say that most of the growth listed above is organic based on customer demands, not my proactive demand creation. As you can tell, this week was huge from a standpoint of increasing overall visitors to the site, and even better for attracting valuable new visitors, let's just hope that they found what they were looking for and had a good first impression...

Speaking of what they were looking for, now I'll take a quick look at the week prior to and including the Super Bowl in isolation to share with you a little bit more about who these visitors were, and what they were doing on the Cluckbucket:

• The most popular content on the site was by far the "recipes" area. Overall, the recipe homepage and 12 individual recipe pages on the site were viewed a total of 2,164 times during the week which represents a 230% increase over an ordinary week.
• Getting people down to the point in the site where they view an actual wing recipe is something that I define as a critical conversion event. My site conversion rate for this event for the week was a whopping 53% (786 recipe visits divided by 1,469 overall site visits)
• Wrapping up on the recipes thread, one of the nice things that WebTrends gives me (that I've heard other providers can't do) is some unique breakdowns for specific pages on my site. For example, I've already told you that the recipes area of my site performed well over the Super Bowl, but what I really want to know is additional detail about the recipe home page, http://www.cluckbucket.com/recipes/recipes.htm: WebTrends tells me that this page was viewed 1,319 times, by a total of 512 visits, and 496 individual unique visitors. They also let me know that this page was the entry page for visitors 380 times and that while most people went from this page on to visit actual recipe pages, other visitors to this page were interested in my home page as well as my Internet Hot Wing Database (which are two other key areas of my site).
• Last but certainly not least, I want to know how all of these visitors got to my site in the first place. As you can recall from earlier on, I didn't do any email, paid search engine, or other marketing campaigns during this timeframe so the most likely place to look is traffic from organic/natural search listings. As usual, the big three search engines were responsible for referring the bulk of the traffic throughout the week; Google - 463 visits, Yahoo - 327 visits, and MSN - 312 visits. It's interesting to note that I do a lot better on what I consider core search phrases (like "chicken wings" and "chicken wing recipes") on Yahoo and MSN, but my phrases referred from Google seem to be more sporadic. Overall, "chicken wing recipes" was responsible for sending the most traffic to my site, to a tune of 129 visits (mostly from Yahoo and MSN where I perform in the top 5 listings).

So, I guess looking at the top content that people were hitting and the top search engine referrals all makes sense when I look at it together. Wing recipes are what everybody is looking for to make an solid contribution to their Super Bowl festivities.

Aren't you hungry for some wings now? Check out the Wing Recipes page to make some yourself or to the Internet Hot Wing Database to find a wing-focused restaurant near you!!!

Peace, love, and grease!

Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth

www.cluckbucket.com