The Super Bowl Feast: It’s not just about pizza anymore…

Another Super Bowl has come and gone and even though the game was pretty ugly, according to my analysis, people were at least enjoying their fair share of wings! Yep, we here at http://www.cluckbucket.com/ saw another big traffic spike with folks looking either for recipes or restaurants to get carryout/delivery. The Super Bowl means big business for the food industry, and wing joints are taking a bite out of pizza place’s pie.

As you may recall, last year following the Super Bowl left a post that showed the traffic patterns for the week leading up to the big day. This year I’ll give you some week-over-week perspective as well as some year-over-year figures.

Week-over-week

Using our analysis from WebTrends, we were able to easily compare the week of 1/22/07 through 1/28/07 (a very normal week) to 1/29/07 through 2/4/07 (the days leading up to the big game). Here’s what we saw:

• Unique Visitors: Increased 138% from 773 to 1,848
• Pages Viewed: Increased 153% from 2,340 to 5,913
• New Visitors: Increased 144% from 711 to 1,733
• Returning Visitors: Increased 64% from 73 to 120

The graph below shows a comparison of the level of visitors I received to the site each day of the week:


Also interesting to note, I only had 1.7% of my visitors reject the cookie that WebTrends uses to identify them. This is way down from the levels that I used to see (upwards of 15%) before WebTrends rolled a 1st party cookie solution out to their hosted software customers.

I also took an in-depth view at where I got all of these new visitors from. The report below shows the top sites that referred traffic to my site throughout the week, and their corresponding growth week-over-week:


I’m particularly fond of the fact that my direct traffic grew as nicely as it did. That means that folks are starting to remember the name Cluckbucket and seem to find some value in the content that we offer.

The growth of referrals from Yahoo and MSN also intrigued me, so I decided to see what search phrases were fuelling those results. Here you can see the straight up figures of the top search phrases and the associated search engine (I’m looking only at organic search engine results so I don’t mix up the clicks that I actually am paying for):



Finally, I wanted to see what content people viewed most frequently, and based on the search phrases reports I had a good hunch that it would be recipes. The report below shows the top 5 pages on the site, and the comparison week-over-week. As I expected, four of the top five pages had to do with wing recpies:



Year-over-year

Again, using our analysis from WebTrends, we were able to easily compare the week of 1/30/06 through 2/5/06 (week leading up to the Super Bowl last year) to 1/29/07 through 2/4/07 (week leading up to the SuperBowl this year). Here’s what we saw:

• Unique Visitors: Increased 29% from 1,422 to 1,842
• Pages Viewed: Increased 27% from 4,647 to 5,913
• New Visitors: Increased 39% from 1,325 to 1,733
• Returning Visitors: Increased 30% from 92 to 120

Wasted Opportunities

Now to the bad news, I was totally slacking when it comes to getting my site prepped and ready for a big day/week of traffic. Had I thought about it in advance I would have definitely done some strategic promotion of the following things:

• Highlight Interactive Content: The only real investment I’ve made in this area is the video of the Smash wing eating technique. It’s proven to be a pretty popular clip and gets decent air time on both Google Video and YouTube. I should have put a promo for it in the side nav of the recipes page.
• Promote the Newsletter: I’ve developed a decent sized subscriber base to my newsletter “The Clucker”, had I been thinking I could have suggested that people that like the recipes they are seeing on the site will enjoy the more in-depth wing related content I provide in the newsletter.
• Cross-sell the IHWDB: The Internet Hot Wing Database is usually one of our most popular and by far our most dynamic destination. Getting people over to the IHWDB would have increased their time on the site, and helped visitors to see that the Cluckbucket is about more than just recipes.

Summing it all up

Even though there were some wasted opportunities, the net net was that was a good week for us both week-over-week and year-over-year. Similar to last year, my main hope is that people will remember the Cluckbucket keep coming back throughout the rest of the year…

Peace, love, and grease!
Scott “The Cluckbucket” Roth
http://www.cluckbucket.com/