A month ago, FJ Gaylor blogged on ‘The Flutie Effect’, and asked if anyone had success stories on the impact that sports can play on Admissions.
A month later, I have some stats for you. As most of you know, our beloved Bulldogs fell to Tennessee 76-71 in overtime. While it was a tough loss to swallow, getting Butler’s name out there was wonderful for the Admission site.
~2900 visitors, compared to 800 on an average Sunday.
I wonder why so many people from Tennessee were checking our page out? 
A breakdown of visitors from Tennessee:
Some of the 400+ Google searches that referred people to the Admission page:
And my personal favorites:
Where is butler university?
Butler university town
Location of butler college
University of Butler
Butler college Missouri
Butler college where
Butler dog pound
Butler uniservisty <——- potential future student?
Butler university is located where
Butler university Wisconsin
Butler university, chicago
Butlier university <——- Another prospect?
How to get to butler university
In what city is butler university?
Size of butler university
Scholarships offered for butler university
The location butler university and mascot
Town of the butler bulldogs
Where is butker university <—— Yet another
Where is butler bulldogs from
Where is butler college located at
Where is butler located
Where is butler university?
What city is butler university
And for my personal favorites………….(These will both land you on our Mascot’s Blog)
Does aj graves have a girlfriend
Drew streicher’s girlfriend
Oh… and does anyone want to take a guess at what time the game was?
I forwarded this out to the office, and one co-worker responded: “I googled Siena this weekend to find out where they were located.. :)”
So there you have it. Get your sport teams into the post-season, and your website traffic will benefit greatly. The Flutie Effect gets 2 thumbs up from this guy.
OH, and for the “what’s the benefit” question that will surely arise — Web Information Requests were up approximately 45% over the weekend compared to previous weekends in March, as well as this weekend in 2007 (we were also in the tournament last year at this time.)
6 Comments until now
Great post.
The answer to the benefit question is simply: YOU WEREN’T THERE last year!!!!!!
makes you wonder if admissions ppl should be on the site during those times to initiate chats with the visitors. there is software out there to see who is on your site live and then you can click on them to initiate a chat.
Sadly, I was going to use this weekend to test out the new chat plugin I implemented on the site, but decided NOT to do it because I wanted to watch the game! Classic example of hindsight.
For the software you mentioned, I know Xigla has a great open-source solution for $180. We pushed for it, but to no avail. They ended up purchasing a ’solution’ that cost 177 times more, and none of the information in the live answer shows up on searches. Bad call. That’s a whole other blog post, though.
I googled Siena too and their site was down. I’m sure it got hammered. I ended up going to wikipedia.
I bet a good conference session could be put together by the George Mason’s, Davidson’s, and Siena’s on handling the newfound publicity.
Davidson’s site was moving like a turtle yesterday. Kudos to their web/marketing team for placing Stephen Curry’s student testimonial on the front page though.
[...] not to long ago about Butler’s traffic increase from their success in the tournament, March Madness: Basketball Scores Online Traffic. So over the last few weeks I’ve noticed that Davidson’s Alexa traffic was [...]
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