Superbowl Analysis: Two Views

There has been a lot of analysis of this year's Superbowl...and I'm sure there was some analysis of the actual game as well. Those who watch the advertising world seemed disappointed with the ads this year. Tivo has emerged as the analysis authority on the event/game, noting in their press release that:

• Ameriquest ran two ads that were the favorite among the Tivo rewind/replay crowd
• Tivo viewers hit replay 30 times on average
• And, "A controversial touchdown call in the second quarter spurred almost as much replay and rewind activity as the most popular commercials"

What I found most interesting is that they use the data from a sampling of 10,000 households to determine this information. This is out of 4 million subscribers. That's a pretty small percentage, but it's not clear how many Tivo viewers tuned into the game, so it might be statistically more meaningful than it looks.

But I'm curious why they need to sample the data in order to pull these statistics? I believe they have full information on all of the activity of the subscribers...so why sample? Are there statistical reasons for taking an assumed complete data set, and choose to throw out a certain "random" percentage in order to make sense of the data?

Another way of looking at the game is to analyze a core human need: wings. That's right, if you're going to have a Superbowl party, you gotta have some wings. Need a recipe? Search for one, and you'll possibly end up at the best wing site on the internet: cluckbucket.com. As it turns out, many people did just that during the week leading up to big game. Scott "The Cluckbucket" Roth, notes on his blog the following terrific analysis of the week prior to the game, compared to the week before:

• 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)

He also provides some notes regarding his incoming search traffic.

"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)."

That's pretty impressive considering he hadn't done any additional advertising or outreach. Nice work Scott. I've got to try one of these recipes! Mmmmmm....wings.

Thanks Clay!

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