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Internet Marketing Data Predicts the Patriots will Win the Super Bowl over the Giants

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Please read the whole article before you decide I am crazy. You can think I am crazy at the end of the article, but hear me out first. After all, we did send out a news release about my Super Bowl and Internet marketing data opinion.

What data can you use to predict who will win the Super Bowl? The sportscasters on TV use their own understanding of the teams and their expertise in understanding football. They are rarely better than probably 65% accurate in their predictions. The oddsmakers in Las Vegas essentially use a popularity contest to predict the winning team for a game. Based on how many people are placing bets on either team, they adjust the "spread" or the number of points by which one team is predicted to beat another team so that there are an equal number of people betting on each side. The size of the point spread indicates how many people think the favored team will win relative to the other team. Currently the New England Patriots are favored to win by about 14 points, meaning most people think the Patriots will win the Super Bowl.

I think you can also use Internet data to make as accurate a prediction about who will win the Super Bowl as the sportscasting experts or the oddmakers in Las Vegas. Here is a list of the data I used to make this prediction and why each piece of data matters. All data is from the Website Grader Marketing and SEO Tool.

How Internet Marketing Predicts Patriots will Beat Giants in Super Bowl

Just like Las Vegas, many pieces of Internet data are based on popularity. More people visiting your website is better, more people linking to your website is better, more people bookmarking your website is better. And the Patriots dominate all of these Internet marketing metrics - sort of surprising when you remember that the Giants have a fan base in the most densely populated metropolitan area in North America.

1. Patriots have a lot more Website Traffic. The Patriots Alexa rank is 13,000, putting them in the top 0.11% of all websites, while the Giants are only in the top 0.2%. The Patriots are getting a lot more website visitors. As a comparison point, the HubSpot website has a similar Alexa rank to the Giants website - and we're just a two year old startup.
2. Patriots have more inbound links than the Giants.This was a big shock to me. Links on the Internet are like recommendations in the offline world. More recommendations from more trustworthy sources are good. And the Patriots have far more links than the Giants - almost 428,000 for the Patriots to the Giants' 186,000. This one isn't even close. This really shocked me since the Giants are a good team that you would expect to get a lot of coverage and links to their website.
3. Patriots have more online bookmarks. For those of you not familiar with the Del.icio.us social bookmarking service, it is just a way for people to store bookmarks online instead of in their web browser. This makes it possible for you to share them with other people, plus they are search-able, and you can use the data to measure things. I think that measuring the number of online bookmarks is a great way to measure how much people like your content, and the effects of any viral marketing. The Patriots have 133 bookmarks and the Giants have 98.
4. The Patriots are winning in search engines. Search engine optimization is the use of best practice marketing techniques to help your company get found in search engines when people are looking for the products or services that you sell. For the search terms "superbowl champion", "superbowl champions", "super bowl champion", and "super bowl champions" the Patriots are on the first page of Google results. The Giants are nowhere to be found on the first 10 pages of results. While I would expect the Patriots to beat the Giants on this one, I am surprised it was basically impossible to find the Giants.
5. Patriots have a higher Google Page Rank.While it is becoming less important and people do tend to pay attention to it too much, Page Rank is a measure of how important Google thinks you are online. It is a 1 to 10 scale and the higher the number, the better. The Giants are a very respectable 6 (HubSpot's homepage is a 6). However the Patriots are a 7 - this is the same as NFL.com. A Page Rank of 7 might not seem that much better than a 6, until I tell you that it is an exponential scale, and according to my estimates a 7 is about 4 times better or harder to get than a 6.

Summary of Super Bowl Internet Marketing Data

Obviously the real goal here is to have a bit of fun, but I do think there's a correlation (but not causality) between these Internet marketing statistics and who is most likely to win the Super Bowl, if only because teams that are more productive on the field are more likely to be more popular and win the Internet marketing popularity contest.

Finally, some of you probably noticed that the Giants actually have an overall Website Grader that is higher than the Patriots. This is because the Patriots have a "splash page" for the Super Bowl on their homepage - and this splash page has almost no links, almost no text. Splash pages like this really hurt you in term of getting found and converting leads online, so they get penalized heavily.

What do you think? How crazy am I? Do you agree with any of this? Leave a comment below and let's discuss.

Posted by Mike Volpe on Tue, Jan 29, 2008 @ 09:45 AM