March Madness Search Strategies

It goes without saying that during the NCAA Basketball Tournament, visits will increase to the websites that provide coverage of the games – particularly on those that offer live video during work hours. As the tournament gets underway, we decided to look at the search terms that are driving traffic to websites hoping to attract viewers and ultimately drive ad revenues during March Madness.

We created a portfolio of the most popular search terms around the NCAA tournament to understand what search strategies are being employed to drive traffic. Last week, the share of clicks to the portfolio from organic search results was 90%. Among the top 10 search terms ranked by the share of clicks, 5 received 100% of their clicks through organic results.

This high share of organic results shows that many of the websites are well-optimized for the top search terms, with the official website of the NCAA leading the pack.

Of the 10% of the traffic that came from paid clicks, Google captured the majority of the traffic coming through sponsored listings. 94% of the paid clicks for all of the search terms within the NCAA March Madness portfolio for the week ending 03/14/2009 were through Google.

The overall share of paid traffic is fairly low for the portfolio of NCAA March Madness search terms and many of the terms are only driving organic traffic, so there should still be affordable opportunities across all of the search engines. Some of the players can take advantage of sponsored links for placement next to the organic results and possibly intercept some traffic.