March Top 50: Tournament Madness and Spring Promotions

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Go.com

One website on the top 50 list that had a solid month-over-month growth (MoM) of 7.8% was go.com (#17) with unique visitor (UV) count of around 50.4 million. Over the past two years, March has consistently produced the largest amount of UVs for go.com. This website contains many popular subdomains like abcnews.go.com, Disney.go.com, and most importantly (during March at least), espn.go.com. With the March Madness NCAA basketball tournament, unique visitor traffic to espn.go.com saw MoM growth of around 24%, translating into 30.6 million unique visitors.This site an incredibly popular website to visit, especially during tournament time, because of its news stories, score updates, live streaming capabilities, and tournament bracket challenges. I came to the site to check my bracket on occasion, but let’s just say this year was not optimal for my “choosing the best mascot” strategy.

Homedepot.com

Homedepot.com (#46) broke into March’s top 50 with 24.3 million UVs and a strong MoM growth of 14.43%. Perhaps Home Depot’s “Spring Black Friday” could be one major source that influenced traffic. Instead of sticking to just the traditional date for Black Friday, Home Depot runs four massive weekend sales events during spring. The first event was from during March from 17-20. After running a keyword report, I could see that Home Depot controlled 15.6% of overall traffic from the keyword “Spring Black Friday” with average referrals of around 19.6 million. This data would suggest that the campaign had a clear influence on the growing UV count.

Target.com

Target.com (#41) also made its way into the March top 50 sites with 26.2 million UVs and nice MoM growth of 9.9%. Target recently started spreading the word about an exclusive Lilly Pulitzer fashion campaign, which could have boosted traffic to the site. As of now, search referrals from the keyword, “Lilly Pulitzer Target” have driven .19% traffic share of a total 14.5 million search referrals. In other words, around 2.8 million people have landed on Target.com after searching for “Lilly Pulitzer Target.”

Conclusion

For Go.com, March has remained a very important point with web traffic consistently reaching its peak during the month from March Madness activity from espn.go.com. It will serve as a tough challenge to increase its UV count after this month without the big pull from the NCAA tournament for espn.go.com.

Homedepot.com and Target.com both ran campaigns during March that seemed to have positively resulted in a growing audience. Perhaps the big question will be: can these websites convert a growing number of visitors into loyal customers? That much may still remain to be unseen until these campaigns are finished.

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