More than 267,000 users came to ClemsonTigers.com after the national championship game.
Record online traffic flooded Clemson’s official athletic website following the Tigers’ Jan. 7 College Football Playoff championship victory over Alabama, and the vast majority of visitors — more than 80 percent — had never been to ClemsonTigers.com before. That was one of several takeaways from an analytics report prepared by WMT, the Tigers’ digital partner and website host.
WMT measured online traffic at ClemsonTigers.com for the 24 hours after the game and found:
ClemsonTigers.com Traffic Sources
■ 72.9 % Mobile
■ 20.9% Desktop
■ 6.4 % Tablet
■ The site hosted 307,120 sessions during that period, meaning a user did something to engage with the site such as click on a page. During a typical day during football season, sessions tend to peak at 12,000 to 15,000.
■ Perhaps just as meaningful was that each session averaged 3.77 pages, meaning a user clicked on almost four pages during the visit to the site. “That tells us that they liked the content and they were looking for more,” said Jonathan Gantt, the Tigers’ associate athletic director of creative solutions. “That’s a good indicator of your content.”
■ In all, 267,235 users came to the site after the game, and 81.1 percent of the users had never been to ClemsonTigers.com before. “People are always asking about the impact of winning a national championship,” Gantt said. “This gives you a pretty good idea.”
Eye of the Tiger
Most visited pages on ClemsonTigers.com
1. Roster
2. Schedule
3. Justyn Ross bio
4. Trevor Lawrence bio
5. Main football
6. Parade info
7. Will Swinney bio
8. Travis Etienne bio
9. Christian Wilkins bio
10. CFP coverage
■ Only 1.75 percent of users went to the site and exited without doing anything, what’s known as bounce rate. Typical bounce rate for ClemsonTigers.com hovers around 21 percent.
■ More than 80 percent of traffic on Clemson’s site came from Google searches. Of the 307,120 sessions, 250,768 (81.7 percent) resulted from search engines. “The Google search data and the number of new visitors really speak to the kind of spikes you can get and the importance of search engine optimization,” Gantt said. “When people were searching for ‘Clemson Tigers,’ our site was at or near the top.”
■ Merchandise sales at Shop.ClemsonTigers.com, the team store run by Fanatics, reached $118,000 in the 24 hours following the game. That number includes only purchases that resulted from a consumer clicking on an ad or link on the Clemson site. Sales paced 21 percent ahead of two seasons ago when the Tigers won their first CFP title.
■ Despite the heavy traffic, WMT said its servers held up. It took an average of 0.08 seconds to load a page.
