Friday, December 04, 2009
The Tempo-Free State
There are some interesting things that Google Analytics provides to web site owners. The thing I’m constantly fascinated with is the geographic breakdown of visitors. They give you a map that colors each state in various shades of green to indicate the relative frequency of visits from each state. That map isn’t terribly insightful, though. The top five states by visitors to this site since the start of the season breaks down like so…
1. New York
2. Illinois
3. California
4. Texas
5. North Carolina
From that list, we have four of the top five states by overall population. What I really want to know is which state’s citizens have the most interest in the site when scaled by population. Here’s how the top ten looks when dividing visits by total population of each state…
1. Kansas
2. Kentucky
3. Washington
4. North Carolina
5. Nevada
6. Virginia
7. Missouri
8. Illinois
9. Nebraska
10. Wisconsin
For the record, the District of Columbia produces over twice the per capita visitors that Kansas does. The list isn’t too surprising as there are a lot of hoop-heavy states in here. I’m not sure how Nebraska made the list, though. I’m pretty sure how Nevada did. Washington is an interesting find at #3. If we scaled by total basketball fans, we’d probably find the Emerald State would rank first. What’s the bottom five?
1. Louisiana
2. Arkansas
3. Hawaii
4. North Dakota
5. South Dakota
SEC country in general ranks low as they continue to be distracted by football. Every state in the southeast is in the bottom half of the nation in terms of per-capita interest. That’s part of the reason I’m running these stats now - to see where the serious hoops fans come from.
One other interesting bit of info is what pages are being hit the most. When I limit that list to the 2010 team pages, this is the kenpom top 25 in terms of popularity so far this year…
1. UNC
2. Duke
3. Kentucky
4. Kansas
5. Texas A&M
6. Washington
7. Texas
8. Syracuse
9. Wisconsin
10. Gonzaga
11. Missouri
12. Michigan State
13. Illinois
14. Minnesota
15. Purdue
16. Washington State
17. Marquette
18. Portland
19. Clemson
20. UNLV
21. Florida State
22. Memphis
23. Arizona
24. UCLA
25. Iowa
With Indiana, Michigan, and Northwestern falling just short of this list, the Big Ten actually has 9 teams in the top 30 and easily provides the biggest source of interest in the site.