This weekend there was plenty of sporting drama to enjoy with another tense week in the Premier League, the conclusion of the Masters and the Grand National at Aintree.

With such a feast of sporting activity it’s not surprising that visits to the Hitwise Sports category increased by 14% in the week ending 9 April 2011. Football is almost always the key sport responsible for driving traffic to the Sports category but in the last week it was the Grand National that captured online attentions, with 8.6% of all search terms driving traffic to the category containing either the word ‘grand’ or ‘national’.

Not only did the Grand National affect traffic to the Sports category, but visits also spiked in the gambling industry, specifically for Sports Betting. With millions of punters checking for the latest odds and runners, visits to the Sports Betting category doubled on Saturday, accounting for over 1% of all UK Internet visits on that day.

Visits to the Sports Betting category on the day of the Grand National this year were 9% ahead of the last year’s event, showing that the event continues to grow in popularity with online gamblers. Of course, people were also visiting sports betting sites to bet on the outcome of the Masters, but the fastest moving search terms for the second week of April compared with the second week of March show how much the Grand National dominated betting behaviour online.

The list above just shows the top 10 fastest moving search terms, but you can see that they are all Grand National related. In fact, you have to go to the 54th fastest moving search term before you get a term which is non-horse related, with ‘masters odds’.
On such a big day for the sports betting companies, who was the top recipient of traffic on Grand National day?

Our data shows that Ladbrokes Sportsbook was the number one website in the Sports Betting category on 9 April 2011, overtaking Paddy Power on that day. The two websites were extremely close, with just 0.36% market share of visits separating them, but at the photo finish Ladbrokes just edged it, with 14% of the visits to the category.
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