As with the rising popularity of the Super Bowl and the NFL, visits to the NFL Sites custom category* have increased regularly over the course of the previous 3 seasons, each with a seasonal peak in December. Between 2009 and 2010 share of visits to NFL Sites increased 71% while between 2010 and 2011 visits increased 12%.

Yahoo! Sports NFL and FoxSports NFL were the biggest contributors to the category’s growth between December 2009 and December 2011. During this time, share of visits to the sites increased by 154% and 159%, respectively, against all categories.

By looking at the breakout of visitors to the NFL Sites category by DMA indexed against the online population, we can immediately see that 6 out of the top 10 DMAs to the category, when ranked by representation, were from Wisconsin during the previous 4 weeks when the Green Bay Packers were still in the playoffs. This indicates that these markets, presumably Packers fans, were much more likely to visit NFL Sites during the previous 4 weeks.

Filtering to show the DMAs for the Super Bowl-bound New York Giants (New York, NY) and New England Patriots (Boston et al, MA-NH), we can see that the New York DMA sent roughly twice the amount of visitors as the Boston DMA to the NFL Sites category during the previous 4 weeks. Despite this, visitors from the New York, NY DMA were 15% less likely to visit NFL Sites versus the online population whereas visitors from Boston were 30% more likely. When it comes to the NFL, Boston fans are a more engaged audience online.

Charting this index over the course of the 2011 season along with the wins and losses of the Giants and Patriots reveals that there is a correlation between the performance of the teams and their respective market’s level of engagement to NFL Sites. It will be interesting to see how these numbers change after the Super Bowl and if the losing team’s market will ‘bury their head in the sand’ following the game.

*The NFL Sites custom category contains: Yahoo! Sports NFL, Foxsports NFL, NFL.com, ESPN NFL, SportingNews NFL, CBSSports NFL, Sports Illustrated NFL, and ProFootballTalk.