For the week ending August 18^th, McKayla Maroney, the gold medal gymnast – who has been on the publicity circuit and making headlines for hanging with celebrities and the “Not Impressed” Meme – saw an increase in ten percentage points and claimed the top searched U.S. Olympian, accounting for 22.5% of searches. As we noted in our previous post, McKayla stayed on this list from the first week of the games and her share of searches grew a total of 222% since then.

Last week, appearing in the top were Serena Williams and Kobe Bryant, two Olympians who have popular professional athletic careers outside the Olympics and are considered very marketable. With the buzz from the U.S. Open which began earlier this week, Serena dominated the number one spot accounting for more than one-third of the U.S. Olympians searched. Serena maintains huge endorsement deals with companies such as Nike and Gatorade and has appeared on several Forbes lists – Top 100 Celebrities and Highest Paid Female Athletes.

Also of note, swimming medalist Ryan Lochte appeared back in the top ten for the first time since the week one of games. For the weeks ending August 18 and August 25 he held his position at four and five while others around him fluctuated. He had some buzz pre-games in the number two spot the week before the games stared – this could indicate people will remain interested in news about him moving forward. Search terms around Lochte seem to be skewed towards a heavy interest in his personal life, as many are related to having a girlfriend and his sister who recently made headlines for a controversial interview.

The Olympics are a great stage for athletes and marketers, and this year’s summer games were more digital than ever before. Many fans went online and to social networks for news about their favorite athletes, which is a great opportunity for all marketers, not just official sponsors. Marketers should see athlete endorsements as a huge opportunity to expand their reach, as well as put products in front of new audiences, so it is important to evaluate who would be a good candidate. Even if athlete endorsements don’t fit with your brand, search intelligence can help you identify consumer trends and opportunities that arise from big events, like the Olympics, in order to benefit from terms that drive traffic in your industry.

The week before the Olympics started, 17-year-old swimmer Lia Neal held the first spot with 21.71% of searches among all the 2012 U.S. athletes. During that same time, hurdler Lolo Jones leaped into the top ten with 1.93% of searches.

Source: Experian Hitwise

During the week of the opening ceremonies, Jones jumped 21 percentage points to the number one spot, accounting for 22.75% of searches among the athletes. With the mounting build-up set to take place over the next week at the aquatic center, swimmer Ryan Lochte took second over his teammate Michael Phelps in the race for most popular online, with 8.6% and 7.79% of searches respectively during the week ending July 28.

Source: Experian Hitwise

After the first week of competition was over and Phelps made Olympic history as the most decorated Olympian ever, just like his medal count his online popularity rose to number one with an increase of ten percentage points from the previous week. Searches for Michael Phelps accounted for 17.86% of searches for U.S. Olympians during the week ending August 4. Despite his popularity with the ladies, Lochte fell off the top ten list; he was defeated by some of the female swimmers who powered their way into the week’s top ten searched.  Also appearing were several members of the “Fab 5” – the women’s gymnastics team.

Source: Experian Hitwise

At the end of the second week of competition, Lolo Jones reclaimed her number one position with 12.54% of searches for the week ending August 11. Swimming events ended and track and field events took over this week, which is reflected in Phelps’ drop from the top ten and sprinter Tyson Gay’s appearance in the number two spot with an increase of 10 percentage points from the previous week. Other stand out performers this week were  gymnast McKayla Maroney – whose “not impressed” photo after winning a silver medal went viral – and Hope Solo from the U.S. Women’s soccer team; both made it in the top five.  Beach volleyball star Misty May-Traynor also held on in the top five, although she dropped from the number three position she held the previous week.

Source: Experian Hitwise

These search results help athletes and marketers alike. Now that the athletes continue onto publicity tours and endorsement deals, they have a chance to make a name for themselves and their sport, and earn a good paycheck. For marketers it’s an opportunity to see who captured the interest of Americans and might be a good candidate for endorsement. Even if you won’t be hiring an Olympian, this kind of search intelligence can help you learn popular terms and benefit from those that drive traffic in your industry.

Which Olympians will sustain popularity as excitement of the games subsides? We’ll continue our coverage to find out.

For more online consumer trends, visit the Hitwise Online Trend Center.

There was never really any question that the Olympics would attract a rich and demographically diverse audience of consumers. A more pressing question for Olympics sponsors and advertisers is “how good of a match is the audience with respect to the characteristics of my potential brand users?” In other words, “to what extent will I be reaching the type of consumer who is most likely to be interested in my brand?” Tools like the Experian Ad Relevancy Score help to answer these questions. The score, developed from television viewing behaviors and purchase data collected by Experian Simmons, is derived from profiles of actual brand users compared to the corresponding profile of the Summer Olympics television viewing audience. The higher the score the more benefit and overall sales lift that can be hypothetically derived by the advertiser from placing spots that reach this audience. Think of the score as a general measure to quantify the degree to which the ad will be seen by an audience that is most appropriate and relevant for the brand being advertised. Scores are benchmarked against an average of 100.

After applying the Experian Ad Relevancy Score to a subset of key Summer Olympics sponsors and advertisers, we found that the highest scores are attributed to airline brands. The top five include United Airlines (142), American Airlines (133), American Express (129), Delta Airlines (128), and Citibank (126).

United’s investment in the Summer Olympics appears to be a match made in heaven. The brand’s top score of 142 means that the Summer Olympics viewing audience is 42% more likely to be comprised of consumers who are United flyers. United has been the official airline of the U.S. Olympic team since 1984 and clearly has a nice marketing match with this global event. Nike and McDonald’s, also official sponsors of the U.S. Olympic Team, had scores of 109 and 107, respectively.

A more in-depth analysis and profile of Summer Olympics enthusiasts provides further evidence of a strong connection between interest in the London Games and airline travel. Experian’s Mosaic® USA lifestyle segmentation solution shows that consumer segments including Kids and Cabernet, Jet Set Urbanites and Silver Sophisticates, are among those with a 50% or greater likelihood to be avid fans of the Summer Olympics. Consumers from all three of these segments also have a high propensity to be frequent flyers.

Interested in ad relevancy? Take a look at posts comparing advertisers to audience for these events:

NCAA Tournament

Academy Awards

Super Bowl

Team Great Britain’s fan page has grown rapidly from less than 100,000 fans on the eve of the games to almost three quarters of a million fans (705,000) in little over a week. Meanwhile, the longer established US Olympic Team page has grown only two per cent from 2.2 million since the games began.

Whilst a handful of athletes such as Tom Daley (600K+ fans), Jessica Ennis (330K+ fans) and Andy Murray (700K+ fans) have their own highly engaged fan bases, many other GB athletes don’t have any or a sizeable fan base – and so Team GB has picked up much of the conversation space.

The most popular UK posts are those that report on medal wins – especially the gold medals. Team GB’s poster girl Jessica Ennis’ heptathlon gold tops the UK charts with close to a quarter of a million Likes on the team page. Posts on Ennis’ own page also got close to 200,000 Likes following her win. After Ennis it was Mo Farah’s win in the 10,000 metres, shock wins for Helen Glover and Heather Stanning in the rowing and Greg Rutherford in the long jump that really captured GB fans’ attention.

By comparison, posts about those missing out on medals drove much less activity. Tom Daley and Peter Waterfield’s disappointment in the diving earned Team GB only 16,000 Likes. By contrast, Tom Daley’s apology to his fans on his own page pulled in a flurry of support with over 14,000 comments from his fans and over 125,000 Likes, considerably more than on either Team GB or Team USA fan pages.

Winning is definitely driving fans to Like on these Facebook team pages. Social media is allowing people to really be part of the Games and share in the overall excitement, and it will be interesting to see how brands tap into athletes’ new found popularity.

The table below shows the top 30 most popular posts (based on likes and comments) on the official TeamGB and US Olympic Team Facebook pages.

Big hitters aside how are the rest of the Olympic athletes doing in harnessing Facebook to increase fan engagement and build excitement during the games? The chart below shows how 400+ pages associated with Olympic athletes, teams and sports are performing (these are pages listed on Facebook’s own Olympic page – facebook.com/pages/olympics). We have plotted the number of fans each page has against the level of engagement for the page over the last week (using Facebook’s ‘People Talking About This’ metric – which provides a measure of number of new fans and people engaging with the page in the past week).

The tables below show the top 30 most popular posts (based on likes and comments) on the official TeamGB and US Olympic Team Facebook pages.

In the left hand chart we show all of these pages, and the true giants dominate the picture with many more millions of fans and hundreds of thousands more people engaging with them than the vast majority of other athletes and Olympic pages. Track athletics take second place to football stars such as Beckham (20 million fans) and Neymar Jr (6 million fans), US NBA basketball players (Kobe Bryant, LeBron James, Pau Gassol), and Tennis pros (Roger Federer, Rafa Nadal) who rank as the biggest players on Facebook. Usain Bolt has more fans than any other track athletics star (7 million fans), with swimmer Michael Phelps running a close second (5 million fans). By showing page size against the level of engagement (People Talking About This) one can immediately see where pages are receiving a disproportionate amount of engagement and excitement given the size of their fan base (i.e. those that are further up and to the left in the chart). Team GB and the US Olympic Team fan pages are both successfully creating engagement at levels above what you would normally expect for a page of their size. As we drill into the smaller pages (see the scatter chart on the right – which shows the detail for smaller pages), we also see that both the Japanese and Australian Olympic Teams – whilst smaller, are also driving engagement levels above other Fan pages of similar sizes. These national team pages appear to be hubs of conversation for fans in each country – perhaps not surprising given the number of athletes and events who do not have acitve pages themselves, or may have several, including unofficial pages which can cause confusion for even the most ardent supporter. Furthermore, most athletes have locked down the ability for fans to post stories on their pages, and instead fans interact by liking or commenting what Usain and others have to say in their posts – whereas on the Team pages, fans can generate their own posts and kick off new stories and conversations with their network. Team GB posts 15-25 times a day – and so far the double gold for rowers Helen Glover and Heather Stanning have been the most popular with 80 thousand likes per post. In contrast, the Team US posts more sparingly between 2 and 4 times per day focusing on their medal wins – with posts about Phelps’s 4x200m freestyle, which made him the most decorated Olympian of all time grabbing almost 200 thousand likes.

Whilst the US Olympic team’s page (2.3 million fans) is far bigger than Team GB’s (373 thousand fans) – Team GB has been the most successful with these games so far (again not surprisingly being on home soil) – growing almost five fold since the beginning of July (and over three times in just the past week), and the US Olympic Team’s page has grown by 8%. As we can see in the chart below, whilst GB still have a fair way to go to catch up in terms of fans, in terms of engagement (People Talking About), the GB and US team pages are neck and neck with almost quarter of a million people engaging with each page in the past week. Traffic to the official Team GB site also increased by 150 per cent in the last week

Teams aside, many athletes do manage to leverage Facebook to create and share in the excitement of their fans, and although many of the most prominent ones are outside of the track or pool – Bolt and Phelps are worldwide sensations with many millions of Facebook fans, and it will be interesting to see whether the games generate a million more fans with new audiences or whether they have reached saturation. In Great Britain, until the eve of the games Tom Daley and Jessica Ennis – two much more local stars had similarly sized fan bases of about 100 thousand fans. Tom’s page has since soared to close to half a million fans, growing by almost 3 times in the past week, and the level of engagement is greater than many of the biggest athletes on Facebook.

Tom regularly updates his Facebook status via his mobile in the run up to and following events – posting every day during July. When Daley and teammate Pete Waterfield missed out on their synchronised medal, he quickly posted to Facebook as to being “#gutted so sorry to everyone” – generating 120 thousand likes and 10 thousand comments from fans – mostly expressing their pride and wishing him luck for his individual event (see word cloud below of top words in the comments appearing on that post). His strong fan base also rallied with 170 thousand likes when he posted back in May for a fundraising night in memory of his late father. When we cut this with Experian Hitwise data we see that during the past weekend Tom Daley was the most searched for athlete by the UK internet population and searches for him tripled between Sunday and Monday. On Monday in particular Tom Daley featured in 1 in every 300 UK internet searches with 7% of searches including the word ‘twitter’. Finally 1 in every 17 searches for Twitter included the words ‘tom daley’.

In contrast, the history making Phelps has a much more laid back approach to Facebook, posting every couple of days in the run up to the games – he hasn’t yet updated his profile since the opening weekend of the games – presumably too busy on Twitter and competing – when he posted a congratulations to Ryan Lochte on his performance and was self deprecating about his own performance, garnering a good but by no means legendary 100+ thousand likes. UK online searches did increase by 467% for Phelps at the back end of last week.

We will be watching how engagement on Facebook evolves over the coming weeks and whether national team and sports pages and others manage to retain engagement once the games are over.

NOTE ON DATA IN CHARTS: There are some variations between data presented in the charts due to variations in timing of when Facebook data is available for different metrics – and in some cases we have updated live data from pages to provide the most up to date view.

The Olympic teams’ site visitors tend to be men.  The swimming site attracted the largest share of male visitors at 60%. Basketball and track & field close behind with 58% of visitors being male.

A lifestyle and psychographic look at site visitors shows varying profiles for the fans of each sport.  Using Experian’s Mosaic USA lifestyle segmentation solution, we are able to better understand what the fans of each sport are all about. The following are the top lifestyle segments driving traffic to the respective websites.

At the top of the podium for the USA swimming site is the Booming with Confidence target:

• Prosperous, established couples in their peak earning years living in suburban homes. This group is upscale, experienced travelers, brand-aware, loyal and sports enthusiasts.

For track & field, the Promising Families group leads the way:

• Young couples with children in starter homes living child-centered lifestyles. They have solid incomes and busy lives. They are young and active – especially with child centric activities, team sports are a big part of their lives as well as other activities for the children.

And the USA basketball site has two groups that are most interested in the latest dream team – Booming with Confidence (described above) and Suburban Style.

• Middle-aged, ethnically-mixed suburban families and couples earning upscale incomes. Suburban Style have rich leisure lives and enjoy family centric activities and sports. They are community minded and brand conscious.

Segmenting the lifestyle of a website’s visitors helps to us to create a rich profile of each site’s audience. For advertisers, it presents an opportunity to target audiences that are most relevant to their product or service and create timely, tailored campaigns for each segment.

Related posts: Track ahead of the competition – who will make it to the finish line?; Let the marketing games begin

USA Track & Field took the gold in consumer interest with the highest visits from June 21^st to July 1^st, when qualifying trials were held. USA Swimming took silver , as their trials were held at the same time.  The peak in traffic was during the week ending 6/30, when most of the finals and interesting competitions occurred. Traffic to USA Basketball is still rising. Though the team did not have official trials, it held exhibition games against other nations’ teams.

Source: Experian Hitwise

Where else do the fans spend their time online?

Although the USA Track & Field site clocked the most visitors during trials – the USA Swimming site  visitors are more enthusiasts of the sport. Four of the top ten downstream sites from the Olympic swimming site were related to the sport.  After visiting USA Swimming, fans went to the Omega Timing site, the official timekeeper of the Olympic games. The site hosted live timing and the results of the trials. And, one-third of the traffic to Omega’s site was new visitors; a big win for Omega. With a spike in traffic of 57% along with 49% new visitors during the final week of trials, their sponsorship of the games is successfully working as an acquisition channel.  Additionally, there was interest in the USA Gymnastics site as visitors jumped over to this site from the swimming site and about one-third of those visitors were new to the gymnastics site.

Source: Experian Hitwise

The USA Track & Field visitors most often went to search engines and social media sites after the site, with only a few sites related to the sport.

USA Basketball visitors went to a variety sites including, ESPN, Netflix and Culver’s fast food restaurant. Leveraging the sites visited after your site to find sites and products where your audience has an affinity helps to develop a more targeted marketing campaign.

Successful marketers are like Olympic athletes – it takes focus, preparation and knowing your competition to win.  By knowing the interests and site behavior of your customers and having insights into the campaigns of your competitors – you can win the competition in your industry.  Timely, accurate data is invaluable to ensure you can react to changing behaviors and emerging trends in your industry. Hold on to your gold or break out from silver by staying ahead of the competiton and in front of your best customers and prospects.

From archery and athletics (that’s Olympics-talk for track & field) to weighlifting and wrestling, there are 32 medal sports on the Olympic program for the 2012 London Games. It’s a pretty sure bet that the most popular events from a television ratings point of view will include gymnastics, swimming, and track & field. Since Americans would most prefer to watch events where their fellow Americans have the greatest chance of winning (out of 921 all-time Summer Olympics gold medals won by U.S. athletes, 60% have come from these combined disciplines), it’s no coincidence that NBC will devote the lion’s share of primetime network programming to these premiere attractions.

The Olympics craze that is soon to be unleashed has advertisers in the starting blocks and at the ready to launch their own Olympic-size marketing campaigns. The composite television and online audience for the Olympics will span a wide range of demographic characteristics.  It’s one of few sporting events that captures the interest and attention of as many women as men. In other words, lots and lots of people will watch. That means these Games will reach a massive audience and represent an advertising bonanza the likes of which marketers have rarely seen before.

How Should Marketers Capitalize?

Despite its obvious drawing power, a target marketing approach still plays a prominent role in determining the likely success or failure of any Olympic-themed marketing campaign. So, what is an Olympics advertiser to do? What types of consumers are more or less likely to be tuning and checking in?

In keeping with the Olympic spirit, we undertook our own exercise of classifying U.S. households into gold, silver, and bronze categories based on their overall interest level in viewing and following the Games. The analysis is based on television viewing behaviors captured by Experian Simmons.  The segments are drawn from Experian’s Mosaic USA lifestyle segmentation solution.  Topping the podium are such key targets as Platinum Prosperity, Fast Track Couples and Picture Perfect Families.  Here’s a look at six medalist segments (ranked by overall interest in the Summer Olympics), all of which have an above average propensity to be frequent viewers of the Games compared to the overall population.

1. Platinum Prosperity. They see themselves as citizens of the world with a strong global consciousness and keen interest in international affairs. How’s that for embodying the Olympic movement? A bit older (mainly in their 50s and 60s) and wiser (they are 4.3 times more likely to have earned a graduate-level degree), these wealthy empty-nesters and retirees are a prime target for marketers of luxury goods, products, and services. Many are also fitness fanatics who belong to health clubs, enjoy aerobic sports and watch professional sports events. More than twice as likely to own a second home, they travel frequently both domestically and abroad.
2. Picture Perfect Families. Due to their mainstream media tastes, you’ll most likely find members of this segment taking in the Olympics parked in front of the family room HDTV. Predominantly in their mid-30s to 50s, married and college-educated, the buying decisions of these consumers are heavily influenced by teenagers who largely rule the nest.
3. Fast Track Couples. Younger, career-focused, upscale couples who have recently started a family or are on the verge of having children, these time-starved households are frequently on the go. Convenience is critical to meeting their discriminating demands. That means they are highly likely to take the Olympics everywhere with them by following the Games online and via their mobile devices.
4. Kids and Cabernet. Highly affluent, well educated, and chock full of moms with kids, these brand-conscious suburbanites are the next best thing to a marketer’s “dream team.” They like their products family-sized. Preferring SUVs outfitted with the latest technology, they make frequent trips to athletic fields and school activities. Parents in this segment also spend a significant portion of their leisure time engaged in athletic pursuits including tennis, golf, skiing, and biking.
5. Wired for Success. An eclectic collection of younger and digitally savvy adults, these consumers will lead the charge to a customized Olympics viewing experience by taking full advantage of online and video streaming options. Without children, these households have plenty of discretionary income to spend on the latest fashions and electronic gadgets. Many plan their shopping trips online before making a purchase decision. They are prime targets for Olympics advertisers planning to utilize social media marketing initiatives.
6. Status Seeking Singles. Highly influential among their peers, these urban, upwardly-mobile singles latch onto the latest fads and fashion trends. Mainly in their 30s and 40s, unattached and childless, they strive to be “in the know.”  Their penchant for a highly social lifestyle and all things digital makes them among the heaviest users of smartphones, tablets, Facebook and Twitter.

Companies whose products and services appeal to users in these key segments – think travel, electronics, financial products, retail and more – can take full advantage of a captive Olympics audience via many touchpoints. Let the Games, and the marketing mania, begin.