Jan. 21, 2010
IOWA CITY, Iowa – Big wins on the gridiron paired with the ramping up of the basketball and wrestling seasons was a powerful combination for hawkeyesports.com in the month of December.
The official world wide web site of the Iowa Hawkeyes – which is now in its seventh year of operation – set records for the number of pages downloaded and the number of unique visitors in the month with 2,012,473 pages viewed by 308,548 visitors.
The data for December comes on the heels of a string of record-setting months. hawkeyesports.com posted an all-time high of 3,225,314 pages downloaded during the month of October when the Iowa football team was making its move in the national polls and claiming its place in the first Bowl Championship Series standings of 2009.
Another 3,021,241 pages were downloaded in November when the Hawkeyes were staking their claim to a Top 10 finish, and the men’s and women’s basketball teams and Iowa’s defending national champion wresting team opened their 2009-10 seasons.
December marked the fifth consecutive month of record-setting numbers for unique visitors. The string started with 237,470 unique visitors in August and continued with 441,367 in September, another 554,767 in October and 470,578 in November.
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The data for December comes on the heels of a string of record-setting months. hawkeyesports.com posted an all-time high of 3,225,314 pages downloaded during the month of October when the Iowa football team was making its move in the national polls and claiming its place in the first Bowl Championship Series standings of 2009.
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“Successful teams paired with well-written, timely and entertaining editorial and multi-media is a powerful combination,” said Rick Klatt, the UI’s associate athletics director for external affairs.
Klatt said the traffic to hawkeyesports.com not only boosts awareness and appreciation for Iowa’s 24 varsity sports programs, but also raises the profile of the UI as a whole.
For example, during the report period of Oct. 26 to Nov. 1, 11,957 user sessions came to hawkeyesports.com from uiowa.edu. The total was 6,562 for the comparable week in 2008.
“The data shows a rather significant increase in the number of visitors coming to hawkeyesports.com directly from the UI’s official web site. That’s a positive for the institution,” he said.
“Sure, many of those visitors are fans of the Hawkeyes and parents of current student-athletes and talented high school student-athletes who are interested in our athletics,” Klatt continued. “But, it’s also very likely that the group includes alumni, other friends of the UI, and high school students working on the process of whittling down the list of schools they’re considering for their higher education.”