Baseball Ramps Up Its Web-Analytics EffortBaseball Ramps Up Its Web-Analytics Effort

Major League Baseball has made a lot of changes to its Web presence this year, and now it wants to know what those changes are yielding. MLB's Internet arm, Major League Baseball Advanced Media, has turned to NetIQ Corp.'s WebTrends Live service to get an idea of how fans are interacting with the league's MLB.com portal, as well as the 30 individual franchise sites. Through the service, MLB Advanced Media now has Web-based access to analytics that provide a snapshot of the visitor experiences, current to within the last 15 minutes.

In the past several months, the league has reorganized its Internet operations under MLB Advanced Media; launched a video-archiving feature built around technology from Virage Inc.; cut a deal with RealNetworks Inc. to create revenue from online radio broadcasts of games; and introduced E-commerce, promotional, and community features to its sites. WebTrends Live is giving the league a better idea of what features fans are accessing most frequently, letting it respond quickly by tailoring its sites to fans' tastes.

Kristen Fergason, marketing manager for MLB Advanced Media, says the league selected WebTrends Live in part because it provided a diverse, quick-response service that's designed to preserve consumer privacy. "We're not trying to look at individual users, see what they're doing, and personalize their experiences," Fergason says. "We're trying to get an overall look at the baseball fan."

Stephanie Bridges, product manager for the WebTrends Live service, says NetIQ--which acquired WebTrends earlier this year--has gained valuable experience through its work with an even larger-scale client, Petersons.com, an education portal run by Thomson Learning that links 6,000 individual school sites. Part of what makes the service attractive to such large operations, Bridges says, is that all of the analysis is conducted by WebTrends servers and stored on NetIQ databases, making the collection of analytics transparent to site operators, who access the data through a secure Web site. "All the customers have to do is place a JavaScript tag on all the pages they want to monitor," she says.

David Daniels, an analyst with Jupiter Media Metrix, says MLB's move to analytics technology that's embedded in Web pages is a logical step. Daniels says the quicker, more accurate data will let MLB more efficiently determine what content it should be caching at the edge of its network for easier retrieval.

The terms of NetIQ's deal with MLB Advanced Media were not divulged, but the company's pricing is based on page views, meaning that MLB is likely one of the company's higher-volume customers, based on the popularity of the league's sites. And because the installation was so simple and the reporting is so thorough, Fergason says MLB is committed to WebTrends Live: "We're planning on staying with them for a long time."