So, who watches football anyway?

We spend a lot of time trying to understand our users and how changes and new features work (or not). One of the tools we use is Google Analytics which basically crunches a lot of statistics on visitors, page views and a lot more. One of the more recent additions is something called ‘intelligence’ which picks up big changes in activity on the site. Normally we don’t get many notifications, but for Sunday two big alerts appeared. This would normally cause some panic, until it became obvious that ‘normal’ does not apply when it comes to a World Cup Final.

Obviously, both countries saw a drop in the amount of usage of Just Landed on this day versus what would normally happen. The effect was marginal for any other geography. The stranger thing is that there is such a big difference between the two countries. Sunday is usually a ‘quiet’ day in terms of usage so, there may be other effects mixed in there.

Theories:

1. In the Netherlands people tend to go out earlier, so this would have had a bigger impact if they turned off earlier and they didn’t come home until late and then didn’t feel like turning on the computer.
2. In Spain many people watched the match at home and then went out, so they had more time beforehand.
3. Maybe in Spain less people use Just Landed on a Sunday in general and the ones which do are less affected by football.
4. Spanish people believed in the octopus, so carried on with normal life (like looking for a new job abroad or some info on immigration to Australia, etc) until the match started.
5. Dutch people didn’t believe in Paul so spent the day nervously consulting stats and football commentary online instead of visiting Just Landed.

If I had been asked to predict the above figures I would have said the effect would have been marginally stronger in Spain as they are slightly more fanatical than the Dutch.  I would have been very wrong and not challenging the cephalopod prediction dominance in any way.

PS: <rant> After the semi-final, I very nearly got run over in Madrid by a car with a flag-waving football passenger with the flag over the windscreen so you are either lucky (or not) to be able to read this. For the last two weeks it has been over 35 degrees at night so you need the window open and people have been partying in the street until late (for Spain, which means screaming and loud music until past 4am…). I  spent more time on the Internet on Sunday than normal (which is normally none) as I had to find something to do while a load of pampered hairdressers’ models knocked a ball around for a couple of hours. </rant> 😉 Still confused why this was so different between NL and ES though…