Keeping score

DAN LEICHTENSCHLAG, CTO and COO of SportsLine.com, loves the action of helping run a high-powered sports Web site affiliated with organizations such as the NFL, the PGA Tour, and CBS Sports.

Although SportsLine.com could plug into the day’s most important sporting news, Leichtenschlag and his 80-person IT staff were spending too much time producing Web analytics reports for various business divisions in order to meet the company’s strategic sales and marketing needs. As a consequence, his staff had little time to improve SportsLine.com’s site.

In February, SportsLine.com outsourced its Web analytics needs to San Diego, Calif.-based WebSideStory and its HitBox Enterprise service. “We’ve grown so much over the last six years and we found it was going to be a big effort to [continue to] produce all these reports,” Leichtenschlag says. “We became efficient at counting pages on our Web sites, but WebSideStory provided a ton more data than we could customize ourselves around our site.

“With WebSideStory, there’s one less IT headache,” Leichtenschlag adds. “It’s eliminated the need to have to continually respond to requests to write reports.”

The company began in 1994 as SportsLine U.S.A. and changed its name to SportsLine.com in November 1999. It grew through a series of affiliations with major sports-related brands. Its most well-known Internet sports service, CBS SportsLine.com ( https://cbs.sportsline.com ), was formed in a deal with CBS Sports. SportsLine.com also has strategic relationships with Major League Baseball and the NBA, and it is the primary sports content provider for America Online and Netscape.

Big game traffic

Earlier this year, SportsLine.com collaborated with the NFL and Fox Sports, which broadcast the Super Bowl XXXVI game on television, to produce SuperBowl.com, the big game’s official Web site.

Fans going to any one of these sites can drill down to a dizzying number of pages to uncover info on teams, games, and player statistics. Fort Lauderdale, Fla.-based SportsLine.com regularly records huge numbers of page views following major sporting events, such as 1.5 billion hits recorded the weekend of the NFL season opening.

The business units’ demands to produce site traffic reports outpaced the customized report applications created in-house by the CTO’s staff. “We were getting requests from sales and others for the information,” Leichtenschlag says. “It became constant. But we really didn’t have the tools. Once the page views grew to a billion, it became hard to do it. [Before the outsourcing agreement,] we processed the log files each day to produce reports and customized a program we wrote ourselves. We’d make new files in the morning, but after busy [sports] days, it could take 24 hours to run. [WebSideStory] can do it in real time.”

Analytics ticker

Despite being routed through IT, Aberdeen Group reports that Web analytics is more of an art than a science. According to “Web Analytics: Translating Clicks into Business,” pitfalls exist in collecting data, determining whether data is hard or soft, and defining and applying business rules. So an increasing number of enterprises have decided that outsourcing Web analytics makes sense, industry analysts say.

“We expect that over the next four years, outsourcing of [Web] analytics may reach 30 percent of the entire analytics market,” says Matthew Berk, an analyst for site technologies and operations at the New York-based research and analysis company Jupiter Media Metrix.

“Outsourcing is a great way to get rid of the burden of processing massive log file data,” Berk says. “People are also turning to outsourcing because it takes the technology piece and puts it elsewhere so business people can focus on business and the marketing people can focus on marketing without going to the tech people and saying, ‘Can I have this custom report?’ ”

When sales and marketing are dependent on IT, the tech staff is distracted from their essential tasks. “If you do it yourself, you are in the business of collecting log files, maintaining software and upgrading software, and operating hardware and databases,” Berk says. “That’s something that’s not the core [of IT].”

A different analytics strategy

SportsLine.com tried out WebSideStory’s HitBox Enterprise first to track its NBA site, says Jay McCarthy, vice president of product strategy at WebSideStory. Already counting sports giant ESPN as a customer, WebSideStory was not worried about scaling to meet SportsLine.com’s needs, McCarthy adds.

“They came to us in a lot of pain,” McCarthy says. “They felt they were having to collect a huge amount of data in log files. We’d overcome issues of scalability in the past [with other customers] so when they came to us, we were ready.”

WebSideStory does not deploy log files to gather statistics. Rather it uses tags on the client side to monitor browser activity, McCarthy says. “We told [SportsLine.com] to take our Java script tags and place them on [their] content and that gets reported back to our datacenters, which get 30 billion page views a month.

“From tagging the content, we slice and dice the information into hundreds of statistics and analysis views,” McCarthy says.

The information available includes the number of page views on the site, number of visitors, and the paths taken by users through the site. HitBox also offers segmentation that divides visitors into logical, behavior-based groups that enables marketers to develop a strategy to attract customers. The information is available in real time.

Deploying the technology was a matter of writing and attaching some code — code that automatically attached the tags to SportsLine.com’s pages — and plugging in, Leichtenschlag says. “We had to add a little code to the end of our pages. It took a week or two to add the code to the applications that generated the pages.”

Now SportsLine.com executives are lining up to get their hands on the reports, Leichtenschlag adds.

“WebSideStory is providing the interface to drill into the data,” Leichtenschlag says. “We’ve got 40 or 50 people using WebSideStory for different things.”

The sales department looks at inventory reports, or how many page views were generated by a subject so the company can sell ads. “The products people are designing products to see what features are good, so we can drill down into the site to see what paths people took,” Leichtenschlag says.

And Leichtenschlag now has time tinker with and improve the company’s Web site. “It frees resources to be working on applications the customer is going to see and not the back office stuff they won’t see,” he says. “If I can find a way to outsource, I’m going to do that.”