Baseball Gets Predictive To Drive Online Ticket Sales

Everything about MLB.com is big league. The official site of Major League Baseball, it's visited by six to seven million fans per day and has 15 million registered users. Together with the 30 official team sites built on the same infrastructure, MLB.com has 10 terabytes of information online, including scores, stats, news and live and archived audio and video of every game.

Until recently, however, baseball was still in the bush leagues when it came to understanding site visitors. "We had a great deal of traffic, but very little intelligence," says Bob Bowman, CEO of MLB Advanced Media, which runs the MLB's digital media. "We wanted to gather data and predict what visitors to the sites are going to do in real time because if they don't find it in five minutes, they're gone."

Figuring out what interests a site visitor is one thing, but doing it in real time and predicting resulting behavior is as difficult and as rare as a no hitter. Yet most sites don't need that kind of performance to win at e-commerce.

In April, MLB Advanced Media capped off a year-long effort to get to real-time prediction. It starts with Web analytics from Omniture, which collects data on site traffic and feeds it to a SAS database. SAS software then analyzes individual visitor behavior in real time and predicts to which campaigns they're likely to respond.

"We're getting really good insight into our visitors, and we're pursuing classic marketing goals based on [customer] recency, frequency and monetary value," says vice president and chief architect Justin Shaffer.

Baseball previously relied on bulk e-mail messages, banner ads and mass advertising but is now targeting e-mails and ads based on individual purchase behavior and site navigation. Even if users aren't registered, the sites can target individuals based on current and past navigation traced to cookies.

"The majority of companies using Web analytics aren't tracking and predicting individual behavior in real time," says JupiterResearch senior analyst Eric Peterson. Peterson cites SPSS as one of the few other vendors pursuing such projects, but beyond megamarketers such as HP, Dell, Amazon and eBay, he wonders if there's a payoff. "The investment might be a rounding error for baseball, but for low-margin retailers in competitive markets, they're likely to get more value at a lower cost from gross visitor segmentation."

MLB Advanced Media wouldn't divulge its investment, but the big push is on filling seats in stadiums, and to that end it recently bought Tickets.com. "The acquisition gave us control of the [online ticket] inventory, and we expect to develop innovative approaches," says Shaffer. By late March, baseball had already sold 10 million tickets online, 5.4 million ahead of last year's pace.

At the clubs' discretion, discounted ticket offers can now be sent to best prospects via e-mail or text messaging as late as a few hours before a game. Marketers at each club can use SAS to see scorecard views of team merchandise and ticket sales, site traffic and rolled-up stats by day, series, month and year so they can judge the effectiveness of marketing campaigns.

MLB Advanced Media's impressive infrastructure includes Sun servers and storage at data centers in New York and Chicago. Digital assets are managed by Open Text's Artesia software. The video content alone generates 100 terabytes of data that must be managed and archived each season.

— Doug Henschen