Ahead of NCAA March Madness, Bracket Builders See 400% Traffic Spike

The 2024 NCAA March Madness kicks off on March 19, running for about three weeks through April 8th. While the players compete on the court, countless other competitions happen outside the arena.

March Madness Brackets are as popular as the actual tournament itself. Fans fill out their predictions for the NCAA Division Men’s Basketball Tournament, guessing the outcome of each game and picking winners from the first round all the way to the championship. Points are awarded for each correct prediction, and the person with the most accurate bracket wins.

There are various ways to fill out a March Madness bracket, but in recent years, online bracket challenges hosted by sports networks have been the most popular.

For this analysis, we focused on four of the most used:

• ESPN Tournament Challenge: Users can create and join groups, compete against friends, and track their brackets throughout the tournament. It’s one of the most popular online bracket challenges and offers prizes for top performers.
• Yahoo Sports Tourney Pick’em: Users can create private groups, join public leagues, and compete for prizes.
• CBS Sports Bracket Games: Features multiple bracket challenges, including the “Bracket Challenge” and the “Round by Round” game.
• NCAA March Madness Bracket Challenge: The official NCAA website also hosts its own bracket challenge, allowing fans to fill out brackets and compete for prizes.

So, which brackets are most popular among fans? Let’s look at last year’s data to anticipate the web trends we’ll likely see unfold in 2024.

Key takeaways:

• ESPN’s Tournament Bracket is the most popular. Last year, the bracket segment of espn.com received 6.7M visits in a 25-day period (March 11 – April 4, 2023), encompassing the entire tournament and a few days before.
• ESPN’s digital bracket received 86% more traffic than its second closest competitor, CBS Sports (1.4M), 159% more than NCAA (549.8K), and 183% more than Yahoo Sports (279.3K).
• Traffic to the bracket website rises and falls throughout the competition. The highest peak occurred during the tournament’s first week on Thursday, March 16, 2023. Traffic to all four segments rose on average 393.6% week-over-week. The second highest peak occurred the following weekend, between Thursday, March 23 – Sunday, March 26.
• ESPN’s bracket earns 63.8% of the traffic share during the 25-day period, followed by CBS Sports (25.8%), NCAA (7.5%), and Yahoo Sports (2.9%).
• Internal referrals drive the most traffic to all four bracket segments, followed by organic search and then direct.

This is a developing story. As March Madness 2024 begins, check back to see updated stats for this year’s digital bracket competition.

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Report By: Molly Winik, Senior Content Marketing Manager

Methodology

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by Molly Winik

Senior Content Marketing Manager

Molly has 8+ years of experience in marketing, content creation, and PR. Her work has been featured on Mention, The Times of Israel, and Culture Trip.