RaceInsights Into Bayshore Marathon

Bayshore Marathon opened this morning. This is a very popular Marathon, Half Marathon and 10K in Traverse City, MI. The Half Marathon is already sold out, and when they opened at 9:00 this morning there were a crush of people waiting to register. This year, they have RaceInsights to see what is happening:

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They can see how many page views there have been. They know their email accounted for 649 registrations and over 10,000 page views – so they know they have a receptive email list.

They can also drill down into their Referral sources by clicking on “Referral”:

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What jumps out right away is that Google accounts for nearly half of the registrations (and Google Canada accounted for 21! – see the last referral on the list above).

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Surprisingly, Bing (162) is ahead of Facebook (52 desktop + 46 Mobile). This is for a Facebook page that is well maintained with over 8,000 Likes and multiple posts this morning.

HalfMarathons.net is also a big source – with 134 people finding the registration path from that website. They are a RunSignup Affiliate, and automatically list all Half Marathons on their site that are listed on RunSignup (that’s right, Bayshore didn’t have to do any scrambling to list on many calendars). RunningintheUSA also was a source for registrations a bit further down the list, as well as a Playmakers, a Michigan running store that uses the RunSignpp Calendar Widget on their store website.

Oh, and RaceInsights is helping them track the number of impressions their sponsors are getting as well. With over 19,000 impressions, their sponsors will be very happy!

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Tech Corner

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Doctor Ron of RaceInsights fame, aka Jeff Kohart, one of our developers

So how is all this information collected? Well we have more than just Doctor Ron (Jeff Kohart is one of our developers who likes to think of himself as Doctor Ron). Every time one of their webpages is hit by a browser, we collect the information from the browser, like the referral website and store that in our Analytics Engine. We then set a cookie that keeps track of where that person came from, and when they get to the confirmation page we record the transaction amount and the # of registrations and attribute that to the original referral source.

And this all happens super fast. At the peak during the 60 seconds between 9:01 and 9:02, there were 1,041 people who registered, with more than 130 pages per second being counted and recorded!

This graph is from our New Relic monitoring tool that shows average page load time participants are experiencing before and after 9:00 AM. It stayed pretty consistent, right around 2 seconds. The network delay and browser processing on your phone or computer is the majority of that 2 seconds, with our server averaging 188 milliseconds (0.188 seconds) per request.

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Summary

Races are loving the new RaceInsights. They are truly understanding what is happening with their race. Not only can you see registration referral information, you can also see detailed demographic information, registration information, customer loyalty, and more. And we give you the tools to take real action.

Special Thanks to Jason Whittaker and the Traverse City Track Club for letting us share their information so others can learn! Let us know if your race would be open to a case study!

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