Sportsline.com Using Data Warehousing and Database Marketing

Sports Line.com, founded in 1994, is the Internet's leading website in Sports media and e-commerce related to sporting goods products. The content of the website includes one million pages of sports related news, information, merchandise, magazine subscriptions and other services. The site also produces the content for major league baseball, the European NFL league and the PGA tour. In addition it provides sports news for many of the major Internet Service Providers including Netzero, America Online, Excite and Netscape.

(About Sportsline.com) Much of the company's success is due to the integration of data warehousing and database marketing into its' e-business solution. The company uses this technology to achieve the following; manage enormous amounts of data, refine their systems to keep up with the rapidly emerging Internet, incorporate data from various sources and analyze incoming data in real time. (Matrix) This allows Sportsline.com to store important data such as customer names, demographics, and purchasing tendencies, which provides the company with the information that they need to market effectively.

In January of 2001 Sportsline.com announced that it had broken a record in the fourth quarter of 2000 when its' data warehouse technology recorded 2.8 billion page views. Which means that 30.2 million people visited the site per day and over 100 million a week. The firms' data warehouse also found that there were over 3.5 million registered and active users of the site in the fourth quarter of 2000. The data warehouse technology also enables Sportsline to compare data from previous quarters.

The comparison found that there were only 11.6 million page views in the same quarter of the previous year, which marked an increase of 161% in a single year. In addition the comparison found that registered users had increased 118% from 1.6 million in the previous year. (Sportsline.com Has Record Quarter For Page Views) The increase in traffic on the site allows the company to use database marketing to attract customers.

Founder and CEO of Sportsline.com Michael Levy Noted, "This growth strengthens our ability to offer integrated sales and marketing packages to our customers using cutting-edge technology to deliver their message to our highly attractive customers.

With all of our baseball fantasy products being offered free of charge and the strong promotion we'll receive from CBS Sports during the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship, we anticipate being able to build on this momentum." (Sportsline.com Has Record Quarter For Page Views) More recently the company has had to update its' data warehousing technology to meet the growing demands of users; the site has recorded as many as 150 million page views within a two hour period.

The increase in users of the site prompted the company to examine its' traffic analysis software that had been in use for six years they discovered that there old technology could not meet the needs of the rapidly growing increase. Sportsline decided to outsource and contracted with WebSideStory to use its' HitBox technology. (Mollison) This outsourcing proved to be of great success to the company. Sportsline found that the new system allowed for many comprehensive reports on consumer spending habits and time spent on the site.

In addition the HitBox technology allows SportsLine to merge data and get minute-by-minute reports to show user activity on the site. This has proved to be beneficial not only for SportsLine but also for its' sponsors. Jim Bracken of sports line states, "We may have a particular area of our site that's sponsored..

If our goal is to have that sponsor reach a few million people, we may need to be able to react quickly to the data." This ability to react quickly to the data that is gathered aids the company greatly in creating new and more effective business solutions.(Mollison) The firm's aggressive use of database marketing allows Sportsline to offer advertisers access to a targeted audience and provides for several marketing solutions including advertising, marketing specials and sponsorships.

In July of 2000 Sportsline announced that it would be implementing a new strategy in an effort to generate revenue through database marketing. This strategy included offering its entire product line of Commissioner.com fantasy products to the public at no charge; the games ordinarily cost anywhere from $19 to $99. Sportsline hoped that this would increase the amount of people that use the site and thus increase the amount of potential customers. (SportsLine.com, Inc.

To Offer All Fantasy Products Free of Charge) Mark Mariana, who is the sites' president of sales and marketing stated the following, "Our Commissioner.com fantasy products have long.