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Rugby World Cup the 'most searched for' sporting event of 2015

10th December, 2015
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Richie McCaw (Photo: AFP)
Editor
10th December, 2015
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When you’re in the publishing business, search terms in sport are key – it tells you what real people are searching for, every single day.

I’m sure that the sporting public would also be similarly intrigued about what sports fans are looking for on in their search engine, so I’ve put together a little report on 2015 in sport, as it was seen by the two biggest traffic providers in search, Google and Bing.

The biggest sporting event of 2015? According to both search engines, the Rugby World Cup was the biggest single event of the year.

The two challengers for the title were the Cricket World Cup and football’s Asian Cup, which was won by the Socceroos.

Here’s a graph that gives you a nice breakdown of how the searches spiked during the year.

Obviously, this data is less informative about what search terms gained a lot of attention over the year as part of a ‘slow burn’, but it’s interesting nonetheless.

For those wondering where the NRL grand final is, I chose to include State of Origin, as all three peaks were bigger than the NRL’s showpiece, which was around 75% of the AFL grand final.

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The first thing that struck us about the data was that the Melbourne Cup didn’t appear on the charts of Google Trends due to lack of searches. I feel like it could be more of an anomaly due to the lack of sustained interest in the search term. That’s just my hypothesis based on Roar traffic, my experience as well as a few other things, but if you run a report for interest in the Melbourne Cup over 10 years, the spikes each year are prodigious.

Here’s a graph that compares the Melbourne Cup to the Rugby World Cup.

This illustrates my point, in that the big peaks of the Melbourne Cup are far bigger than the peak of the Rugby World Cup, which was in turn bigger than the Asian Cup, Cricket World Cup, and AFL grand final.

The big topics this year were fairly predictable – AFL, NRL, rugby, cricket. I have no idea how ‘Canberra’ slipped in there, but there you go.

If you look at sports over the entire year, AFL is by far the most popular search term, ahead of cricket then NRL. Obviously you don’t include State of Origin in that little mix, as it’s a different search term, but

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Bing’s breakdown of the data was that the Rugby World Cup was the biggest search term for users, with the AFL and NRL grand finals coming in next.

Bing EOY trends v06_preview

A Bing spokesman said the Rugby World Cup was the biggest event of the year.

“According to Bing, sport obsessed Aussies kicked the Rugby World Cup into the top search trend this year and the AFL grand final searches beat the NRL grand final by 18%.”

Interestingly, Bing’s data also included a number of people as part of their searches. Looking at Trends, Jarryd Hayne was big in Australia, but no one beats Ronda Rousey, who is the queen of the searches.

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That’s my analysis of the data, all of which is available if you have a look on Bing or Google Trends.

What do you make of it Roarers?

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