Google and IDP Seasonality
Full disclosure: in my day job I’m a media planner. I spend my time working out how people act and then trying to abuse that information to get my clients’ ads in front of the right people. There are plenty of interesting spots where my professional abilities and my love of fantasy football tend to overlap, and that’s what I want to look at today.
Google are taking over the world. We all know that’s true. They’ve got information on everything and everyone and know more about what you’ll do next than you do yourself. But the flipside of all that is we get to see some of that information and learn about people’s behaviour. So I started wondering what we could learn about the IDP world based on what people are searching for.
This is how all FF terms stack up against IDP:
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Pretty useless. The red line is all fantasy NFL terms. The blue line is IDP only. As we’d expect most search queries are NOT IDP related. Let’s break them out separately so we can see better:
First of all it’s worth noting that we’re looking at indices here rather than total searches. We saw earlier that IDP searches are a small number. This chart just shows how high the peaks are compared to other activity.
It’s clear that IDP searches are more concentrated. We see one big, annual spike just before the season starts and then very little activity for 11 months.
This is very different to the overall FF shape where we see the same spike just before the season but then significant volume for the first two-three months of each season. This is based on hypothesis but I think the data teaches us a few things:
- Most fantasy players just look for help right before the season. Only true degenerates like us are active all through the year
- There is no real spike around the time of the draft. Most people do not play in dynasty leagues and therefore do not participate in rookie drafts. This is fantasy data remember – not all NFL interest.
- There are small spikes each year in mid-October and November. These do not correspond to playoffs. I don’t really know what they are to be honest. Let me know if you’ve got any ideas.
The annual spike is driven by people looking for help with redraft rankings (of course). Here’s what it looks like for all rankings searches:
Pretty clear eh? You can at least see a small bump here in April time but mostly this is just trying to get the internet to tell you who to pick. I wonder what these people think their opponents are doing? Who knows; maybe their opponents aren’t doing anything.
If we look at IDP rankings searches it looks like this:
Very similar to the last chart. Note how similar it looks to the overall IDP shape we saw earlier. People search for IDP help right before their drafts with things like “best IDP LBs” and then ignore them for the rest of the season. This is a great opportunity that might even be useful in the dynasty world. Anyone obsessed enough to be reading this also knows how tough and time-consuming it is to track IDPs in-season. And there are relatively few resources that will do it for you. I think most IDP players (even in the dynasty sphere) stock up in the off-season and then mainly stick with the same players for the season. Obviously this implies that anyone who can speedily react to new news and changing circumstances has an advantage. And that’s what I want to do. Enable DLF readers to react faster and better in order to create incremental value.
Last but not least, here’s the data for IDP dynasty-related searches:
It’s so choppy because it’s based on so few searches. It’s just a low base of information. Anyone reading this article hopefully thinks more leagues should feature IDP, so I challenge you all to fix this. Go and talk about IDP in the dynasty world. Convert a friend to playing this season. Start a new league. It is the only real way to play fantasy football and it’s on us all to help grow it.
Thanks for reading.
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