U.S. markets may have risen by 15% in the last 3 weeks, but as anyone who works in an office knows, overall employee productivity in late March is pretty pathetic. The primary culprit: the NCAA tournament. Sure, many of our colleagues don’t even bother coming to work, fully accepting their addiction to heart-pounding hoops action, support of their alma maters, and the religious scrutiny of their brackets. Those who don’t stay home, however, are shamelessly plugged in at the office, scouring the web for real time scores, news, and game highlights.

With this year’s NCAA tourney wrapping up last night in Motown, what better time to look back at the past few weeks of March Madness and see which of the major online hoops properties managed to effectively attract and engage passionate fans, crazed bracketologists, and everyone in between. Throw a high unemployment rate into the mix, and the bracket traffic data really starts to sizzle. So which site came out ahead as king of the online court? I took a close look at NCAA bracket pages for ESPN, CBS Sports, and Yahoo! to find out.

Week 1 traffic to all three properties showed a strong year over year uptick, with ESPN taking the lead in 2009 from CBS, the 2008 leader. No shocker that overall week 1 traffic volumes eclipsed week 2 numbers: clearly a result of heated bracket building and heavy first round action in the tournament’s first week.

While ESPN reigned supreme in the 2009 battle for bracket builders, CBS proved that in the end, content is the real name of the game. Combining live streaming video coverage of games on site, exclusive highlights and commentary, weekly contests, and user generated content, the CBS bracket site averaged 7.8 pages per visit in Week 1 of the tournament, 20% stickier than ESPN at 6.5 pages per visit. Week 2 brought more of the same, with CBS closing the Unique Visitors gap and maintaining a clear engagement advantage.

Big month ahead: Major League Baseball kicks off, NBA postseason begins, and NHL playoffs get started. We’ll be sure to keep our eyes on the Fantasy ball, and keep you posted on the biggest stories out there in the online sporting world.

My brackets were busted and my teams were ousted more rounds ago than I’d like to admit, but the tournament has again been a success for CBS Sports. While other networks have a more balanced sports calendar throughout the year, the NCAA Basketbally Tournament is the annual event that stands above the rest for CBS.

The varied Fox coverage of the NFL, MLB, College Football BCS, and Nascar span nearly the entire calendar year, and provide a more regular flow of traffic to their sports site than CBS does. With bracket management, tournament fantasy options as well as live coverage of the games, CBS does leverage its online channel well during its few weeks in the spotlight though. This could serve as a lesson to other networks in how to best utilize their sports sites in coordination with their TV coverage, as well as a lesson to CBS that success in one marquee event is good, but it takes more than that to stay top of mind with viewers throughout the year.

Check back later this week for more on the NCAA Tournament.

Recently Ford Motor Company announced an online promotion in which contestants have a chance to win a new 2010 Fusion Hybrid along with a trip for two to NASCAR’s Championship weekend in Miami. Contestants register at a site developed by Ford called weraceyouwin.com. Ford is promoting the sweepstakes on social networking sites Facebook and Twitter.

Certainly this promotion plays off Ford’s heavy involvement in racing, but is the Fusion prospect that in tune with what’s going on in the world of NASCAR? And to what extent does leveraging Facebook and Twitter further the cause?

Assuming Ford is targeting mid-size car intenders, people who recently bought or shopped for a mid-size car, Compete was able to assess the extent to which this consumer segment visits nascar.com and the extent racing enthusiasts are on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter. And if they are, will social networking sites reach them?

As the result of a collaboration with JD Power and Associates, Compete has been able to match our panel of online consumers and their behavior with vehicle purchase data from JD Power. One result of this collaboration is the Online Media Behavior Study which tracks the current online activity of recent new vehicle purchasers. With this tool we are able to isolate mid-size sedan purchasers to determine their propensity to visit nascar.com as well as other sites like Facebook and Twitter to see if the weraceyouwin.com promotion has the potential to effectively reach the right prospects.

At first glance, one could get the impression that this promotion might be better suited to another group of prospects than mid-size car purchasers. Using January 2009 data, indexing mid-size car purchasers’ propensity to visit nascar.com against the internet browser population, we find they are less likely to visit the racing site. However, December and January is the off-season for NASCAR, with no racing until the season opening Daytona 500 in early February.

Take a look at what happens when we use data from Summer 2008, the height of the NASCAR season. The mid-size car index jumps to 167 suggesting that just maybe mid-size car purchasers need to hear the roar of the engines and the smell of racing fuel to get their interest up. When they do, look out. They’re big fans.

In fact, interest in NASCAR increases as the season progresses for many new vehicle purchasers. Not surprisingly, Full-Size pickup purchasers are fans all year round but their interest really picks up in the summer. The same is true of domestic purchasers in particular while import purchasers don’t show as much interest - which is something Toyota should take a closer look at given their recent NASCAR involvement with Camry.

Mid-size car purchasers are also on Facebook, and not just during the summer but in the winter, too. That means a Ford/NASCAR promotion could effectively reach the right prospects with the sweepstakes message even before the NASCAR season revs up. Twitter doesn’t reach mid-size car purchasers as effectively as Facebook but that could be driven by the fact that most people Tweet via their mobile devices and don’t return to the site very often. As further proof of Facebook’s potential to reach this target, over half of NASCAR enthusiasts in general (those people who visit other sites with NASCAR sub-domains such as CNN and Fox Sports in addition to nascar.com) also visit the social networking site.

Understanding your prospect’s online behavior is critical to developing effective online campaigns. It can help you better target your best prospects and more efficiently reach them with the right messages. Compete and JD Power’s Online Media Behavior Study takes that a step further by identifying the online behavior of new vehicle purchasers. Understanding the behavior of purchasers can help auto marketers make the most out of the web by more efficiently using it to accurately target and reach new vehicle prospects.

Coke and Pepsi have been locked in battle on many fronts for decades and the Super Bowl goes a long way in deciding which of the two has the upper hand. Both had success with memorable ads in 2008; Pepsi’s Justin Timberlake ad and Coke’s Parade Balloons (as a Patriots fan, the ads are the only part of that game I want to remember).

Each company had three commercials during this year’s Super Bowl, leading to a predictable spike in site traffic on the day of the game. Coke managed to keep that momentum going through to Monday, whereas Pepsi saw a steep drop.

But things were not all bad for Pepsi. Unlike Coke, which did not include any references to their online channels in the ads, Pepsi pushed their new refresheverything.com site in two of their three commercials and the graph looks quite a bit different with it included. Though the site wasn’t started solely for the Super Bowl (it began with a campaign to voice your concerns in a video-letter to the President and got a boost from its Facebook page), the massive exposure from the game helped maintain its momentum and keep the daily Reach numbers high and trending upwards.

One of Coke’s ads featured people in public being viewed as animated characters, reminiscent of online avatars and gaming, yet they failed to build on that association by driving viewers online. Instead it seems that Pepsi seized the opportunity to further engage consumers with their new site at a time when integrated cross-channel marketing is more important than ever.

The Super Bowl has become so much more than just the game, and nowhere is that shown better than in the big budget commercials. Brands like Budweiser, Coke, Pepsi and many others have been laying down huge money annually for decades now to have their ads in the big game and they often deliver memorable commercials that keep people talking long after the game. One relatively new player that has made a big splash at the Super Bowl is Go Daddy.

The February spike in GoDaddy.com site traffic has become an annual occurrence, but Fox censors banning their “Exposure” ad last year may have been the best thing for them. In its place Go Daddy ran an ad directing viewers to their website to see the banned ad, funneling record numbers to the site.

The average time spent on site per visit dropped considerably with the influx of all the Super Bowl traffic in early years, but it seems that Go Daddy’s strategy last year worked for more than visitor numbers, as they also saw the time per visit increase in February.

After last year’s success, Go Daddy seems to have found the right formula and although their ads have been approved for the Super Bowl this year, they are still playing up the online angle. The two approved ads have been posted on their site since mid-January for visitors to vote on which one will air during the game. With success and buzz like this, it seems that even the $3 million price tag for a 30-second spot is worth it for Go Daddy.

The 2008 college football season comes to a close tonight as Oklahoma and Florida face off in the BCS National Championship Game. As usual, the only major sport that has no playoff system has followed up a thrilling season with a seemingly arbitrary matchup, leaving several equally deserving teams out of the running for the championship. The Bowl Championship Series uses a combination of “Top 25” polls and so-called “computer rankings” that grade teams on factors such as strength of schedule, quality of wins, etc. to determine the two teams that will compete in the title game. Rarely does the college football community agree on who the two best teams are, and of the 11 seasons of the BCS, seven have ended with disagreement over who should play for the title: Florida State/Miami in 2000, Colorado/Nebraska/Oregon in 2001, LSU/Oklahoma/USC in 2003, Auburn/LSU/USC in 2004, Florida/Michigan in 2006, Georgia/Ohio State/LSU/Oklahoma/Virginia Tech in 2007, and now Florida/Oklahoma/Texas/USC/Utah in 2008.

In each of these years, angry pundits and fans – particularly fans of those schools left out of the title game – condemn the BCS as an unjust, biased system that fails to achieve its most basic objective of determining a true “best team” in college football. Despite all this, the BCS lands one major TV contract after another. Fox picked up broadcast rights in 2006, and ESPN recently inked a deal worth 50% more than Fox’s, which will start with the 2010 season. On the surface, the TV deals sound outrageous to fans, given the unpopularity of the current system. But have the BCS’s problems translated into problems for the sport in general?

Hardly. For all the controversy it creates, the BCS certainly knows how to spark a good conversation, and all the arguing over which one-loss team is better than all the other one-loss teams has only served to put more eyeballs in front of the TV and in front of the computer during the season.

Whether in spite of, because of, or irrespective of the BCS, online interest in the college football season has continued to rise year after year. FoxSports.com has seen substantial growth in its college-football viewership since Fox began its partnership with the BCS in 2006, despite the TV network’s dearth of regular-season broadcasts. The ESPN brand is obviously the most recognizable in the sports landscape, and their season-long TV, radio, and magazine coverage has naturally contributed to ESPN.com’s growth in recent years. But the biggest gainer has been Yahoo! Sports – the true leader in sports on the web – which has actually doubled its college football traffic in the past four years, thanks in part to its acquisition last year of Rivals.com, a top source for college sports and recruiting news.

Each new season generates a new controversy, and each new controversy generates more traffic across the interwebs. ESPN’s new deal to keep this horrible system festering for four more years will likely ensure that all those angry eyeballs stay tuned. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to prepare to curse this system for the entire four-hour telecast tonight that I will, of course, watch intently