The Online Battle between the NFL and Franchisors Extends Beyond the Cowboys

This article is a continuation of our plan to review the most popular articles from the first 18 months of the LGRC.

Today, I want to re-examine my controversial piece entitled “Why franchises hate the Dallas Cowboys.” If you haven’t had the chance to read the original post, you can peruse it here.

As a brief summary, I examined the odd explosion of Google searches in August 2014 including the term “franchise.” Essentially, I found that the release of Forbes’ Most Valuable NFL Franchises caused people to seek out that article. And, you guessed it, the Cowboys were number one. So, any franchise running search advertising (e.g., AdWords)that week was likely inundated with paid searches of people not actually interested in opening their own franchise. (Rather, they wanted to see what it would cost if Jerry Jones’ franchise ever hit the re-sale market.)

Well, let’s jump forward to 2015. Here’s what Google Trends tells us searches looked like over the year in the United States including the word “franchise.”

Of course your eye is immediately drawn to those two peaks which seem to be in March and July. To be exact, the two most popular weeks last year for “franchise” searches were March 1st – 7th and July 12th – 18th.

Any guesses about what caused such an unbelievable spike in franchise searches? Don’t feel bad, no one here at FranchiseHelp HQ (myself included) had any idea.

Well, it turns out that those two weeks are key to the NFL's franchise tag system! (If you want a super detailed explanation about what the franchise tag actually is, you can check that out here. But it’s certainly not vital to understanding this phenomenon.)

It’s absolutely unbelievable! Here’s a detailed look at franchise Google searches for only March.

One day An absolute explosion in search.

And for good measure, here’s July 2015:

Another one day! The deadline to sign a franchised player to a multi-year deal. Another explosion of search volume.

As we wrote about last year, in and of itself, events like these are not make or break for franchise lead generation. If you were completely unaware that these phenomena existed, you’d be fine. Heck, we all know that ignorance is bliss.

However, here’s the thing. This is what franchise lead generation is all about. These things happen. Your franchise may have tried AdWords SEM at some point for a week and determined that it “just didn’t work for us.” Well, if you completely coincidentally conducted your test over one of these days, your performance was likely killed. And for no fault of your own nonetheless.

And if you don’t want to dig _this _deep. We understand. That’s what we’re here for!

Interested in learning about FranchiseHelp’s lead generation programs? Click here to check out the details.