[February 2010]
Let’s hope there’s more snow to come…
A study conducted by the td Insight Team at TradeDoubler casts new light on the impact of the recent snowfall on online activity. People surfed online, shopped, played games, and booked holidays in far greater numbers than usual in the aftermath of Christmas and January sales period. Even travel, which seasonally peaks in January, saw an additional boost.
“This is all fairly obvious with large numbers of people staying at home and the usual shopping and working patterns interrupted. The importance of td Insight is to quantify exactly what effect this has. If you don’t know precisely how something has changed the normal rate of return, how can we measure the success of our marketing channels? We effectively are flying blind”, said Maria O’Flynn, Strategy and Insight Director at TradeDoubler.
In the ten day period, from the 5th to 15th of January, average depth of snow on the ground ranged between two and seven centimetres on the ground across the UK and got as high as 44cm in some parts of Northern England (source: www.weatheronline.co.uk). Recorded traffic levels were more than 12% higher than anticipated during this period, largely as a result of the adverse conditions keeping people at home and online.
Conversion rates on retail sites were up more than 40% in some cases – coming at the end of much longer click journeys.
In a statistic that might worry some employers, the chief beneficiary of this surge was the gaming sector with both site traffic, and importantly, new customer sign-ups significantly up at this time. Ryan Henderson of Intercasino observed, “Casino players love fun and excitement, so when they’d finished playing in the snow, our players took the excitement indoors and we saw traffic and play on InterCasino.co.uk increase significantly.”
The snowfall also created an additional boost to online travel bookings. Interestingly, traffic only began to rise beyond the expected norm four days into the period of bad weather, perhaps as people grew frustrated with the cold weather – and conversions held strongly even as the snow melted.
The correlation between snowfall and uptake in home and car insurance policies was marked as people sought assurance that they were covered in the midst of the inclement conditions.
The td Insight team has been set up to give clients an extra edge in performance marketing. By applying business intelligence approaches to existing data sets, we find new sources of volume growth and uplift for our clients.
