23 Musings

ComScore has released some figures on traffic growth in January for the UK. As expected travel features prominently.

January is the peak booking month for holidays in the UK and as such the number of web users researching and buying is much bigger than any other month of the year.

January's figures show that the biggest increasing category in travel was hotels/resorts with a 54% increase in traffic from Dec-Jan. Airlines were next with 46% and online travel agents third with 43%. Quite where tour operators come in there is a bit of a mystery to me, it would be really interesting to see them broken out to compare with OTA's.

Within travel two websites saw huge growth, First Choice grew 140% and TUI Group 122%. British Airways, Moneysupermarket Group and Priceline all feature as well with good growth.

Nothing unexpected in any of this but it does highlight the gaps in ComScores data as the market as a whole is not very well represented.

Of course it would also be intriguing to know if their booking numbers increased by similar percentages...

That's Facebook for you! At the same time as everyone saying Facebook is facing an exodus figures come out showing that the audience is a massive 712% higher than this time last year.

Maybe there's some jealousy leaking out in the recent stories... For my opinion on Facebooks traffic dip go here.

Another big news story today is the dip in Facebook users from the UK of 5% from December to January. Much is being made about this being the backlash to the poorly executed advertising projects or the natural move away as it becomes fad rather than fashion.

I have my own opinion... I think it's purely the January blues. Think about it; December is a huge month for keeping up with friends, arranging events and parties and reconnecting with old acquaintances. Come January though, we're all back at work, busy, tired, dieting, looking for holidays and generally keeping a lid on the credit card as we recover from the spending excess.

Now does a dip in January seem that unusual for a social network which basically encourages social interaction between friends?

Alright, I may be being a little blaise but I wouldn't read too much into the dip and I certainly wouldn't be talking about the demise of Facebook quite yet.

ComScore have released figures for the biggest U.S. web properties for December. MarketingCharts have the detail here. Obviously, retail is the big show, and as usual Yahoo just pip Google, even though they have many more pages. Google should overtake them soon.

Travel shows with Expedia in 41st place. January should be a very different story as travel sites shoot up the rankings.

Full list of the top 50 below:

Facebook accounted for 1 in 50 of all internet visits in December 2007 (according to Hitwise). It's share of internet traffic has grown 10-fold over the last year (again in the UK).
It also positioned itself as the 7th largest upstream website, that means it sends the 7th largest amount of traffic referrals to other website categories within the Hitwise system.

Figures like this make it hard for marketers and PR people to ignore. Any potential traffic source of that magnitude has to be tapped into and quickly before your competitors figure out all the cool ways to make use of a social network and you end up looking like someone who's following their lead. It's still imperative to add value though, just diving in with a load of offers isn't good enough, you need to engage and add value to your prospects experience of Facebook (while at the same time acquiring new prospects and customers).

I blogged the other day about the increases being seen by retail websites on Black Friday, Nielsen reported an increase of 10% year-on-year. I wrote that I still expect a 15-20% increase in web traffic year-on-year for the online travel industry in our peak booking months of January and February.

Well, Hitwise have been looking at the web traffic figures for Cyber Monday (another traditionally busy online shopping day) and they're reporting an increase of 26% year-on-year.

Now that's really encouraging for the online travel peak period. Travel sites tend to see the same if not more year-on-year growth than retail sites. A lot of this growth is down to the increase in web users every year as more people get online and begin to trust e-commerce as a way to make purchases. In travel that growth tends to be more pronounced.

That said, I'm still sticking with my prediction although erring more towards the higher end at 20%. Is your infrastructure ready to cope with it yet??

Compete.com have released some stats listing the top 50 website domains by unique visitors on their blog today. It makes for some interesting reading:
Yahoo is still the biggest domain in terms of unique users. Not surprising given their huge coverage, surely they have to come up with a way to make a success of all these eyeballs? They may lose out in search to Google but with such a vast web real estate finding a way to leverage that is key for them. Google however coming second is amazing considering their core is still search!

Facebook at number 21 is a bit of a surprise, I'd assumed they'd be higher given the buzz but perhaps they'll position much higher next year (if their bubble doesn't burst).

The growth figures in the blog post are most intersting, showing sites such as YouTube, Flickr and Digg as some of the biggest gainers (bigger even than Facebook). This certainly is the time of sharing content, something Facebook has yet to get right (they started off well but it's lately disolved into MySpace'esque profile vanity).

Adult dating still a major growth area it would seem; the person who launches a Facebook for this domain will win big!

Of the losers, most intersting for me is the losses experienced by Expedia. This can only be down to the emergence of much better sites that give users more intuitive ways to search for flight & hotel availability. Online travel is much more competitive in that arena this year and with the move from tour operators to embrace dynamic packaging I can only see Expedia losing more eyeballs if they don't make some significant functionality changes soon.

So what is it that can build loyalty with our customers and get them coming back over and over again to our travel websites (if not to book then at least to research with the possibility of turning them into a booker in the future)? Is it having the best designed website with loads of aspirational imagery? Is it having loads of Web 2.0 features and and user generated content widgets? Is it having the biggest range of ways to book your travel (dynamic packaging, component packaging, component only, package, tour etc)? Actually, it appears it's much simpler than that!

A new survey from PhocusWright and Burst Media shows that the key features of a travel website that will make a user become a repeat visitor are:

• Having the ability to check rates and book online
• Having access to good quality destination content
• Having a good range of clearly priced and regularly updated offers and promotions

Here's the list:

How's that for common sense? The most basic features of a bookable travel website are still the most important as far as the user is concerned. So to all those travel websites who are branching out into adding in flashy Web 2.0 features I say; get the basics right first! Work on your bookability and usability; make it easy for a user to find a price and compare that with other products, and then make it easy for them to continue and book their chosen product. Give the user really good, informative destination content; this saves them having to go elsewhere and makes it more likely they will come to you for their research. Get your offers online regularly, make them clearly priced (a price the user can actually book if they want to), make them tempting and as good as (if not better) than anyone elses.

Of course I would add one more technicality that will help ensure these three things keep people coming back... Get the architecture right! Make it easy for users to find this content, don't funnel them down a journey they can't find their way out of, navigation is still king!

In this previous post I mentioned the ABCE's desire to move to unique users as a measure of traffic to a website and the coming death of the page view/impression. To update that I'd like to point you all to this post by Steve Rubel which surmises what should really be used to replace page impressions as the metric that matters. Remember that with the advent of Ajax many websites do not request new pages, rather they respond to user driven events and supply content dynamically to the same page.

Steve has come up with three possible new metrics:

1. He starts with events; now this seems a good choice as it can catch user events on Ajax pages and interactions with RSS feeds etc
2. He then mentiond unique visitors
3. And continues with time spent on web pages; this is a useful measure of the quality of a sites content. Our site is extremely content rich and as such we experience long user sessions, this is great for advertisers as a measure of a sites value to them.

So which should it be? Well, in my opinion a combination of all three would be best. In these days of dynamic, active websites using a single measure is never going to give a fair comparison between sites with vastly different technology profiles. If someone can come up with a formula which takes into account the myriad ways a user can be measured then they will have a hold grail for online marketers everywhere!

Got sent a link to a nice list of Web 2.0 companies ranked by their Alexa traffic rankings. Movers 2.0 is a handy list of (currently) 105 of the best known Web 2.0 sites around. You can also view them by the weekly and daily movers which is useful to see how the buzz develops after a new service appears and gets blogged about heavily.

What's missing is the buzz factor! They should be using other measurements such as Technorati figures on how often they are blogged about and combine to give a true picture of how much of a 'web 2.0 darling' each of these sites are.

But a useful site nonetheless!

...for traffic that is.

According to Comscore via USA Today, MySpace outstripped Yahoo in the traffic stakes in November.

A shame I think. When you consider the breadth of services and properties that Yahoo owns compared to a single social network you'd think they could command more traffic.

Yet another indicator of the gradual deterioration of Yahoo as the key web destination...

Techdirt (one of my favourite blogs) carries a story asking whether we need a new type of auditor to validate the wild claims of traffic and user figures that are coming out of the web 2.0 world at the moment. It's a very good question, but sadly not one that will be solved by an auditor.

Sites are claiming hundreds of thousands of visitors a day and millions of registered users. Figures that make the VC's and investment guys go weak at the knees, but make many savvy web people snigger and wonder how anyone falls for it!

Traffic is easily inflated, many of the online marketing campaigns of the moment are designed purely to drive huge volumes of traffic to your website with no regards for the quality of that traffic. I don't see these sites quoting average page views per visitor, or average length of time a user spends on a website, which are both key in my eyes to how popular a site really is! For instance, I recently trialed a pop-under campaign (I know, not the nicest form of advertising, but we needed traffic and sales) and the visitor numbers went through the roof, but average page views etc plummeted (it did have a halo effect on sales, so proved quite useful), so it's really easy to bump those figures up!

The other measure I'd question (even on the big sites MySpace and Facebook) is the number of registered users. Rather than just reporting on how many user accounts there are they need to start quoting in active user accounts (ie. ones that people log in to at least once a week). I'm an example of one of these surplus users they are counting! I've signed up to all these sites just to see what they are like, but after a few visits I don't go back again.

So come on web 2.0 and community sites! Give us some meaningful figures that really show just how big you guys are!