Have others been noticing a dip in traffic now that the nicer weather has arrived? Or is this just us being affected by some new tweak at Google? Thanks.
Yes, I've noticed the same drop. I'm 25-35% off my peak traffic levels that I had right before the nice weather(not including spikes from forums postings or whatnot)... -- Derek
What, you mean people actually go outside when the weather is nice? Or is your site something that attracts seasonal interest?
I also notice a drop starting about a week ago...something tells me there's more to it then just the weather
I think a big factor is that the University year is over for many students in North America. They don't have to procrasinate by surfing the web any more. Traffic will pick up again in September.
Good point Compar. The demographics may be skewed towards vacationing young adults or parents who now have their hands full. I'm seeing steady traffic on my vertical market B2B site, but it is neither seasonal nor skewed towards those demographics.
Same here... I see continued steady traffic growth on my stuff. But I'm not geared towards vacationers, families or students.
My non-sports related pages all seem to have steady growth. The wrestling related pages drop dramatically outside of the season, but the sales ratio increases ten-fold. I'm assuming its like compar said, college students surfing- now their tanning.
We have a slight dip in traffic, but it's still our best month ever, but each month we out due the one before. Our target seems to be teenage to young adult girls, and some older women as well. We get the younger crowd when a product we sell is in a magazine, but we get the older women when something we sell is mentioned on TV. This is where SEO really plays a part. One of the products we carry was mentioned on the Today Show, and within the next couple hours after the show, mainly only that day, we got a bunch of orders for that product. We don't actually make the product, but we sell it, and we rank between 1 and 4 for the product name. The manufacture has a poorly optimized site, plus most of it is flash, so we get most the traffic. I guess that's not for this thread, but it is exciting for me so I had to share.
Since I have a baseball-related site, which sells a fair number of books from Amazon and Abebooks, I am one who enjoys a benefit from summer. My sales numbers usually roughly double in season.
"One of the products we carry was mentioned on the Today Show, and within the next couple hours after the show" Very Cool! I wish I had that happen to some of my products!
Yeah it was definitely a good thing. We got so much traffic from it, and orders, that there is a big spike in traffic on that one day, then it trails off from that day down the week to back to normal. I am wondering that with the addition to TiVO into people's homes that this type of thing will have a longer effect since they can watch their show at anytime afterwards, plus rewind if they missed the name of the product.
That would explain my drop, for certain. The majority of my demographics for that site are young adults that are probably university students right now... My demographics do reach down into the teenage years however, so maybe when high school gets out, I'll get a jump in traffic again... -- Derek
I guess I never thought of the seasons having that much of an effect. I was thinking that some of my pages changed in rank, but the ones that changed didn't really change drastically enough to justify the more than 100 uniques/day that I've lost in the past 10 days. Plus I only made minor changes. Maybe it was a combination of both my changes and the seasons. This is an interesting topic though. Does anybody know any sites that research like this has been done (i.e., web-surfing habits via demographics)?
When I ran commerce related sites my traffic always declined during the summer, most noticeably in July and started picking up again in October.
My sales spiked majorly last month (best month ever) and they're back to average this month. I was thinking it had to do with the season too. Then again, maybe I was working harder and surfing less last month . I guess the seasons effect me as much as my customers....
The only site I have that is immune to seasonality is my computer service/repair site. People break their computers year round.