I spend my sad life getting traffic to sites mainly in the UK and monitoring them like a hawk…
This is post is nothing to do with conversions as I’d need pages and pages to explian my thought process with examples of what has and hasn’t worked and what has changed over the years of being a seo/webmaster thingy.
These examples also have social media elements removed so we can look into search engine traffic trends.
This is just a simple look at a few verticals of the effect of traffic during December 2009.
Why December?
Well as mentioned I work on mainly UK sites with UK traffic so the below stats show what the UK public traffic trends are.
Why is it interesting?
Most of the UK population celebrate xmas in one way or another, many buy online which is expanding at a massive rate in the UK. Most businesses shut over xmas (most people surf the web at work) so for many sites the 25th Dec should be a pretty dead time for traffic. I know from non UK site stats that the effect is a lot smaller but this post has a focus on the UK and Decemebr 2009.
Example 1
Let have a look at my first example:
[click image to expand]
Vertical: Arts
Weekends
Your be able to spot each and every weekend on this graph with a drop on Sundays each week and a peck on Mondays when every gets back to work. This Sunday/Monday trends on this site is consistent throughtout the year with only anomalies effecting this.
25th December
This site has xmas themed sections and but you will be able to spot the trend starting from the 11th December which is the friday before the 2nd weekend in December which was a massive shopping day for xmas in the UK (I went shopping and is was so busy). The trend continue right up until the 25th with well over 2/3 of the traffic dropping.
Traffic sources
80.5% Search Organic
11% Direct / Bookmarks
8% Referrals
0.5% PPC
As you can see this site has almost all it traffic from natural ranking thus the trends effecting this site are a mix of the theme and organic.
Example 2
[click image to expand]
Vertical: Home
Weekends
Again your be able to spot each and every weekend on this graph with a drop on Sundays each week and a peck on Mondays when every gets back to work. This Sunday/Monday trends on this site is consistent throughtout the year with only anomalies effecting this.
25th December
This site has no xmas themed sections starting from the 7th December which is the Monday just before the 2nd weekend in December which as already mentioned was a massive shopping day for xmas in the UK the trend continue right up until the 25th with yet again well over 2/3 of the traffic dropping.
After the 25th of December the traffic recovery on this site is pretty fast with with traffic increasing well over any amount before the 25th.
Traffic sources
64% Search Organic
10% Direct / Bookmarks
7% Referrals
19% PPC
As you can see this site has almost all it traffic from natural orangic and PCC thus the trends effecting this site are a mix of the theme and search engine traffic. I feel the theme of the site has effected the recovery.
Example 3
[click image to expand]
Vertical: Fashion
Weekends
One again your be able to spot each and every weekend on this graph with a drop on Sundays each week and a peck on Mondays when every gets back to work.
25th December
Same as the previous site:
Again this site has no xmas themed sections starting from the 7th December which is the Monday just before the 2nd weekend in December which as already mentioned was a massive shopping day for xmas in the UK the trend continue right up until the 25th with yet again well over 2/3 of the traffic dropping.
Pecks
21st December this site saw a per xmas peck with last minute online shopping creating this peck.
Traffic sources
57% Search Organic
8% Direct / Bookmarks
9% Referrals
27% PPC
As you can see this site has almost all it traffic from natural orangic and PCC thus the trends effecting this site are a mix of the theme and search engine traffic.
This site has the most PPC of all the above examples but yet again is effected in the same way.
Conclusion
From the above 3 example we can see if you have a UK site its likely you will see a trend of dropping traffic from around the 7th December until the 26th December.
When looking at the keywords for the first example which had a xmas section which brought in a ton of traffic wasn’t enough to offset the downwood trends.
I feel unless over 2/3 of your site is xmas themed your going to feel this effect.
Of course socail media is not included in any of the above info and site I have/work on have very different stats and trends.
