What happens to people’s online behaviour when summer comes around in the middle of a recession? Whilst spring and summer is traditionally a strong time for visitor numbers to airline websites, research from Hitwise UK out last week showed that the recessionary woes of the airline industry are being played out online too.

Traffic to airline and flight websites was down 19.2% between April 2008 and April 2009.

I used to think that everything stopped in a recession. That people stopped buying stuff and stayed at home. But the truth of the matter is that everyone still needs to buy stuff, its just that they buy cheaper versions of the same stuff they were buying before.

Everyone still wants to go on holiday; it’s just that they can no longer afford the flights. So what do they do instead? The answer is; they look for a cheaper way of getting away. The sectors that are bucking the downward trend in travel are the train and coach websites, whose traffic has increased almost 4% over the same period.

Of the 500 most popular travel websites in the UK, 39 were about either trains, buses or coaches The official National Rail website was the fourth most visited site out of all travel websites in May this year, And that’s out of 18,390 travel sites in all. Finally, searches for ‘train times’ is up 1.5% over the last 12 months too.

So a downturn can be a good time for people in the travel sector, especially if you are seen to offer a ‘budget’ version of something that others charge more for.

What does this mean for us website builders? If you run a travel or holiday website, it makes sense to emphasize your cost effective prices at this time. You could include prominent promotions on the site, and give away discount and voucher codes wherever you can. Another idea is to incentivise repeat business or recommendations by giving away a discount with ‘your next stay’. Because people still want to go on holiday, it’s just that they want to find a cheaper way of doing it; if they think they’ve saved money by booking with you then they will be happier

Have you done well or suffered in the downturn? Have you found a way of turning people’s modified online behaviour to your advantage? Leave us a comment below.

Research from Hitwise UK this week showed the impact of world events on Internet traffic. The outbreak of Swine Flu in April boosted traffic to the World Health Organisation and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention by more than 200% each in just 4 days.

Here’s a graph from Hitwise that shows their traffic.

And of course it also has a huge impact on what people are searching for. UK searches for ’swine flu’ increased 58-fold for the week ending 2nd May. Of the 10.9 million different search terms that Hitwise monitored over this period, ’swine flu’ was the 20th most popular.

And as we’ve discussed before, this booming interest in swine flu has meant the cyber squatters have moved in. This is good news of course if your website is all about flu symptoms. But for the rest of us, we can only watch (with our facemasks poised). Time to use the WebEden Website Maker to write about Swine flu?

The MPs’ expenses scandal has been rumbling on for what seems like weeks now. And whilst MPs hang their heads in shame, and commentators lament the corruption of our elected representatives, research from Hitwise UK shows that the news is having a big impact on what we’re searching for.

The graph below shows the growth in searches for a group of keywords related to the story. These have increased by 575%, and all indications are that there is more growth to come.

Most of the expenses related search terms are general. Further down the list however you can find the names of specific Mps, and of course ‘expenses keywords’ used in conjunction with ‘Telegraph’

Given his relatively minor expenses story, its perhaps surprising that Gordon Brown is the most frequently mentioned MP, followed by Barbara Follett.

The data is of course slightly old by now – we will update the story if it radically changes.

Here are the top search terms:

1. mps expenses (21.7% of all searches) for terms in the MPs’ Expenses portfolio)
2. mp expenses (14.4%)
3. mp’s expenses (5.2%)
4. mp expenses list (4.3%)
5. mps expenses list (2.6%)
6. gordon brown expenses (2.1%)
7. barbara follett expenses (1.9%)
8. telegraph expenses (1.7%)
9. ministers expenses (1.7%)
10. mps’ expenses (1.65)

Whilst it is MPs who are rightly paying the price for their transgressions, the website of The Telegraph is the main beneficiary.

Last week telegraph.co.uk picked up over 30% of all clicks in the organic search results for expenses related search queries. Other winners were Google News UK, followed by political site TheyWorkForYou.com. All the rest of the top 10 were all news media sites.

Here’s what happened to telegraph.co.uk’s market share of News related Internet traffic:

Hitwise also point out that not only has visits to telepgraph.co.uk gone up, average time on site has increased from 8 to 9 minutes. So people are going more frequently to the website, and they like what they find there. All increasing the telegraph.co.uk’s advertising revenue.

And of course, if people spend more time on the site, they’re probably looking at more pages. Here’s a graph of the telegraph’s page views:

Has the scandal shaped what you’ve searched for? Are you a new convert to telegraph.co.uk? Are you trying to grab some search traffic by using the website builder to add MPs expenses keywords onto your site? Or have you had enough of the whole episode! Leave us a comment below.

With a bank holiday approaching, there’s a lot of weather related chatter going on.  In the office we’ve been talking about stuff like how busy the campsites are, and how choked the roads will become. But as we’ve mentioned before, the weather has a big impact on the sort of things people search for online.

There is of course the obvious stuff: bad weather brings about a surge in searches for weather websites, as Brits look for a break in the clouds.

But also there is the range of activities that warmer weather brings with it. If search engines are anything to go by, the first thing on people’s minds when the sun comes out is the garden. The Hitwise ‘Hot Consumer Electronics List’ shows that garden related search queries have trebled over the last few weeks.

Here’s the top 10:

1  black and decker
2. lawn mowers
3. flymo
4. black & decker
5. petrol lawn mowers
6. petrol lawnmowers
7. petrol lawn mower
8. cheap garden furniture
9. lawnmower
10. lawnmowers

Of course the take away point if you’re selling any garden or weather related equipment is to have a list of keywords sorted out well in advance of this surge. You need to make sure your website is ranking well in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPS) for your important keywords - follow our search engine optimisation guide for the best advice. But owing to the length of time Google takes to crawl changes on your site, its best to make sure you’ re working on your SEO programme through the winter, so that come springtime you’re ready to take advantage.

For those of us not selling this stuff; is there a weather or summer related angle you could give to your site? For example, if you run a B&B take the opportunity to add in a page about the weather in the local area, and optimise that page for local weather keywords. You might well be able to pick up some extra traffic.

Have any of you taken advantage of weather related searches to boost traffic to your site? Leave us a comment below.

More interesting research is out this week, once again from Hitwise. It shows the continuing growth in traffic of Twitter. UK visits to the micro-blogging service have gone up 6 times this year, and are up an amazing 32 times between March 2008 and 2009.

Here’s a nice graph:

This is despite the fact that other research has found that 60% of Twitter users leave in the first month.

Twitter has now entered the top 50 websites in the UK, outranking major players such as he Daily Mail, RightMove, MSN UK Search, Directgov, and all retail websites - with the exception of eBay, Amazon UK, Play.com and Argos.

Even though it has had such strong growth, Twitter is still only ranks the 5th most popular social networking site.

But where is the traffic coming from? Its perhaps an indication of the increasing interconnectedness of social networking platforms, that Twitter’s largest source of traffic is actually Facebook, which makes up almost 20% of all its’ visits. Its possible to ‘tweet’ from your Facebook page, and you can also update your Facebook status from twitter too.

But once people arrive on Twitter, they’re also following links they find there in order to move on: twitter is the 36th biggest source of traffic to other UK websites.

The top four downstream categories of websites from Twitter are Entertainment, Social Networks, News & Media and Lifestyle.

Are you tweeting? Do you want to follow WebEden on twitter? Do you see the point? Leave us a comment below.

Last month saw the controversial launch of Google Street View. But whatever your view of the privacy issue, there’s no doubt it has been a source of increased interest in Google maps. Since the launch on the 19th March, traffic has gone up by a whopping 41%, making Google maps the 20th most visited site in the UK.

The amount of time people spent on the Google maps also went up. ‘Time on site’ is a good measure of whether or not people like what they find on a website, and want to engage with it. Average ‘time on site’ for an informational site like Google maps is usually around 2 to 3 minutes. Following the launch, average ‘time on site’ jumped from an already strong 5 min 28 secs to 7 min 6 secs.

All data is thanks to Hitwise UK.

Here’s a graph showing the increase in traffic:

So for Google, was it really worth all the negative publicity? I think the numbers speak for themselves. But what do you think?

Hitwise, the online traffic measurement company, has produced some new research indicating that visitors to online retailers dropped for the first time in the month of March.

In the UK 8.6% of all Internet visits were to online retailers, as opposed to 9.7% for the same month in 2008.

Whilst it’s normal to see a traffic drop in this sector in Jan and Feb, which follows the retailing binge of Christmas, March normally shows a healthy bounce back in traffic.

According to the research, the traffic dropped as consumers adapted their shopping behaviour to the global recession. Since more people are feeling the pinch, they decided to spend less time shopping and more time doing other things.

So if overall traffic to online retailers is down, which traffic source specifically is in decline?

Paid search traffic dropped from 28% to 23% of the total, compared to a year earlier, which shows that online retailers are investing less of their revenues back into pay per click search marketing.

Since overall Internet traffic hasn’t declined, what are people doing instead? Well one beneficiary of the change in behaviour are social networking sites, which took an unprecedented 9.8% of all visits in the same month.

Hitwise director Robin Goad said: “The growth of social networking, online video and the continuing popularity of news websites has meant that an increasing proportion of consumers’ online time in the UK has been devoted to online media.”

Do you sell products on your website? Have you seen a traffic drop in March? And as a consumer do you think you’re shopping online a bit less that you used to? Leave us a comment below.

There’s some interesting research out this week from Nielsen Online, a website monitoring firm.

According to them, most people who join Twitter don’t stick around: they leave inside the first 30 days, never to return.

Twitter is undoubtedly the Internet phenomenon of 2009, thanks in part to celebrity twitterers Barack Obama, Stephen Fry and Jonathan Ross. But as 60% of people move on in such a short space of time, is it a case of ‘tweet today, gone tomorrow’?

It highlights a problem that Twitter has, and raises a question of the micro-blogging service, namely: What’s the point? This is certainly a view shared by other WebEden users after we announced WebEden had joined Twitter a couple of months ago.

“Twitter faces an uphill battle in making sure these flocks of new users are enticed to return to the nest.” said David Martin of Nielsen Online.

However there may be light at the end of the twunnel (!) The retention rate for those people who are coming back the following month is actually going up – from 30% to 40%. That’s still way down on the 70% enjoyed by services like Facebook and Myspace, but its going in the right direction.

“To be clear, a high retention rate doesn’t guarantee a massive audience, but it is a prerequisite. There simply aren’t enough new users to make up for defecting ones after a certain point,” Martin added.

For our part, Twitter seems like a great service if you are a complete fan of someone, a band or a company, and you want to have a personalised dialogue with them. But as far as we can see, Twitter is just being jumped on by companies looking for a cheap way to reach new customers. And there’s an awful lot of tweeting going on, but is anyone actually reading those tweets?

If you fancy getting involved you can always follow WebEden on twitter.

Do you see any point? Leave us a comment below.

Building a website feels like a non-harmful activity doesn’t it? You’re doing something creative, pulling in your ideas, and thinking about things.

Unfortunately, there is an energy cost for everything to do with the Internet. Quite apart from the energy that your own PC or Mac uses, there is of course the servers that you connect to on the Internet.

Every website and web based application sits on a server in a data centre somewhere. (A data centre is basically a large room or warehouse with racks and racks of servers, and a very fast Internet connection). Not only do servers consume a lot of energy themselves, they also require lots of other supporting equipment, such as air conditioning. And of course they’re on 24/7. It was recently claimed that every Google search uses as much energy as boiling a kettle.

Whilst that myth was dispelled, there’s no doubt that web based activities require a lot of energy – in fact recent estimates say that the Internet uses up to 5% of all the world’s electricity.

In fact, some of the biggest Internet firms use eye-watering amounts of servers and power.
 
Google itself is said to have between 35 and 40 data centres with around 1 million servers. Whilst we don’t know how many Microsoft have, they are said to be increasing their servers by around 20,000 per month.

The more servers you put in a data centre, and the more densely you pack them, the more air conditioning you need to keep everything the right temperature. The amount of energy a large data centre (DC) needs is equivalent to that of an aluminium smelter. Microsoft have just completed a $500m DC near Chicago requires three electricity sub stations to keep it going.

Such are the cooling needs of large data centres that their location is now almost always decided by a source of cheap power. This is why so many locate next to the Columbia River, whose flowing water can be used as a source of power and cooling.

In what is a logical next step, Microsoft itself is scouting locations in Siberia so it can make use of the freezing temperatures. And maybe now due to its banking collapse, Iceland is marketing itself as perfect DC country due to its geothermal energy supply and a chilly clime.

WebEden for its part is run on servers located in a data centre in Paris. Not much chance of help from the weather there! And in terms of environmental impact, we offset the carbon emissions from the energy used by all WebEden websites using COCO2 carbon offset system.

Does any of this change the amount of time you want to spend online or building a website? Leave us a comment below.

Hitwise UK produced some research at the back of last year that broke down Internet use in the UK by city, county and region.

I’m not sure if you’ll be surprised by this – I certainly was – but the data indicates that people living in the country spend more time online than their urban counterparts. The activities that they out-participate city dwellers in are online shopping and social networking.

I had always made the assumption that people living in cities would spend more time online. First of all, I thought that ‘new’ things came to cities first, and whilst the Internet isn’t new then at least urban people would have had a head start in all things ‘online’. Also people living in cities are exposed to a lot more advertising (free newspapers, public transport, outdoor). And since advertising is often packed with technology – the UK’s biggest advertisers are often technology companies such as telecoms giants – that this would drive greater use. Then last of all is the physical reality of getting a broadband connection. If you live in the city you’ve got the option of adsl, fibre, free wi-fi or 3G, Not many rural places can boast all of those.

Hitwise analysed user behaviour for a four week period and found that city populations were least likely to visit an online retailer, whilst those in Wales and the South West showed the greatest propensity. And when it came to social networking, London was the most under-represented. The keenest social networkers were residents of Northern Ireland, Wales and Scotland.

On reflection, this sort-of fits. People living in cities live right by shops, so why bother shopping online? And in living in proximity to so many people, maybe they’re less keen to socialise online too? There’s no doubt that city people keep longer work hours, so maybe it just comes down to a plain old lack of time.

What does this research mean if you’re building a website? Well I’m not sure I can find anything for you. I would love to be able to deliver an easy conclusion; for example, make your shopping site appeal to the sensibilities of a villager. But what are those sensibilities? I’m sure I could only come up with a few stereotypes.

Of course, whilst the urban population might be under represented as website visitors, they still outnumber rural dwellers by a huge margin. So like it or not: your website visitors will still most likely be living in a town or city.

Are you just targeting one or other group? How has that influenced your web design? Leave us a comment below.