Category: Website Stats

Just when the pundits were indicating that UK Internet access had pretty much hit saturation, new research says that it has grown by 5% in the last year.

The UKOM data indicates that there are nearly 2 million more people online in the UK this year. And whilst youngsters were the early adopters, much of this growth comes from the over 50s.

This graph from Nielsen shows it all:

The total number of people online in the UK stands at 38.8m, up from 36.9m 12 months ago. The over-50s account for 31% of that group.

38% of these new users were men over 50, and another 15% were women in the same age bracket. 14% were women between 12 and 34, whilst 12% were girls between 12 and 20.

What are the over 50s looking at online? It turns out that health, online video and community websites are the big attraction.

Alex Burmaster from UKOM said “This age group have a wide appetite when it comes to the types of sites they are using to supplement the interests and needs they have in the daily lives.

“Consequently, a number of brands across a range of industries, particularly travel, are showing the rest what a valuable medium online is when it comes to reaching a desired audience who haven’t grown up with the Internet.”

And what about those building websites? We don’t survey WebEden’s user ages but anecdotal evidence from the forum and Twitter show that many of our best website builders are 50+.

Do you fall into the 50+ bracket? Have you been online for years, or just arrived? Does your online interests different from your peer group? Leave us a comment below.

Although this blog is mostly about how to  make a website, we’ve occasionally published interesting Internet facts and statistics in our web stats channel here on the WebEden blog.

This is for no other reason than we love to be wowed by ‘how big’, ‘how much, ‘how high’ numbers when it comes to the Internet. And of course we all like to fact-boast and appear knowledgeable at dinner parties, right? OK, maybe I should get out more.

Here’s some more stats, this time describing who uses the Internet, and how. Here we go:

*Unsurprisingly, Internet use is on the rise, accessed ‘several times a day’ by 27% of people in 2005 and 38% in 2010.
*Excatly the same percentage of men use it as women – 74%.
*Older people use the Internet less: 93% of 18-29 year olds use it; just 38% of 65 and up do so. 65 is where the drop off comes – 70% of 50 – 64 year olds are online.
*Income level of broadband users are much higher than non-broadband users.
*Internet users are more likely to be graduates (94% of them are online) rather than a  high school leaver (39% of whom are online.
*58% of Internet users make use of a desktop rather than a laptop.
*Bloggers tend to be 25 – 44 – just 7% of those less than 25 do it.
*54% of bloggers think they are ‘experts’. Ahem.
*Norway is the highest percetage of its population online.
*Japan has the fastest Internet connections

It’s all summed up in this great info graphic from focus.com

Never again will you be stuck for something to say as the soup is being served. Anyone want to sit by me?

Do you love Internet statistics? Well you’re going to love this!

Do you know how many pages are looked at on Facebook each month?

Do you know what percentage of all emails are spam?

Do you know how many emails are sent each day?

How many blogs are there? How many websites?

For the answer to these and lots of other interesting Internet stats, take a look at this video:

Back in December we talked about whether Christmas was a good time or a bad time for selling online. It all comes down to the type of products you offer. For consumer facing websites selling clothes, gadgets and gifts its boom time. For everyone else it’s a real slowdown.

For WebEden we charted the reducing number of visitors throughout the month.

Back on the 6th of December it was supposed to be the biggest online shopping day of the year. So called ‘Cyber Monday’ was late enough to ensure that everyone was in present buying mood, but early enough to guarantee delivery by Christmas.

Online monitoring firm Hitwise UK revealed that this year Cyber Monday was been eclipsed by online shopping on Boxing day.

The next busiest shopping day was actually 27th December, which beat Cyber Monday into third spot.

Hitwise also showed that Christmas Eve and even Christmas day were busy shopping days too, up by 36% over the previous year. So plenty of people were choosing bargains while the rest of us were guzzling turkey.

The main beneficiaries of this shopping frenzy were high street retailers who sell online, including Tesco, Debenhams, Next and Currys. Those online retailers without an offline presence actually had reduced traffic.

According to Robin Goad at Hitwise UK it’s all about whether or not the websites were heavily promoting a sale. Apparently UK sales related searches were up by 25% in Christmas week.

As for WebEden this year our traffic figure dropped to right down on Christmas day, but made a solid recovery the next. Here’s a traffic graph for the whole Christmas period.

Was your website busy for Christmas week, or did visitors fall away like WebEden’s? Are you having any luck promoting a sale? Leave us a comment below.

Its been a busy year on the WebEden blog!

I’ve just been looking through some of the blog statistics and I thought you’d be interested in a few of them.

To start with, there have been 239 posts in all, comprising of 121,233 words. We’ve added 647 links and 4,787 images.

You’ve participated quite a bit too! The blog has received 841 comments. Perhaps the most incredible statistic is the number of ‘spam’ comments we’ve had: a whopping 12,268.

We’ve also had some great guest blogs which have been some of the most popular posts.

Its been a strong year for visitors too. The blog has been visited by 18,562 people, who spent an average of 1 minute 58 seconds reading. They looked at 53,679 pages.

Here’s the graph of page views from Google Analytics:

Those spikes that you can see are from when we send a newsletter out.

The most popular categories have been video tutorials and search engine advertising.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed, either though writing, commenting, tweeting or reading.

Have a great Christmas!

Online Sales Christmas Boom

There’s been plenty of news in the press about how online sales are booming this Christmas.

Research from GSI Commerce out last week showed that despite the credit crunch online shopping was set to have another bumper year.

More specifically the research showed that, compared to last year, twice as many consumers are prepared to spend more than £1,000 when visiting an ecommerce website.

So people who run websites are rubbing their hands with glee at the moment are they?

Well it’s not quite as simple as that. At the moment the UK is focused on Christmas, on turkey, on holidays, and on presents. So if you sell turkeys, Christmas trees, or great Christmas gifts, then your sales should be booming.

But at the end of the day people only have so much time in their day, and so much money in their pocket. And if they’re spending that time and money shopping for Christmas, then they’re not doing other more ‘normal’ activity.

So whilst many online retailers have their cash tills ringing, other online businesses are getting squeezed.

Christmas for WebEden

I can show you what I mean by sharing some traffic stats for WebEden. Our website building tool is neither wholly business focused nor wholly consumer focused. Some businesses use WebEden to build a website. And many individuals build personal websites too.

But one thing that we are not is Christmas present material. We’re yet to see a WebEden website stuffed into anyone’s stocking!

So as people’s minds turn to Christmas, they turn away from building websites. Here’s a screen grab from our Google analytics.

As you can see we’ve seen a steady decline since the start of December.

This trend will continue until Christmas day, there will be a short rise in traffic the following week, and then another slump for new year.

So if like us your business has nothing to do with Christmas, you’re probably seeing a similar picture.

What happens in the New Year?

The silver lining here is that January is usually the biggest month of the year for website traffic.

Online retailers launch their sales. And business focused websites see a steep rise in traffic as people return to work in order to ‘get to grips’ with the new year.

Have you had a look at what’s happening with your website traffic? Are you seeing a pre-christmas peak or are you bumping along the bottom? Leave us a comment below.

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.