After a very long and cold winter for much of the Unites States, people across the nation are appreciating the warm weather like never before. What better way to enjoy sun than to pack up way more stuff than you need, spend a week in close quarters with your family, and go somewhere you’ve never been before? Okay that wasn’t phrased quite right… I’ll try again. Let’s go camping!
Two sites embodying the spirit of summer camping trips are CampingWorld.com and ReserveAmerica.com. Camping World will outfit you with the gear, ReserveAmerica will help you find the best campgrounds. Using Compete PRO data, we can see how traffic to these sites increases as the weather warms.
Unique Visitors are a great way to measure audience volume for a website. Unique visitors to CampingWorld.com generally increase from the start of the year through the summer months, as vacationers gear up for their adventures. Last year, the unique visitor count rose 150% from January to July on CampingWorld.com. This year, unique visitors have already increased 160%, and we still have a few months left to go.
The same is true for ReserveAmerica.com, which shows an increasing trend in unique visitors of 540% last year and 325% so far this year from December to July.
In terms of demographics, there are some interesting trends presenting themselves as well. The typical customer of camping gear is overwhelmingly male, middle aged (45-54 – perhaps with a family), and of average income. When thinking of how to better reach its customers, CampingWorld.com can use this data to narrow its target market and use its marketing tools more efficiently.
As we can see, the digital buzz surrounding camping during the spring and summer is significant, and these two companies are capitalizing on people’s sense of adventure. Camping is clearly a seasonal business; there is a steep decline of traffic to these sites after August. When planning marketing initiatives, it is important for summer-focused companies to recognize at what exact point their sites have declining traffic. They should be exploring options for retaining their audiences from August to January, such as adding a blog or other engaging site features that will appeal to their main audience of middle-aged males. This lesson in the seasonality of online traffic is also very relevant for industries beyond outdoor equipment and it’s important to recognize when to pay extra attention to your target audience throughout the year.
Androinapple 