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Weekend
and Summer Web traffic depression There is no doubt that websites on certain
types of topics have less traffic in summer and on weekends. Those are the sort
of Web sites I have. They have information about topics that students are likely
to look up at school, or engineers and marketers might look up at work.
I haven't yet been able to find many good sources of general data about these
seasonal and weekly fluctuations, but a few other people have noticed and complained on
forums. Of course, it is well known that e-mailings are best done during the
week, between Tuesday and Thursday, but that is another matter.
Here is a graph of a week's worth of traffic at one site:
In the summer, there seems to be the same problem. People go on vacation and
aren't looking for these sort of topics. Traffic declines by as much as 30% or
more, as we can see in this graph of sessions from a different site, equally typical:
This site had 1.8 times as many visitors in May as it did in August, though
that may not be clear from the graph of sessions.
I know there is a SMALL summer dip that happens in all Website traffic
overall. Here is what it looks like:
Source of Seasonal Variation Data
That is part of the drop seen in my sites, but it is not as great. The gap
from the best month to the worst is 25%, not 40%.
There's another little tiny dip that happens at the end of December, because
of Christmas.
I know that this summer dip doesn't happen to everyone to the same extent. I can see
the Alexa ranking of these sites, and the traffic share, decline in the summer
and then recover slowly in the winter, beginning after Labor day.
I tried to see if this was tied to seasonal fluctuations in searches for
major keywords associated with those sites, but no such trend was evident. It
must have to do with Long tail
searches for combinations of words.
It would be interesting to hear from others who have the same problem. I am
sure there are other types of Web sites that get many more visitors in the
summer months, such as hotel and resort and tourist site Web sites. Here is an
example:
This Scottish hotel Web site gets a lot more traffic between between April
and August than it does in other months evidently.
What can or should be done about it? I have thought long and hard about this
with my tiny set of brains
and concluded that probably nothing should be done or can be done. A Website is
usually not like a store with a fixed capacity and high overhead. It doesn't
matter when visitors come, as long as they come. I did try to send e-mailings
and post Web logs etc. on weekends, but that seems to be wasted effort. The
multiplier effect of a fresh posting or e-mailing during the week and outside
the summer months seems to be much greater.
December 8, 2008
Ami Isseroff
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