I meant to blog about this ages ago (years in fact), but I’m a scatty brained lazy arse who clearly forgot. I’m a bit of a nerd when it comes to statistics of all shapes and sizes – be it daily website traffic reports from Google Analytics, or checking up on how any of our servers are performing. I’m especially nerdy with new sites I launch, checking in more often than usual to see where i’m getting traffic from, what content is working best, and so on. But one thing that amuses me more than most is the weather factor.
For the past god knows how many weeks, we’ve had totally abysmal weather here in Dublin. We’re in monsoon territory these days and when the sun finally does come out, us Irish like to head outside in our thousands to work on our trademark ‘Paddy Tan’. Yesterday (Thursday 28th August 2008) was one such day. A belter. The sun was out, it was boiling hot, and on my drive home from the office in Donnybrook to my home in Dalkey, I even decided to go the long route down the coast road to check out the talent down by the pier and at Teddy’s Ice Cream place at Sandycove.
I did have a feeling though, that i’d be making less money than usual that day. Many businesses i’m involved in earn revenue from CPC, CPA, and CPM advertising, which are all closely linked to the amount of website traffic one has. The more people visiting your sites, the more ads you deliver, the more clicks you deliver, and the more conversions you deliver. It’s simple – more traffic = more money.
However, on sunny days, I sometimes notice our traffic down up to 30% on the previous day, and traditionally our traffic takes a dip every summer anyway. While some of this may be down to people taking holidays, or students not dossing on the internet because they’re not in college, a lot of it is due to the weather. People want to get out more when it’s nice and – even though i’ve not looked into it – I reckon TV ratings see the same sort of dips during summertime.
Weather also plays an important role in traffic usage patterns for one vertical, as well as the occurance of weekends. Friends of mine who work for travel booking websites report their busiest days as being Mondays, and during bad spells of weather! Unusual eh?