Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - US
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July 17, 2006
Does the Tour de France Affect Bike Sales?
Post accident, I've been going through cycling withdrawal, my only fix is watching the Tour de France on OLN (although now I turn away from the television during crash replays). Maybe it's time to generate some cycling charts.
Last week I had dinner with my good friends Bill and Elaine Yang (Bill is in my cycling group), and after hearing about data that I have access to at Hitwise (warning: if you ask me out to dinner I will talk for hours about Hitwise data), Bill asked a very interesting question: Does the Tour de France affect the sale of bicycles and cycling equipment in the US?
Sticking with our syndicated data, I decided to create a custom category of the top cycling retail sites. If we assume that an increase in visits to these retail sites would loosely correlate with increased sales, then a chart visits to these sites alongside a chart of volume of searches on the Tour de France (as a way to mark the tour dates and consumer interest in the tour) should answer our question:
It looks like a very strong correlation.. but not so fast, Bill had a follow-up question: Does the Tour de France cause an increase in sales to bikes that are prominently featured in the tour? I created two charts and discovered that visits to the Trek cycling site (official bike for the Discovery Channel Team) was responsible for driving the spike correlating to the Tour de France.
Specialized is another bike brand that is prominently featured in the Tour de France this year (Team Gerolsteiner)yet it's chart shows a pattern very different from Trek, but more like I would expect, with interest growing in spring, peaking during the Tour de France.
So with this quick analysis, it does appear that ,depending on brand, the tour does positively affect US bike sales. Thanks for the questions Bill.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 04:21 PM
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Comments
wow
its amazing how cycling retails correlates with Tour de France!
you made a very interesting report!
but as i undestand, that strong correlation relates to the last Tour. wonder why this year cycling doesn't generate that much attention
Posted by: eugene isaychew at July 20, 2006 08:27 AM
Trek for one ran a massive (as much as 20%: $2500 -> $2000 for their best selling 5200) sale on bikes corresponding with the Tour this year -- so that probably accounts for much of the increase in sales.
Posted by: tim at July 21, 2006 11:43 AM
The observable spike in visits to Trek's cycling site is due, at least in good part, to their Tour-related contest - TourMania for this year's Tour - which they host online (and at participating dealer's shops) and promote quite heavily during Tour coverage.
Specialized does not have such a promotion, and hence, one would not expect such a surge in visitors trying to get some free swag.
Posted by: David at July 21, 2006 12:33 PM
David is correct the contest requires you log on once per day to play their scratch and win type contest. I played everyday, and won PowerBars - whohoo! I did not look at a single bike though - i'm not in the market now....
Posted by: HJ at July 24, 2006 11:45 AM
One of the major reasons for the traffic spike on trekbikes.com during the tour was they were having a huge giveaway that you could enter each day the tour was on. They gave away around 55,000 prizes (ranging from powerbars to wheel sets to a couple top of the line road bikes).
Posted by: Eric at July 26, 2006 08:29 AM
