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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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DIY and gardening content online

October 23, 2008

Last month we showed how traffic to House and Garden retail websites has been increasing, despite – or, perhaps more accurately, because of - the credit crunch. Both DIY and furniture retailers are benefitting from this boom, but what about the content sites serving the expanding home improvement market?

In order to understand how these site are doing I created a custom category of house and garden content website that includes magazines, online-only sites and TV-related pages, such as Channel 4 Homes. As you can see from the chart below, retailers in the sector currently receive almost eight times more traffic than content sites. However, what isn’t so clear from the graph is that both categories are actually growing at a very similar rate: 23% year-on-year for the retailers, 22% for the content sites.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_house_and_garden_retailers_and_websites.png

So, growth rates are similar, but there is clearly a big gap in terms of traffic volumes. In order to understand the different types of traffic that each category receives, we ran a gap analysis on the search terms sending traffic to both. The two strongest areas for content sites were financial queries (e.g. ‘car tax bands’, ‘mortgage payment calculator’, ‘loft insulation grants’) and practical queries (e.g. ‘decorating ideas’, ‘diy help’, ‘grow your own’). Retailers, on the other hand, received a lot more traffic from searches for distinct objects, such as ‘aga’, ‘bedroom suites’, ‘flymo’ and ‘garden shed’.

The focus on gardening and DIY tips make sense for content sites - last time we also highlighted the 25% annual increase in practical ‘how to’ searches. Looking at our custom category, it is clear that DIY sites and forums providing practical tips and guides are currently the most popular, with DIYNot.com, HowToMendIt.com and DIY Doctor occupying the top 3 positions during September.

Top_10_house_and_garden_websites_DIYNOT_how_to_mend_it_DIY_doctor_BBC_gardening _september_2008.png

It is possible to segment this category into thee further sub categories. In addition to the DIY sites there are also gardening sites (e.g. Royal Horticultural Society, BBC Gardeners’ World) and what I will call Home Content sites, which focus more on the design / lifestyle aspect than the practical. Examples of these include BBC Homes, as well as magazine sites such as Living Etc. and Wallpaper*.

Charting traffic to these three sub-categories of sites reveals a couple of interesting trends. The first is the clear seasonality of the gardening sites, with traffic starting to take off after Christmas and peaking in late spring / early summer. It is noticeable that traffic to gardening sites has declined over the last couple of years, perhaps as result of two wet summers. The DIY and Home categories are much less seasonal, but while gardening traffic has been falling, these ‘indoor’ sites have done very well, again reflecting the positive news for retailers in the sector.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_DIY_home_and_gardening_websites_2005_2006_2007_2008_chart.png