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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Take That reunion takes Ticketmaster to 13th most popular website online
November 12, 2010
The full reunion of Take That has been some 15 years in the waiting but when Robbie Williams came back to the band, there was online pandemonium as people rushed to secure tickets for the 2011 Take That tour.
In the week ending 30 October when tickets went on sale for the Take That tour visits to the Ticketing category hit their highest ever peak. UK Internet visits increased by 230% in that week as consumers scrambled to get tickets.
Reports from the BBC show that ticket sales for Friday 29 October alone set new UK records. On the day that tickets went on sale, Ticketmaster received 33% of all traffic going to the ticketing category. Such was the volume of traffic that 1 in every 150 Internet visits on that day went to Ticketmaster, making it the 13th most visited site in the UK. Two days before, Ticketmaster was only the 89th most popular website in the UK.
Ticketmaster’s success provides an ideal showcase for our new SERPs Position tool. Ranking highly on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) is the ultimate goal for online marketers. Now with SERP position we can track how each website was ranked in the major search engines for a given search term. For this I have chosen the term ‘take that tickets’ which was the most popular search term driving traffic to the Ticketing category for the week ending 30 October 2010 and filtered websites according to their Google SERP rankings.
What the SERP positioning tells us is that for the search term ‘take that tickets’ Ticketmaster UK appeared as the number one result in the Google rankings, number 24 in the Yahoo! search rankings and number one spot in the Bing rankings.
What’s interesting is how the different search engines rank websites for the same search term. The number one website to rank for ‘take that tickets’ in Yahoo! Search was Take That’s homepage, but in Google and Bing, Ticketmaster was the clear winner.
The other key takeaway from this tool is it shows the impact that paid search can have on a website’s traffic. Seatwave for example occupied the 12th position in the Google rankings for ‘take that tickets’ and yet received 7.21% of all search clicks for the search term. Although this might partly be explained by the high organic ranking in Bing (3rd place), a quick look at the breakdown of paid and organic clicks reveals how Seatwave received so much traffic from a relatively low SERP ranking.
Of all of the websites receiving traffic from ‘take that ticketing’ Seatwave has the highest paid rate with nearly 51% of all clicks coming from paid links. Ticketmaster by contrast had one of the lowest paid rates with 98.5% of its traffic coming from organic clicks. The lesson here is that paid search can boost traffic to websites significantly, but ranking organically is still the best way to attract consumers to your website.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 02:19 PM
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