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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

Analyst Weblog

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Snow Sports – Optimism and Opportunity

July 16, 2008

I'm excited to welcome on board to the weblogs, Alan Long, Hitwise Research Director who will soon be joining me in covering online trends for the Asia Pacific region.

In the meantime, here's a guest post from Alan -

While it's been a few years since I have strapped on the planks for a slide (yep, I'm old skool) I still have a high level of interest in my once main sporting recreation.

After a slow start to the Australian snow season, the recent snow falls have generated a large increase in online interest. To highlight this I created a custom category containing resort and information sites for Australia, New Zealand and Japan that have been receiving traffic from Australian users over the past four weeks.

The chart below highlights the rapid growth in interest that was generated on the back of the first reasonable snowfall of the season in the context of other popular winter sports and the upcoming Olympics. The Australian snow season officially started on June 7.

While snow is hard to come by, garnering traffic against the generic terms seems to be as much of a challenge for our leading resorts.

The resorts are doing a great job of capturing traffic with their branded search terms which make up 15 of the top 20 search terms for the category, they makeup 58.6% of search traffic to the category with search engines delivering 31.86% of all traffic to the category.

The generic terms are more challenging with the majority of the traffic going to independent sites, such as the category leader ski.com.au.

An analysis of the search portfolio highlights the two key content features searched for (outside of the resort searches) are Ski / Snow Reports and Snow Cameras, responsible for 16.6% of all traffic generated to the category.

The resorts do capture a percentage of this traffic, but the independents dominate non branded searches and infiltrate the outcomes of branded snow cams and report searches.

So what does this all mean?

Well, there are opportunities for resorts and independents alike to maximize traffic through search strategies, align website content and its delivery to reader interest and investigate affiliate and content share arrangements.

You need to be an optimist to be a snow sports addict and an opportunist to compete in a limited market, but there are gaps for the resorts and the independent sites alike to increase their share.

Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 07:14 PM | (1) | (0)
In Categories Snow Sports

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