What do you do when it rains?

Wednesday, May 30th, 2007 at 11:38 pm

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Retailers have always been obsessed by the weather.

They know that a cold snap in May can knock a hole in their summer clothing sales, or an Indian summer can drive purchase of outdoor furniture unusually late in the season. It looks like the offline trend holds true in the online world too.

In the UK we’ve just had a pretty wet and miserable bank holiday weekend so I was interested to some statistics from Heather Hopkins on a large jump in UK online traffic that is probably down to people staying at home and shopping online:

It’s logical to assume that bad weather means people staying at home, and I suppose by implication good weather means more people go out so less internet usage (given most internet use is still at home).

It’d be interesting to know what the traffic pattern looks like on a sunny bank holiday weekend - is there a trough that means we could make a rough estimate on the level of increase that poor weather can drive?

Do you think the trend also applies to blog readership? As soon as rain is forecast should I reach for the laptop and get blogging?!

Tags: -research-and-analysis, bank+holiday, Blogging, heather+hopkins, hitwise, Marketing, seasonality, Social media, statistics, weather, Web strategy
Categories: Blogging, Marketing, Social media, Statistics, research and analysis, Web strategy

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