Commentary

Just an Online Minute... End of Summer

Here are some useful end-of-summer stats from Jupiter Media Metrix that you can save for future reference, such as your last week of August 2002 online campaigns.

It looks like as people geared up for long-weekend excursions over the Labor Day holiday, they turned to the web for maps, driving directions, and weather forecasts. Traffic to map sites Encarta.com and Mapblast.com rose 42% and 23%, respectively.

Also, JMM says that before people purchased their BBQ supplies or packed their bikinis, they visited WeatherBug.com (+29%) and Accuweather.com (+20%) to make sure they could leave the umbrellas behind.

The holiday weekend also helped drive increased traffic to bargain travel provider CheapTickets.com (+17%) and Expedia Travel (+14%).

************************************************** Sponsor Ad Sales don't happen on the front page. Why send your prospects there? LookListings, from LookSmart, take prospects directly from search results on MSN, Excite, AltaVista, Juno and Prodigy to your product and service pages. The result is 150-200 highly qualified leads per listing per month, with industry leading conversion rates. No wonder Amazon, eBay, Gap, Eddie Bauer, OfficeMax, Spiegel and Banana Republic all use them. For the full story, click here: http://submit.looksmart.com/list.jhtml?chan=mediapost *************************************************************

Additionally, signaling the end of summer, children and parents were wrapping up their back-to-school shopping and trying to stretch their dollars by using the web to research and bargain-hunt. An increased number of people researched potential purchases at ConsumerReports.org (+166%).

The next stat hopefully won't apply to next year, but as layoff victims continue their job search, HotJobs.com experienced its second consecutive week of significant increases in traffic climbing an additional 48% vs. last week after coming off a 41% increase vs. the week ending August, 19 2001.

And last but not least, who said online advertising isn't effective? JMM reports that the nation's armed forces are increasingly looking to the web to aid recruitment efforts and supplement broader offline recruitment campaigns. And it looks like their efforts are paying off. Last week traffic to Army.mil increased 56% vs. the week ending August 19, 2001. This week the Navy drew a 24% increase in traffic to Navy.mil vs. the week ending August 26, 2001.

Next story loading loading..