Ski Resort Websites Averaged 15,000 Uniques in Jan 2012, How Did You Compare?

Ski resorts websites aren’t Amazon.com and never will be, but a significant portion of ticket sales, bookings, and reservations are made online. With the season in the books, I wanted to see what traffic was like for resort real estate during 2011/12.

Compete gathers their data through a panel of 2,000,000 US internet users which represent approximately 1% of all users. Then, “Using a rigorous statistical normalization methodology, Compete creates precise projections of the behavior of the entire US Internet browser population on monthly and weekly basis.” So, it’s not prefect, but as good as we can get for public data.

A Few Deets
Because not all websites are visited enough times each month by their sample size, some low-traffic websites don’t receive a traffic estimate. Of the 554 US resort’s that I have URLs for, 72% on average received a traffic estimate during the 2011/2012 season. Average are based only on the resorts that DID receive a traffic estimate. Also, five resorts whose websites are hosted on university or other high-traffic county/regional sites were excluded to keep the data as resort-specific as possible.

Here’s how the numbers broke down for both total visitors and unique visitors:

November started the season with 19,700 total visitors and 10,100 uniques. From a January peak that saw an average of 31,900 total visitors and 15,100 unique visitors, those numbers had fallen to 7,500 and 4,800 by May.

How do you stack up?
The internet is where much of ski-related commerce is happening and will continue to happen going forward. Web commerce relies on that classic funnel/formula – traffic * conversion rate * order amount – to earn revenue. Traffic is a simple, but helpful metric to see how well your site is performing in terms of getting people to start that funnel.

While simple, hopefully these numbers provide a basic benchmark to compare yourself to. Larger resorts should be well above this level. Smaller can be a little below without worrying to much. It’s always hard to know how you stand when it comes to private data, this might give some insight where before there was none.