Website traffic is a common measurement of an industry’s health in the digital age. Take the retail industry, for instance. In the same way that more walk-in traffic at physical stores tends to create more sales, more people visiting a website suggests a higher propensity to purchase.
Measuring the health of the cruise industry
You can use a similar methodology in the travel and entertainment sector, including the cruise industry. High website traffic suggests a greater confidence in the market, and more inclination to travel, explore, book hotels and so forth.
With Similarweb we can measure holistic web traffic data, not simply relying on search engine ranking. Using the data it supplies you can get a macro snapshot of the health of any industry. You can then dig deeper to understand the intentions and behaviours that drive the industry. This provides insightful answers as to why the sector is growing, and how you can take advantage of that yourself.
Looking at the travel and entertainment data over the past few months shows us that the industry has revived. Below is a web traffic heatmap report across several industry components. The green blocks show the increased website traffic in these sectors.
As you can see, the cruise industry alone has had a 268% PoP increase in web traffic. For digital marketers who want to be better informed, that’s not enough though. You can look even further into the individual digital channels driving this traffic growth.
Digital channels in the cruise industry
While direct marketing is growing, like most industries, organic search is still the best performing channel, driving the most traffic to cruise industry websites.
The advantage of organic search is that it’s granular and can be used to understand your audience and their intent. How? By simply looking at the search keywords that drive the traffic to the cruise industry. Note that this is not search engine ranking data – it’s traffic data that measures how many people click through from the search results pages.
Search trends in the cruise industry
We can use hundreds of trending search terms that show customer intent in the Australian cruise industry. Some of the recent stand-out terms are:
- cruises departing brisbane
- sunset cruises in whitsunday
- australian cruises 2023
What does this tell us?
- The average Australian cruise customer is looking for a cruise holiday departing from Brisbane.
- Cruise customers are looking for sunset cruises in the Whitsundays. You can infer that these customers might be staying in or near the Whitsundays, and extrapolate from this a need to book accommodation there.
- The cruise customer is looking for Australian cruises for 2023. We can further interrogate this data and get an idea of whether they are looking for local or international cruises.
How do we use this information?
Given that organic search is the leading channel for market growth, it should be part of your mix. We can look for trending search terms within the channel, which you can use in your content, paid search assets, and other marketing materials.
What does this mean for the cruise industry?
In summary:
- The data indicates that travel in Australia is looking healthier because web traffic is up.
- Interest in the cruise line industry is one of the reasons travel intent has increased.
- Some of the trending behaviours of the cruise industry help us better understand what is driving this growth.
The above is an example of how traffic data helps you understand audience behaviours that you can then incorporate into campaigns to bring more website traffic, leads, emails and phone calls. And ultimately increase revenue.
