Cheapflights Takes Off
Written by Mike Redbord (contact - e-mail) -- March 4th, 2008 | Share - Save - E-mailBig things are going on at Cheapflights.com. Unique visitors to the site had settled at about 1.5 million for quite some time, but something changed in November, 2007.
Unique visitor counts surged upwards starting in November and reached 3.5 million in January—well over double November’s traffic. The growth was so sharp that Cheapflights composed a press release, further piquing my interest in the growth’s causes and effects. I quickly pulled Compete’s referral data for Cheapflights and found the growth was driven from a variety of channels.
Varied Travel sub-categories contributed to the rapid increase but the most notable referral volume spike was from Search & Portal, which contributed 400,000 more referrals in January than November. Tweaks to the Cheapflights site, SEO, and increased SEM spend could all drive an increase like this in Search & Portal traffic.
Compete’s new Search Analytics Select™ tool can measure precisely this type of Search traffic gain. In fact, Search Analytics Select™ reaches beyond simple referrals and quantifies conversion like transfers from Cheapflights to external partner sites. These transfers are a critical revenue source for Cheapflights; more transfers to Orbitz, Kayak, or American Airlines means more money in Cheapflights’ pockets. Check out what Search Analytics Select™ can tell us from May 2007 to January 2008:
Look at that last dark blue bar: Cheapflights visitors referred from Google who then transfer to Cheapflights’ partner sites grew by 119% in January! Yahoo! and MSN transfer volume growth was just 51%, but the numbers from Google dwarf the other engines, anyway. The traffic growth not only increased Cheapflights’ visibility in the Travel vertical, but additionally is driving noteworthy revenue gains.
Note that 3.5 million monthly visitors is within striking distance of Travel Lead Generator heavyweights like Shermanstravel.com and Travelzoo.com. The next few months will be exciting for Cheapflights to see if traffic and transfer levels hold, grow further, or if decreases in site investment and SEM bring Cheapflights down to earth.
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March 4th, 2008 at 9:15 pm
maybe I missing where this post says where the growth exactly came from? Was it organic traffic in Google?
March 5th, 2008 at 4:10 pm
Hi Jaan,
I’m not specifically looking at a paid/natural breakout in this post, although both types of traffic did grow in the timeframe examined. The idea is that becuase Search & Portal traffic spiked Nov-Jan, we can look at the top three engines and infer whether or not the traffic gains from search generated proportional transfers for Cheapflights.
March 6th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
So the origin of extra visitors is Google. Fine, nothing strange here. But why would *only* visitors from Google convert (go to partner sites) *so* much more than people coming in via other sources? That one doesn’t make sense, right?
Just because I was able to find a site X from the search engine A (as opposed to B or C) or just because more people used search engine A doesn’t automatically mean people coming in via A will exhibit radically different behaviour as suggested above.
No?
March 6th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Thanks for the thoughtful question, Otis.
Although I’m not privy to the exact methods that Cheapflights used Nov-Jan, personally my money is on site redesign, upped SEM spend, and increased back-linking and referrals in the previous month. Each engine’s algorithms are different, but these factors could affect organic rank and ad visibility particularly well at Google to create the sort of spike pictured above. Specifically, Cheapflights’ site redesign launched in early 2008 and correlates with the Transfer volume spike.
Keep in mind that Cheapflights’ actions had a positive effect across all three engines but in particular Google’s algorithms and users responded well; Yahoo and MSN/Live month-over-month Transfer volume increases were about 50% each, although the bar graph doesn’t show these as dramatically. Add in advantageous organic ranking at Google (relative to Yahoo and MSN changes) and increased SEM and you’re got a situation where one engine will outpace others.
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