Have you ever had a relaxing getaway at the beach rained out and wished there was some sort of compensation you could get for your lack of a tan? In the absence of a long-awaited good weather guarantee from Mother Nature, Priceline has stepped up and taken the initiative. Their quirky Sunshine Guaranteed offer promises to refund vacation package purchases if an excessive amount of rainfall takes place on the trip. Innovative and strong performing promotional campaigns like this, along with a discount and price-focused product and marketing mix have helped make Priceline’s website conversion rates near the highest among online travel agencies.

Priceline’s shopper conversion rate (the percentage of those who perform a search on the site that ends up completing a booking) is 7%, nearly two percentage points higher than the OTA average of 5% (red bars). Promotional Clickers on Priceline, those who engage with some kind of promotional content while on the site, have an exceptional conversion rate of 13%, nearly twice the OTA average (blue bars).

In June, 12% of Priceline’s site traffic clicked on a promotion. While the Sunshine Guarantee promotion may attract only a niche audience (0.2% of Priceline shoppers), those who do click on this promotion are highly likely to convert – an impressive 24% of Sunshine clickers will complete a booking. Despite attracting relatively few clickers, it resonated with its audience and led to strong conversion rates, showing just how effective a smaller, targeted promotion can be.

Expedia’s recent Summer of Adventure campaign was another successful promotion, on a different scale. In contrast to Priceline’s Sunshine Guarantee, Expedia’s promotion generated huge online exposure among visitors to the Expedia website.

Compete’s data is evidence that both large campaigns like Expedia’s and more targeted offers such as Priceline’s Sunshine Guaranteed can be effective in the same market.

Although the Opening Ceremonies for the Beijing Olympics don’t start until tonight, some events have already begun. Likewise, the flow of traffic online for the Olympics got an early start this year, reaching an early peak during the height of last month’s qualifying competitions.

NBC’s official Olympics site (NBCOlympics.com) is gaining steam leading up to tonight, as are the Olympics sections on two popular sports websites: ESPN.com and Yahoo! Sports. The official website for these summer Olympics (en.Beijing2008.cn) lags behind, currently finishing out of the medals.

Although Beijing2008.com and NBCOlympics.com come in first and third respectively as search destinations in a broad match for the term ‘olympics’ since early May, neither is attracting as much Olympics interest as ESPN or Yahoo! Sports. It appears as though users looking for information though search engines are more inclined to use the Olympics-specific sites, while those foregoing search are more likely to use familiar sports sites.

The Olympics sites will of course see a huge spike once the games start, but the spike may be even bigger this year than for previous contests. The chart below compares traffic to NBC’s official Olympics site in the months leading up to and during the Games in 2004 and 2008.

Whether driven by the controversy over protests during the torch relay, the air quality in the city, or a heightened interest in the actual events, NBC’s Olympics site has seen three times more traffic in June and July of 2008 than in 2004. There are still question marks about whether Beijing will be a success as an Olympics venue, but signs are already pointing towards the games being bigger than ever online.

With the bulk of the major soccer competitions coming to a close in Europe over the past couple months, it seems like a good time to give out one final trophy. While this one may not be quite as prestigious as a league championship or the Champions League or Euro title, the battle for the top European club online in the U.S. is still a heated one. And judging from all the off-season tours that many of these teams have made to America in the past few years, the battle for American fandom is one all of these clubs would like to win.

Traffic to the team pages on ESPN Soccernet, BigSoccer.com, and Goal.com was included to give a sampling of the casual to the hardcore fans. I chose the thirteen most popular clubs from the biggest leagues across Europe, and just to prove that I have no bias here, I didn’t even include my favorite team (although not winning a major trophy for nearly 4 decades would have made it hard to justify including Newcastle United).

It’s no surprise that Manchester United, regarded as the most popular club in the world, has the biggest fan base in the U.S. The English Premier League looks to have the greatest following on the whole as well, taking four of the top five spots.

But which team has the most engaged fans? A look as visits per unique visitor for these three sites shows which fan base just can’t get enough of their team.

The tables are somewhat turned on their head with Juventus going from tenth to first with nearly five visits per unique visitor, and Manchester United dropping from the top spot all the way to 9th. It looks like Liverpool, with the fifth most unique visitors and second most visits per UV, could be the real winner here. Their team slogan, “You will never walk alone,” appears to be appropriate even in the online channel.

With soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S., this is a battle that is sure to go on for years, and while there may not be any trophy for the winner, I’m sure the financial rewards will be more than enough.

Remember when calling someone a “tree hugger” was supposed to be an insult? Now with global warming becoming a prominent issue, it seems to be worn like a badge of honor and I’m sure there are people who would hug a lot worse than trees to get a traffic trend like treehugger.com has.

The one-stop-shopping site for everything green has seen substantial growth over the past two years with unique visitors in April of this year up 281% over the same month last year, and more than 8 times bigger than April 2006.

The depth of the site has also led to increased engagement – just under 7 page views per visit. Treehugger is an impressive example of the new environmentally conscious wave and it’s indicative of an overall trend.

We took a look back at our ’07 resolution to see how far the environmental category as a whole (ranging from the old school - sierraclub.org and greenpeace.org, to the newer wave - motherearthnews.com and treehugger.com, and more) has done since then. After moderate growth from April ’06 to ’07 (14%), unique visitor traffic growth accelerated over the past year, growing 33% since last April.

From the perspective of the sites and the state of the environment, this graph shows that the trend is going in the right direction and as the general public becomes more aware of the issues it will only increase. Someday maybe we’ll all be tree huggers.

The April Fools hoaxes by Google have become widely known in some circles, but judging by the email I got from a friend this morning asking if I’d seen the new Gmail feature of Custom Time, not everyone has caught on. The pages are well done and it’s easy to see how someone not really paying attention could be fooled by some of the “new offers” at first glance.

The hoaxes started back in 2000 but last year was the biggest yet for Google with two fake offers. There were more than one million visits to the combination of Gmail Paper and Google TiSP (Toilet Internet Service Provider) pages in April last year.

Anyway, I wonder if I’ve got a shot at living on Mars…

There are more sports television channels than ever, and new sports websites popping up every day, but ESPN is the self-declared “Worldwide Leader in Sports.” So just how accurate is that tagline online?

While consistently being the leader throughout height the baseball and football seasons, it seems that the slow sports months early in the year hit ESPN harder than both Yahoo! Sports and Sports Illustrated, which actually grew significantly despite relatively little sports news in the past two months.

I recently joined FanIQ.com, an interactive sports site that starts the sign-up process with a list of statements which users agree or disagree with. One of the first statements was, “ESPN is biased towards certain teams.” With this being such a prominent question and sites like deadspin.com regularly taking aim at “the worldwide leader,” it seems like there is a rising tide against ESPN.

Although Deadspin is part of the popular media and pop culture Gawker network of blogs, it doesn’t have the marketing power of ESPN or Yahoo! to drive UVs, so engagement may be a more even playing field.

• Deadspin and ESPN have been relatively similar in terms of average stay over the past year, but Yahoo! Sports nearly doubles them both, with an average stay hovering around 8 minutes.
• Even though Deadspin readers may not like ESPN, most still aren’t avoiding it – 53% of Deadspin visitors also visited ESPN in February, while only 34% went to Yahoo! Sports. 26% of users went to both ESPN and Yahoo! Sports.
• ESPN readers come back to the site more regularly, with an average of 10.8 monthly visits per unique visitor over last year, as compared to 4.9 for Yahoo! Sports.

We’ll have to check back in as winter sports playoffs and the baseball season start, but there just might be a new name atop the leader board in online sports.