World cup influence on SA Tourism's online stats

Just how much interest the 2010 FIFA World Cup has sparked in South Africa's tourism potential is reflected in this initial analysis of the South African Tourism website, www.SouthAfrica.net. According to Antonio Petra, digital marketing strategist for Cambrient, which analyses the site's data every month, said that interest from aboard "peaked late."

The graph below is a general overview of SA Tourism traffic focused on 2010 content from 1 March to 21 June:

It's quite clear from this graph, said Petra, that the interest peaked late and in fact was a short burst. It formed about 15.8% of the total site traffic. What is more interesting, though, is that when you look at it against all the website traffic, you'll see that general website traffic had a comparative spike at the same time. This indicates that there was a general interest in South Africa at this point:

Most of the these users came from search engine traffic; this is generally the case with SouthAfrica.net.

Just focusing on the period over the most activity, 21 May - 21 June, and a comparison between "All Visits" and "2010 Traffic" (these are defined by the grey labels in the graphic below):

This is interesting because it's significantly different from the normal traffic source patterns. The data shows that there was a drop in direct traffic (users who type in the URL or have bookmarked it and use this bookmark to return to the website).

Referring sites (which generally refers to campaigns or links in to the site from other websites) increased, which means that all of those news articles and links back to the site, as well as some 2010 campaign, activity helped.

The most interesting thing, though, is the increase in traffic from search engines. This would generally be traffic from people with an interest in South Africa and who are searching for more information about it, and this kind of traffic will increase when we see general news about the topic increasing, which in this case it did.

So, in summary, what we're seeing here is that the hype did drive traffic to both 2010 content and general South African content. It didn't deliver a sustained burst of traffic but it did deliver the second highest visitor number for users in any one day to the SA Tourism site: 15 027 users on 11 June. The highest day was on 24 February, when a very successful online and offline campaign delivered 15 670 users. The campaign was both offline (TV and print) and online.

Country breakdown in terms of the world cup segment

There are 170 countries on the list; the table below displays the top 10:

The table below shows the change in rankings over the April/May period for "All Visits" to the website. So it's pretty clear our traffic from competing nations increased significantly over the period. The only real surprise in the table above, said Petra, is that it's the first time he's seen the UK trump the US in terms of interest.

Key: Green: Increased Rank | Red: Decreased Rank |Grey: Fell out of Top 20
The last bit of data relates to the kind of questions visitors are interested in.

This is the graph for May:

And this is the graph for January:

Generally, the ranking of these questions is pretty stable. It's always safety precautions which tops the list, for obvious reasons. And you can see this with the ranking for everything that they maintain the same pattern, except for "drinking water". "Drinking water" started to become a hot topic in March and basically by the world cup had become more important to visitors than "safety precautions".