I just did a quick comparison using comscores web rankings for February 2008. I looked at the top 10 gaining site categories by number of unique visitors February 2008 vs. January 2008 in Germany, France and the U.K.
Top category in both France and the U.K. was Flowers/Gifts/Greetings. In Germany this category was missing, however, top scorer was Fragrance/Cosmetics. This strikes me as very unusual even considering the exponential pace at which these categories are growing (hardly month on month sequentials of 20%+???).
Without having any more data I wonder if this is an underlying trend over multiple months or whether this can simply be explained by seasonality.
On the one hand, between January 8th and February 8th, there may have been a post x-mas surge in gift cheques/ coupons usage as the receiver moves to cash it.
However, one would think that this traffic would have been similar the period prior to it i.e. Dec-Jan since it takes at least one visit to purchase the cheque or coupon off the site.
A more intuitive explanation would be that Valentine’s day, which is on the 14th of February, is driving a very big increase in “flower traffic” on the internet. Most people would have made there purchases at least one week before to secure delivery hence the beginning of February would be loaded with flower and fragrance Valentine gifts.
Seasonality, and in this case possibly “the Valentine’s day effect”, makes any data look strange until you identify the abnormal, but recurring, nature of it.
Can anyone provide a better explanation?
