2020 was an interesting year, to say the least. A Global pandemic, political turmoil in the United States, Australian bushfires, Murder hornets, the Stock Market crash with quick recovery, and the tragic death of Kobe Bryant.
While many businesses struggled in 2020, we were fortunate that both BattlBox and Carnivore Club were well-positioned and able to show success during the pandemic. Both were on pace to have record-setting years in the midst of the pandemic and BattlBox had not even played its ace in the hole, Southern Survival.
On July 4th weekend last year, Netflix launched Southern Survival. Southern Survival was BattlBox’s TV Show. Each episode dealt with product testing to determine if items would meet our stamp of approval and in turn be potentially featured in a future BattlBox. Before the show launched, we knew we were going to see a major bump in traffic, but we had no idea what it would look like and how the traffic would behave. Don’t get me wrong, we had theories on how much traffic we should see and how it would convert, but it was simply educated guesses as there was no real past data or case studies to show what to expect.
Here is a breakdown of sessions on our website for 2020:
Bigger Image: http://prntscr.com/ww7n4v
As you can quickly see, when the show dropped on Netflix, the traffic quickly followed. While we previously averaged around 200,000 sessions a month on the main BattlBox site, July saw over a million sessions. Around a 550% uptick to normal expected traffic. We still saw a traffic uptick in August, a tad over 300,000 sessions, or a 50% uptick.
Here is a breakdown of daily sessions for July 2020:
Bigger image: http://prntscr.com/ww7rh7
The show was made available on July 3rd and as you can see there was an instant traffic hit to our website. Sunday, July 5th was the peak with 90,000 sessions. We had between 1000-2000 people on the site at almost all times that Sunday. As you can see, while traffic continued to be way higher than normal, it was a slow bleed back down to reality. It was a predictable decline and after a week and a half worth of data, we were able to adjust our forecasts on how the traffic would behave for the following months.
Let’s talk about search queries! While we had multiple SEO strategy conversations (and executions) prior to the show (partnered with HulkApps for this) to make sure we captured as much of the search traffic as possible, preparation for this was unchartered water especially since we watched the whole series for the first time at the same time as everyone else was able to (July 3rd). In addition to SEO strategies, our Google Ads strategy was a very important piece as well (partnered with Stealth Venture Labs for this). Here is a breakdown of both search queries for the year and July specifically:
Bigger images: http://prntscr.com/ww81vm and http://prntscr.com/ww86fa
So in summary, LOTS of traffic. As far as traffic behavior goes, the traffic actually performed better than expected. It converted at 50% of our normal expected conversion rate. Our email capturing efforts performed at normal rates so we were able to onboard around 150,000 users into our marketing ecosystem in hopes of a future purchase. These efforts are continuing to pay dividends.
0 comments