The World Cup has had a major impact on Internet Search patterns and this has impacted businesses in different ways. Some have gained, others have had fewer leads.
The obvious winners are the news sites and sports sites who saw huge increases in traffic during World Cup matches due to people viewing online. By huge, increases of over 200% have been reported on news related websites (from sources such as Akamai ).
By contrast B2B websites had a sluggish June in terms of numbers of search visitors to the website as many of the usual searchers were too busy looking at the World Cup. This had meant the usual drop from June to July and August in B2B website visitors due to summer holidays has not happened. Indeed many B2B websites have seen increasing traffic in July compared to June.
The above is a simplistic view; for businesses who advertise on the Internet there were opportunities from the World Cup viewing; advertising on these websites was key and provided larger volumes clicks, so it was possible for B2B or more usually B2C websites to buck the trend.
The World Cup was a world event, with the search impact being felt across the world. Other events are more local . For example the UK search markets were affected at the start of the year by snow. The impact of the snow across the UK in early January was more workers staying home and the holidays became 1-2 weeks longer than usual. So B2B websites has a bad January as well.
All in all 2010 has not been the most predictable for B2B websites; forget the recession, other factors such as snow and football can have as big an impact.
What does this mean for Internet Marketing Strategy? It makes simple comparisons of one year with another difficult, and even month by month comparisons need some explanation to see what is really happening,