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Right. This depends a lot on the demographics of your site users. Mine are also the sort that whether or not there is a war will effect much why they'd want to read what is on my site.
I got more traffic the first two days of last week than in the entire week before.
It's costing me a fortune on AdWords right now, though...
Anyone in the _UK_ seeing a similar trend?
Fortunately:
(1) this allows me to overcome the problems I had at the last Google update when some people seemed to make major jumps ahead of me for no apparent reasons.
(2) with the traffic drop off I have had some time to have larger maintenance windows and make the site stronger for April and beyond. Some major changes like substituting HTML pages built with XML and XSL for older JSP pages. Should improve speed etc.
I have just cut back on marketing for now too. Way I figure is that I am nicely positioned for the next month, why throw any more money at the current time when it's obvious that my product is not selling.
The news business is going good.
Stateside (USA)
This I would expect. Travel is one of those things that if something far more immediate and pressing can distract there Internet time, like war news, people will defer to later. Eventually they'll come back.
(1) as stated deferred searching etc. The fact there are more important things people want to see on the web.
(2) also, economics play a big part. If the economy bounces back after the war then i expect to see leisure and vacation sites and referrals bounce back too. A "peace" dividend as it were.
(3) also, uncertainty. If all we hear is about this and that airline having problems etc, then that means people don't want to fly...if they don't fly they don't book accommodations etc.
All in all its a tough time. But IMHO make the most of not having traffic to prepare for the next time you.
this included US visitors who had totally vanished for 2 or 3 days
My traffic is back up today so far, maybe near normal.
Perhaps some of the other, more portal like search sites are loosing some of their search traffic to war links on their sites' home pages.
Just thinking aloud.
Still, the fact that I'm still at 85% of my normal traffic levels with a war going on is fairly encouraging. My biggest concern right now is that cuts in international flights may limit the number of North Americans, Australians, and Asians who can visit Europe this year.
As for sales, I've had zilch since the war started, absolutely nada, and very few emails either, and I usually get several reservations a day. Looks pretty bad to me. C'mon, people, the war won't affect your vacation to Central America, go ahead and book some rooms, will you? Jeeze!
I have another site, not travel-related and also irrelevant to war issues, and traffic and conversions are both down for it as well, though not so much as for the travel site. The world holds its breath. I wouldn't, if I were them, they might get a little blue in the face before this is over.
