We've done a few posts about the flower sites in the past, including "Mothers and Sweethearts" and "Which is More Popular: Mother's Day of Valentine's Day?"If you take a look at the traffic to two of the major flower sites shown on the left you'll see that they get the majority of their traffic on two hallmark-made holidays, Valentine's Day and Mother's Day.
Taking a closer look at the graph above, there are some interesting things to note about the two sites, Proflowers.com and 1800flowers.com. Proflowers, shown in red above, has been trailing behind 1800flowers for years, consistently pulling between 50% and 75% as much traffic. But as of February this is no longer true. This Valentine's Day Proflowers saw an almost 60% increase in Year over Year traffic, besting 1800flowers by 40%.
Here's the kicker: Proflower's increase in traffic didn't come from search.Take a look at the (messy) graph to the right. It shows the percent of traffic to our flower sites that comes from search. You can see Proflowers (in red), which has historically relied heavily on search engine marketing, is now getting less of their traffic from search. 1800 flowers on the other hand has stepped up their Search Engine Marketing and is now getting more traffic than ever from search engines.
Search Engine Marketing is often seen as the key factor to driving more traffic. But as Proflowers proves, there are other ways to generate traffic. How did they do it? They have gone old-school with a large-scale radio campaign signing a number of endorsement deals with radio hosts. Who says radio is dead?
Quick reminder: don't forget your Mom -- Mother's Day is just around the corner.
