Gucci’s Web Site Booming, Study Shows
The luxury brand came in on top for web traffic, alongside Stitch Fix and Uniqlo.
Gucci’s recent success isn’t limited to the runway — it’s also doing better than ever online.
New research from SimilarWeb, a digital firm that studies web traffic, found traffic
to Gucci’s web site increased monthly
over the course of last year, peaking in December with 4.7 million visits to the site. In December 2016, Gucci pulled only 1.9
million visitors and, during most months that year had at least one million fewer visits than in 2017.
The brand’s bounce rate, or the percentage of visitors to the site who leave after seeing only one page, has also improved, dropping to 34.1 percent in 2017 from 41.4 percent in 2016. Last year, the average Gucci web site visitor looked at 7.1 pages, up from 3.9 pages in 2016, according to SimilarWeb.
This traffic bump was led by an increase
in organic searches, or when someone puts a term in a search engine and is led to the site, which accounted for 41.6 percent of Gucci’s online traffic. Direct searches for
the site came in second and made up 25.5 percent of the traffic.
The firm said Gucci’s increase in traffic
was also coupled with “increased engagement across all stats with the site also benefiting from a strong relationship with referrers like polyvore.com and rstyle. me.”
Gucci is also the only luxury brand to
make it into the study, which SimilarWeb dubbed the “Momentum Awards.” Also named in the study were Stitch Fix, the online-only fashion styling service, and basics-driven Uniqlo.
While Uniqlo can boast the highest traffic of the three brands, with visitors from four million to nine million during 2017, Gucci beat it on engagement. Uniqlo visitors averaged 6.6 pages per visit last year, down from 6.9 in 2016.
Gucci beat Stitch Fix, too, on both engagement and bounce rate. The online pure play counted 5.5 pages per visitor and
39.4 percent left after only seeing a single
page. While traffic at Stitch Fix was higher
than Gucci throughout the bulk of the year,
during the holiday season they changed places, with Stitch Fix dropping to 2.5 million visitors in December, compared with Gucci’s 4.7 million.
Gucci has been enjoying the success of
the brand vision led by creative director Alessandro Michele since he was appointed at the beginning of 2015. One aspect of Michele’s designs and marketing is his take on “faux-real culture,” which has proved tricky at times, but led to a number of unexpected collaborations that have surely grown its audience.
Wal-Mart Stores Inc. also made it onto SimilarWeb’s award list in the online marketplace category, averaging about 350 million online visitors a month last year before jumping to 500 million in November and December.
In the Media category, hard news dominated, with The New York Times leading the way with a steady stream of between roughly 275 million and 300 million viewers every month.