In depth research of how shoppers look for Adidas and Nike online and across Amazon has revealed that, while Nike sees more traffic, Adidas has become more adept at how to make its own site and Amazon work in tandem.
The research by SimilarWeb looks at desktop and mobile traffic for adidas.com and nike.com, from the US, covering the period from January 1, 2017 to June 30, 2018. The insights also cover incoming traffic to Nike subsidiary converse.com.
In addition to considering traffic from search engines into the owned sites, the company also looked at on-site search at amazon.com and the overlap for visits to more than one of these sites within a single session.
So what did it find?
While both Nike and Adidas are leaders in sports apparel sales online, with significant monthly traffic – 23 million and 10 million visits on average, respectively – traffic growth has been slow, despite the huge brand recognition they enjoy.
Both sites employ a similar digital strategy, focused on brand, resulting in direct traffic making up around 40% of total site traffic. A further 80% of search traffic to each site, both paid and organic, is branded.
“This strategy is about Nike and Adidas defending their brand and claiming the attention of their most loyal fans. In this way they retain many of the visitors who are actively seeking the brand, but it may open up doors for third-party retailers to gain traffic against the brands’ names”
– SimilarWeb
Looking at all traffic from the top 100 branded keywords shows that 83.5% of the organic search traffic goes to nike.com, adidas.com or converse.com. This suggests that search leeching to third-party sellers is not a major source of traffic loss for either company.
The third-party retailer getting the next highest proportion of this branded traffic is sneaker marketplace flightclub.com (2.9%), followed by footlocker.com (2.1%) and finishline.com (1.3%).
Amazon.com only ranks 19th on the list – receiving 0.4% of the organic search traffic for Nike and adidas-branded keywords.
Amazon.com isn’t only where search ends. For many, it’s where search starts. Direct traffic accounts for 57% of traffic into amazon.com. An additional 27% comes from search of which 79% is branded.
So, while less than 100,000 visits came into amazon.com from searches involving the keywords Adidas or Nike, on-site there were as many as 9 million searches for adidas and 15 million searches for Nike.
“The lower proportion of crossover traffic between amazon.com and adidas.com suggests that adidas is able to retain, and potentially convert, visitors to their own site, more than Nike. This may be due to a variation in the range of products and the value of promotions on their owned property vs a third-party retailer.”
– SimilarWeb
In conclusion
Has Adidas cracked using both online and Amazon? SimilarWeb thinks so. In the past couple of years, Adidas has made significant strides in the digital space –focusing all of its marketing efforts online – and it is paying off.
Though traffic to the site is lower than to nike.com, adidas.com manages to keep people on the site, and maintain a higher conversion rate for consumers who also shop around at Amazon.
“A key part of this success has been the careful curation of their product line with event releases of new items, particularly Kanye West’s Yeezy brand, available exclusively at adidas.com. This way all the industry buzz drives traffic to the owned property while reflected brand awareness maintains traffic for other adidas products at third-party retailers.”
– SimilarWeb
To learn more download the SimilarWeb report here
