The Pulse: Levels of interest in Mass-Participation sport in the UK
In our sector, there's one question on everyone's mind. When will mass-participation sport return?
To help answer this question, we're opening our digital doors and sharing our site traffic to allow race organisers to see data to help with decision making over the coming months. Data will include:
- Traffic. How many people are actively looking for events on findarace.com?
- Bookings. Are people just looking for events, or also booking?
- How far in the future are people booking events for?
Spoiler alert: not many people are looking for events right now. Our site traffic is 25% of what it would normally be this time of year. But over the next few months we'll keep this dashboard open and provide regular updates with top level insights to keep you up-to-date with the latest trends.
The Pulse dashboard is split into four charts:
Race Ready Score.
We've created an index to show the public interest in searching for and booking races. The Race Ready score is calculated with a few factors including findarace.com traffic, search trends data, survey responses and on-site bookings. This is out of 100 with 100 being what we would be seeing in a normal year. No surprise to see this right now in mid-May in the mid-teens.
Site Traffic.
This feeds into the Race Ready score but is also interesting to see on its own. It shows the impact of Covid-19 on site traffic starting from the day that we went into lockdown. Traffic for April was down 73% at just over 100k Sessions, compared to 400k in April 2019.
CR Index Score.
This chart looks at whether people are booking races, or just looking. It shows the trend in actual bookings (by Conversion Rate) on findarace.com. This score is also indexed with a score of 100 being what we would expect to see at this time of year.
When are people booking for?
This chart shows bookings split out by date of the event. In line with guidance from UKA we're currently seeing next to no bookings for events in May and June, and even less in July. There are a few bookings being made for August but the volume is too small to represent a meaningful trend.
We hope some of this data is useful to the industry and we'll continue to share the Pulse dashboard over the next few months. Let us know if there's any more detailed data you'd like to see, such as levels of interest for specific distances.
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