How the Angry Birds shop got more traffic than M&S

The success of the Angry Birds online shop is a testament of how quickly things can gain traction on the web if they capture consumers’ imagination. Angry Birds started life as a popular game, and its success led to a shop being launched in March selling Angry Birds merchandise. Hitwise, which collates data on web traffic, yesterday released figures showing that last week the retail site got more traffic than Marks and Spencer, nearly as much as Argos, and more than New Look and Topshop combined. Its traffic amounted to over 1% of all UK internet visits to online retailers last week.

Not only is the speed of its growth impressive, but the way it has grown is new. Most retailers get 40% to 50% of their traffic from search engines, and those active on social networks might get 20% more from sites like Twitter and Facebook. Angry Birds got 41% of its traffic from Facebook alone. This may be, says Hitwise research director Robin Goad, because some parts of the game require access to Facebook, but the high levels of traffic indicate it’s more likely to be down to marketing.

As Goad says, “social media (and Facebook in particular) is becoming the new frontier to advertise products online.” There’s obviously huge potential for retailers who manage to transport their brand successfully onto social networks, and the list of (generally new) retailers to emulate is growing.