This index is written for marketing and ecommerce teams at UK luggage brands and retailers: anyone selling cabin bags, underseat bags, suitcases or travel bags who has to account for where this year’s organic traffic went.
The sector figures give you the benchmark to measure yourself against. Search demand fell 16% to 1.2 million a month, the average site lost 34% of its estimated organic traffic, and all 23 of the largest sites declined. A site down 15% has held 19 percentage points more of its traffic than the average competitor and has grown its share of a smaller market. A site down 50% has lost 16 percentage points more than the average, and that gap is what its own category pages, product templates and internal linking can be made to address.
Lugg is the case worth studying in detail: 68% growth year on year in a period when the average site lost 34%. The sites that grew in this cycle, Lugg among them, sort their cabin bags by airline and put the allowance in the product name, which matches how shoppers now phrase the search.
When you take a traffic chart into a board meeting, the useful version carries two lines: your own year-on-year change and the sector average of -34%. This report gives you the second line for more than 100 brands, so you can show which part of the fall every competitor in the category shared.