How Trek Leveraged Referrals, Paid Search and Social to Generate 20% of Total Traffic Share Towards MTB

Key Takeaways

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Trek Leveraged Referrals, Paid Search and Social to Generate 20% of Total Traffic Share Towards MTB from May 2022 to July 2022. Here's how: 

Marketing Attribution: 

• Mountain biking content on trekbikes.com saw 49% of traffic from Internal Referrals.
• Referral, Paid Search and Social traffic are contextual approaches leveraged to help encourage Internal Referrals. 

Average Site Duration & Bounce Rate:

• Generating 403K website visits, Paid Search saw the highest average duration (00:07:07) and lowest bounce rate (20%), indicating message stickiness & intent targeting accuracy.   

Marketing Content:

• Referral: Trek received impactful referrals from different cycling sites as well as yelp.com where Trek retail stores rank under searches for “bikes”, “bike repair” and “rentals”.
• Paid Search: 5% of the Paid Search budget went to promoting mountain and off-road biking with copy including “Looks like a Monster Truck, Rides like a Magic Carpet” and “Trek is the world leader in mountain bike technology”. 
• Social: Four out of five of Trek’s top Instagram posts from May 2022 to July 2022 featured mountain biking trick and bike performance Reels. 

On-Site MTB Content:

• Three main pages on trekbikes.com focus on directing buyers to mountain bikes, generating 439K website visits. 
• The Bike Finder represents 61% of the traffic (267K) followed by an MTB Collection Page (101K) and a Buyer’s Guide (70K). 

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Trekbikes.com saw 15.7M site visits in the United States featuring a steady rise in total traffic (+57%) from January 2022 to July 2022 with mobile making up 51% of all traffic.

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Traffic to the main domain trekbikes.com is led by Organic Search and Direct sources. Referral (3%), Paid Search (2.6%) and Social (2%) traffic are contextual approaches that reach buyers through activities such as reading a blog post, making a Google search or scrolling on social media.

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Trek’s primary navigation segments the site into nine categories including MTB. Mountain biking content on Trek made up 20% of the visits to the site (3.1M traffic).  

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Mountain biking content on trekbikes.com saw 49% of traffic from Internal Referrals.  

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Referrals saw an average visit duration of 03:04 and an average bounce rate of 37% on traffic generated to the site. Out of the three highlighted channels, it generated the highest traffic (502K) and saw the second longest average duration and second lowest bounce rate.  

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Trek received impactful referrals from different cycling sites as well as yelp.com (8%) where Trek retail stores rank under searches for “bikes”, “bike repair” and “rentals”. Popular bike comparison site 99spokes.com uses Trek as a search example directly on the front page when landing on the site. Other referral sites post reviews and buyer guides featuring Trek.

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Generating 403K website visits, Paid Search saw the highest average duration (07:07) and lowest bounce rate (20%), indicating content message stickiness & intent targeting accuracy. 

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From January 2022 to July 2022, Trek spent $904K on Paid Search. May 2022 to July 2022 saw 34% of the ad budget with 78% allocation to Desktop devices. 

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From May 2022 to July 2022, June saw the highest Paid Search ad spend at $146K. In June 2022, 95% of the ad budget went to generic “Your Local Bike Shop” search ads. 5% of the budget went to promoting mountain and off-road biking with copy including “Looks like a Monster Truck, Rides like a Magic Carpet” and “Trek is the world leader in mountain bike technology”. 

The copy with 95% of the ad spend, “Your Local Bike Shop”, was experimented within geographies that support off-road cycling with “Your Local Mountain Bike Shop” at $170.

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Social saw an average visit duration of 03:20 and average bounce rate of 55% on traffic generated to the site. It generated 301K website visits and saw the lowest average duration and highest bounce rate, indicating that visitors from social interact quickly before signing off.

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Four out of five of Trek’s top Instagram posts from May 2022 to July 2022 featured mountain biking Reels over other forms of biking content. Reels feature the usual mountain biking skill and trick footage in addition to this Reel demonstrating how quiet the electric feature is on Trek’s e-mountain bike. 

Engagements: 93K | 1.4M Views

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Engagements: 21K | 443K Views

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Engagements: 19K | 393K Views

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Engagements: 10K | 329K Views

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Trek spent $335K on Paid Social ads from May - July 2022. The top three ads about mountain biking had a budget of $23K, with the top spend directing viewers to take a quiz. The other ads promoted an MTB series in Wisconsin and an MTB education guide. 

Spend: $18K | Impressions: 2.3M | CPM: $7.75

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Spend: $4.1K | Impressions: 520K | CPM: $7.88

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Spend: $1K | Impressions: 131K | CPM: $7.64

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There are three main pages on trekbikes.com that focus on directing buyers to mountain bikes, generating 439K website visits from May 2022 to July 2022. The Bike Finder represents 61% of the traffic (267K) followed by an MTB Collection Page (101K) and a Buyer’s Guide (70K). 

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This top MTB Paid Social ad featuring the Bike Finder page received praise as Trek riders took to sharing pictures of their own bike models and their enjoyment of the quiz in the comments. Content such as this fosters community and engagement from dedicated buyers who are loyal to the brand and looking to encourage others to invest as well. 

Creating discoverable content across external Referrals, Paid Search and Social enables viewers to find and interact with content on-site provided to improve the Trek user experience and fandom. 

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