2012 Attendance and Google Trends

[mrfoos]

I was reflecting on this past season. I live in a college town, and my staff and I talked to a lot of college students during October. We were surprised by how many guys we talked to that had never been to a haunted anything (house or trail) and seemed very tentative (scared?) about going. However many of these guys were taking their girlfriends to a corn maze for a date night. I ran just a haunted trail on a farm and wasn't able to get a corn maze up this year. It definately got me thinking that I might can lure more sheltered types in by offering a relatively safe corn maze but then try and get them to try the haunted stuff out too while they are already there.

So I ran a google trends search on "corn maze" to see what kind of pattern of searches it was getting over the past few years:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=corn%20maze

So this year was significantly down from the past two. I have no idea if it's related but the low years seem to be around presidental election years. However the term "fall festival" was steadily increasing each year:

http://www.google.com/trends/explore...estival&cmpt=q

Anyone interested in discussing this? I guess I'm wondering if the peaks and valleys of "corn maze" traffic relate to anyone's traffic patterns over the past few years. I'm a nerd for graphs so maybe it's just a pointless line of thinking.

[scottylmt]

I don't think its pointless at all; just the opposite in any business. Google search keywords will soon be the biggest draw factor for new business (actually it probably is already)

I know the haunts in my area, but I still searched google to see if there were any new ones anyway.

[UnDeRTaKer313]

roughly 6 months ago, google got faced a huge lawsuit that meant they wernt allowed to report traffic in analytics or google trends of any person who is logged into there google account. which is a ton of people. Haunts who had traffic that was up huge this year showed lower traffic in google analytics and it showed that google trends for their keywords were down.

Just a heads up

[drfrightner]

These are the smart debates and more people should add input because this is how you get money to buy new props or build new scenes or pay your bills...

Technology is changing so fast and its so hard to keep up with it and I'm talking about technology from the marketing standpoint.

Yes I want to see this discussed. Good points.

Larry

[BigT]

Technology is moving faster than you think. There are some aspects of what I am going to deluge that are already out there working, and there is some of this stuff in the works (this is my day job). When you use your cell phone, and you have selected the little option about using your location to support an application (like Google Maps), you are by law now telling Google (or any other company, including your cell phone company) that you are giving them permission to share your location with applications.

These applications can come from another company, such as an ad company. We are working on something right now that will look at the web sites you visit, and the areas you travel, and send this information to an ad server that in turn sends you a customized ad. Not just customized to your location, but also in your interests. If you visit a lot of haunted house websites for example, the ad server would send you ads about haunted houses, and because it knows where you are (that little GPS thingy in your phone) it can tell you about haunted houses in your area.

Its real stuff, being implemented next year in major wireless networks all over the world. And there is a lot more to come.

[Greg Chrise]

Not sure how effective that is going to be when everyone is 10% haunt sites or 1/1000ths percent looked up a haunted house site and 98% Porn sites.

[BigT]

This is going to be an interesting project. Ad servers are working today by the way. Apple introduced Passbook, which allows you to have your tickets and coupons sent toy our iPhone. For example, you signup with Starbucks as a loyal customer. Everytime you are near a Starbucks, your location is sent to the Ad server, which then looks up your profile (yep, they have that too). They see you are signed up with Starbucks, and you receive a special offer for the day from Starbucks. When you go to the register, you show them your phone and they scan the barcode on your phone (or QoR code) and your account is debited.

By the way, I saw where TicketLeap is now tied in with PassBook on the iPhone. I am going to try this and see how well it works, but it will require a different payment collection method for us (I'll have to leave an iPhone in the ticket booth to accept payments). Anyone else taking payments this way?

[Jim Warfield]

23 times over the last year at least 23 carloads of my customers were misguided and they ended up four blocks South of my house, right down the same street, Carroll Street. they were instructed to turn left instead of right at the corner Charlie's Tavern is on, we are right behind Charlies. just a block away to the right.
Coincidentally among those murdered in 1940 at the wrong GPS location was the 31 yr. old Daughter of the people who then owned my house and lived here in it too.
Two locations connected by relation and grief in 1940, re-connected by GPS showing strangers where so much random deaths all happened.
All fact. No fiction.

[mrfoos]

23 times over the last year at least 23 carloads of my customers were misguided and they ended up four blocks South of my house, right down the same street, Carroll Street. they were instructed to turn left instead of right at the corner Charlie's Tavern is on, we are right behind Charlies. just a block away to the right.
Coincidentally among those murdered in 1940 at the wrong GPS location was the 31 yr. old Daughter of the people who then owned my house and lived here in it too.
Two locations connected by relation and grief in 1940, re-connected by GPS showing strangers where so much random deaths all happened.
All fact. No fiction.

I never have anything cool like that happen in my neighborhood.

[BigT]

Gee us neither MrFoos! All we had was a woman hang herself. Oh and the kid they found in the bottom of the pool four hours later (pool was full that day - couldn't see through all the kids to the bottom). I'll have to think about a technology link though ...........