Similarweb has recognised 10 top-performing digital domains from 10 categories ranked by growth, with its annual Digital 100 ranking for 2022.
The fastest growing websites among Australian audiences in each of the categories were online car dealership, cars24.com, up 174%, reservation and booking platform for beauty treatments, fresha.com, up 106%, productivity platform, workjam.com, up 76%, robot vacuum cleaner manufacturer, ecovacs.com, up 95%, health and fitness supplements, setforset.com, up 301%, social marketplace for pre-loved clothing, poshmark.com.au, up 144%, superannuation and investments firm, cfs.com.au, up 91%, international news site, nytimes.com, up 332%, budget airline, flyscoot.com, up 884% and ticket retailer and event guide, livenation.com.au, up 341%.
The rankings are based on traffic from Australian desktop and mobile web internet users, focusing on digital domains that were active throughout 2021 and averaged at least 100,000 monthly visits in 2022.
A common theme across many of these categories was life returning to a sense of normalcy after two years of pandemic lockdowns. For example, in the Hobbies and Leisure category, not only was the ticket retailer and event guide Live Nation the fastest growing digital property, six of the 10 fastest growing websites were all ticket retailers. These included theticketmerchant.com.au (302%), frontiertouring.com.au (282.8%), and ticketek.com.au (151.6%).
This trend also played out in the travel sector as the four fastest growing websites were all airlines offering flights between Australia and South-East Asia. Along with the category leader flyscoot.com, airasia.com (703.6%), malaysiaairlines.com (486.2%), and singaporeair.com (362.5%) witnessed significant traffic increases throughout 2022.
“After all those years in lockdown, it’s clear there is pent-up demand among Australians to live their lives again. Ticket and gig guide websites dominated the Leisure category last year and airlines offering affordable flights to South-East Asia topped the travel category as Australians rushed to head overseas,” Similarweb Australia and New Zealand head of account management, Holly Joshi said.
Despite the desire to get back to normal, this year’s results also show Australians are changing their behaviour in response to economic pressures.
This is particularly apparent in the Financial Services sector. Last year’s Digital 100 was dominated by home loan providers but this year tells a different story. With retirees, or those close to retirement, concerned with how long their superannuation and other investments will support them, traffic to Colonial First State almost doubled in 2022.
“The impact of the economic squeeze is clearly having an impact on Australian consumer behaviour, and one category in which we can see this clearly is in the automotive industry,” Joshi said. “Although cars24 had the fastest growth in the category, petrolspy.com.au had by far the largest traffic of the top 10 sites. Over 2022, more than 39 million Australians logged in to find cheap petrol while the rest of the top 10 averaged around 2.5 million visitors for the year each.”