Is the recession over? Maybe Google knows...

Look at any newspaper or news bulletin on the TV in the last couple of years and it would have probably touched on the 'current economic climate' at some point. Yes, the UK is in recession and has been for a while. Despite some companies posting some very healthy growth figures in 2009 (including ourselves I might add :), there is still much talk about how bad the economy is and how bad 2010 will be for sales.

What happens next year is anyones guess but certainly there seems to be an upwards trend in the economy at the moment and a more positive outlook from a lot of the business people we speak to.

Perhaps one of the best indicators of this is website traffic. Sure, there are lots of things which you can do to improve your online traffic but looking at an overall picture, you're bound to get a good reflection of the general feeling across the country by looking at the amount of website traffic and searches carried out each month.

If anyone is going to know about user behaviour, it's Google. Since Google launched its Google Analytics product a few years ago, its usage has become the near de facto standard for most digital and web agencies. Perhaps one of the little known facts about Analytics however, is the fact that Google owns all of the data is collects. If you stop using the product, you can't take the information with you.

Google by now must have billions of visits and hundreds of billions (I'm sure there must be a term for that) of page views recorded in it's servers. If anyone is going to know about trends, then they're the ones to know.

The reason why we think the recession might be ending is that our own Google Analytics information is showing a huge upward trend at the moment.

As the screenshot above of just some of our accounts shows, there has been growth of around 80% of the websites we monitor in the last month. These range from small brochure sites which receive handfuls of traffic a day through to huge multi national ecommerce websites getting hundreds of visits each hour. Regardless of size, promotion work (to a small extent) and industry, there are pretty much green numbers across the board.

Is the recession over? Only time will tell but for now it seems that users are voting with their fingers in a big way.