Image from: Cooking / Shutterstock
Over these past couple weeks, my interest in cooking has dramatically spiked. I’m not exactly sure what spurred my fascination with the art of food, but I do know that I am most definitely hooked. There is something so fulfilling about making a whole meal nearly from scratch. Somehow the work I put in makes the foods taste a whole lot better, at least most of the time. Given my current fixation with the kitchen, I wanted to look at the Cooking category in Compete PRO.
Over the past two years, the cooking category shows general ups and downs across all metrics, with slight increases around December and January. This increase is likely fueled by home cooking around the holiday, and the subsequent preparation for new diets with weight loss New Year’s resolutions. Therefore, it’s not surprising that the category saw an overall month-over-month decline in all metrics for February.
FoodNetwork.com not only had the greatest amount of unique visitors (UV’s) for the month, but also the most visits, with year-over-year growth of 9.8% and 14.6% respectively. UV growth suggests that the website is attracting new visitors, and visits growth suggests that those visitors are returning more often. Food Network is bringing in new audiences and getting them to return more often than any other website in the category.
This highlights the success of The Food Network’s cross-device engagement. The Food Network is largely known for its television shows, but desktop is another medium that consumers are using to access its content. This is beneficial for The Food Network, because it furthers brand engagement and loyalty.
Allrecipes.com, a site that I use all the time when I cook, was also at the top of the Cooking category for most of the monthly metrics. It even surpassed Food Network in page views and total time spent metrics. This website’s focus is fairly clear in the name: all recipes. It serves as a sort of database of user submitted recipes and rankings – in other words, an online cookbook. The importance of this website is that it represents the convenience and popularity of digital community-building. Using Allrecipes.com is like asking millions of friends what their favorite recipes are, and getting the validation from a community that those recipes are good.
My current cooking strategy is generally to throw a lot of spices and herbs onto anything (I’ve almost mastered it at this point) and it will taste good. Of course, I am getting better and learning new tricks the more often I cook. Perhaps it’s time I check out more of what FoodNetwork.com and Allrecipes.com can offer to advance my skills in the kitchen.
