Mad Dogs & Englishmen – fun Woodfarm stats

Every week my long-suffering colleague Andrew and I sit and drink coffee, and crunch a whole load of data. Heck yeah, we know how to party!

Along with the rest of the Woodfarm team, we’ve built what we consider to be a pretty successful business over the last 13 years or so (writing Sept 2022). One of the ways in which we do this is to work every single week on our websites, and crunching our data.

We look at all sorts of things from the amount of ‘traffic’, where it comes from, how long people stay on which page, what responses we get to our newsletters, social media engagement etc. Actually now I say it, it really does sound dull doesn’t it? However… it’s got to be done, and it massively contributes to the success of the business. 

I heard Martin Lewis (the money saving expert) recently say that you need four things to have a successful business;

1 – You need to be talented

2 – You need to work hard

3 – You need to focus

4 – You need some luck. 

A lot of people do the first three but you do need some luck. In my opinion you MUST put yourself in front of luck by doing the other three!

Anyway, the data crunching and consistent web traffic analysis is part of working hard and focussing. So as it’s half of the things we need, we do it!

There are a few things you may find interesting dear reader;

Welcome back!
A whopping 25% of our guests are returning guests! We’ve built steadily to that over the years, but it’s possibly the one number that fills us with the most joy, because we must be doing something right hey? A quarter of all of our guests are people who have been before and loved what we do! I’ve shared this previously in our newsletters and on our Facebook page because we are just so chuffed with it. As the owner of the business, the really wonderful thing about this is the amount of these people who have become my friends.

Hot tub love
One of the biggest spikes in bookings was when we announced two new Hot Tubs, in Alde and Stour Barns. This tells us that you love our Hot Tubs! So following that, not only did we add two more with Woodfarm House and Meadow View Cottage, but every time we add them, we add even better ones! It’s all about the luxury, and whilst we did look at cheaper ones in the early days, we simply don’t do cheap, and we know you don’t either! We like luxury, and we know that’s what you want. So we give it to you.

Peaks and pricing
The interesting peaks in bookings every year come in January and May, then again at the end of the Summer. Right now (September 2022) we are seeing a huge upsurge in bookings as you’ve all had your Summer holidays and need something to look forward to. You’re booking for the Autumn, as well as 2023 breaks, which is great to see! We’ve seen this same trend every year, since we started really analysing the data in 2016, other than the obvious bonkers roller coaster during lockdowns, aka the ‘COVID years’! Even though there is a level of uncertainty at this time about the cost of living, leisure time and ‘treats’ are vital. Whilst some businesses raised their prices to cover the increase in costs, we actually lowered ours to make what we have to offer more affordable. Might seem daft but it worked! We would far rather be busy and make a little less money, than be less busy and make none. Turns out we’re not as greedy as some!

Digging deeper

Anyway, although we’ve shared some interesting data there, I did say this was just for fun, and here’s how. As we sat recently doing all the above, we dug further into our CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system and realised that there was some info that we’d never really explored before! And this is the result…

We found that we could extract the most common names of guests booking with us, most popular dog names (because we ask), and also the most popular breeds of Woodfarm Canine guests, again because we ask! 

Let’s have a look at some pretty pies!

As you can see, We definitely get a lot of Paul, Sarah, Karen and Lisa bookings, but here are the Top 25 guest names;

 

Who let the Mad Dogs and Englishmen out?

Here are the same results for the four-legged guests;

But what about Dog breeds? Well, here’s the Top 25 of these too;

So, if you are a couple called Paul & Sarah, and you have a Labrador and a Cocker Spaniel called Buddy and Bella, you need to get booking. It’s written in the stars! Actually, we don’t discriminate in any way, so if your name is anything else at all, and your dogs are any other breeds, with any other names we welcome you aboard our Barges or Barns too! 

So what was the point of this? Nothing really, but it gave us both something to do didn’t it? And possibly made you smile. If it did that, then everyone’s a winner!