Earlier this week The Gap publically launched ‘universality’ across the websites of their four brands – linking them through navigation, a single shopping cart and shipping & fulfillment. Each of the brands certainly has a specific identity and target market, but the potential overlap for the shoppers is clear: the demographics of each website are very similar and tend to skew heavily towards females between the ages of 25 to 34. While the official announcement was made on Tuesday, May 27, we have already noticed some interesting trends where the websites have already had a positive impact upon one another.
Oldnavy.com attracts the largest audience out of the four brands, so it no surprise that their traffic can benefit the others. The impact is immediately noticeable on April 22, 2008; for example, when we look at the share of downstream traffic from Oldnavy.com. Before the integration, each received less than 10% of traffic from their sibling. However, afterwards, Gap.com received 30% of their traffic from Oldnavy.com and Bananarepublic.com followed with 17% and Piperlime.com with 13% on May 28, 2008. A similar pattern occurs for each of the websites, highlighting the advantages of leveraging the network of brands.

The Oldnavy.com referrals are also bringing in new visitors, or at least those that had not visited the websites in the past 30 days, offering possibilities to cross-sell across brands to drive additional sales. When the weeks prior to the website linkages are compared to current ones, you can see that there has been an increase in the share of new visitors coming from Oldnavy.com to each of the websites.

Overall, during the week ending April 26, 2008 when we see the traffic referrals increase, there was a lift in traffic for across each of the websites, particularly for Gap.com, Bananarepublic.com, and Piperlime.com (which have continued over the past few weeks).

I will be curious to see how this impacts traffic during the back-to-school and holiday seasons – and if any other retailers will follow suit and test out this strategy.