The ITAD industry’s marketing efforts waned sharply in February 2024. A drop in traffic for ERIDirect.com has had a dragging effect on the overall numbers. This confirms that the performance of a few top vendors has direct and material consequences on the marketing profile of the ITAD industry as a whole. This is because while the sector boasts a moderately-low level of consolidation, marketing efforts seem to concentrate among a handful of players. And yet, this small number of market participants lack consistency in their marketing campaigns, making the sector’s marketing evolve at an unstable rate, with extreme fluctuations of audiences visiting their sites from month to month.
In the month of February, we saw traffic among 18 leading pure-play ITAD vendors fall by 65.9% on the sequential basis. In all, we calculate that 84.6K visitors entered pure-play ITAD vendors’ websites. The drop reflects a combination of factors that include ITAD companies getting less exposure, producing less relevant content, scaling back their online marketing spent, combined with the short month of February (leap year).
By geography, we note the dominance of the Unites States as a source of traffic, accounting for 76.57% of all traffic to the 18 ITAD companies analyzed. The predominance of the US is normal in this context, since the majority of analyzed firms are US-based. We do note also a substantial reduction of traffic from the US, and a triple-digit increase from Thailand, albeit off of a small traffic of less than 3K.
Despite the sharp drop in traffic, the value of the market, or the cost paid by ITAD vendors to market their business, has remained relatively stable, dropping by less than 2%. This reflects a market where keyword sellers like Google have maintained or increased the cost of keyword pay-per-click offerings.
February’s biggest channel generating traffic is the Direct Channel, accounting for 48.25% of all traffic, up from 31.2% in January. Organic search also fared well, accounting for 34.3%. Paid search remained insignificant at only 1.29% of all channels, reflecting a lack of direct promotion by ITAD companies.
In the competitive landscape, we note TES taking over the leadership rank of first promoter of ITAD, on the basis of the volume of traffic, pulling in more than 41K visitors in the month of February. However, despite traffic leadership giving it a 48.86% share of the market, TES’ traffic fell 54% from January.
TES’ move to volume leadership is largely the result of two factors: The first is ERI’s abrupt sequential retraction, with a February market share of 6.74% for its flagship website ERIdirect.com. ERI saw its share of traffic drop from 41.22% (102.2K traffic) in January to only 6.74% in February (5.7K), a move that is evidence of an unstable marketing environment in the ITAD industry. The second factor is the start of TES communication campaign related to the March opening of a new facility in Fredericksburg, VA. Although the opening of the SK Ecoplant in Fredericksburg was announced on March 13, 2024, the company likely began soft promotion that was captured by web crawlers, hence attracting visitors to the company’s website.
Meanwhile, we note substantial gains both in terms of traffic volume, month-to-month growth and market share for California-based All Green Recycling and St. Charles, MO-based EPC, the details of which are available here.
Outlook statement:
Compliance Standards expects a traffic recovery in March, with an estimated volume of almost 200K visitors to ITAD vendor sites. Volume growth could be as high as +125% with many ITAD companies recommitting to increase their visibility.
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