When Amazon was launched in July 16, 1995 as a website that only sold books, founder Jeff Bezos had a vision for the company's explosive growth and e-commerce domination. In December 2019, we note that around 6.5 percent of visits to Amazon came from paid traffic in France, that is to say, visits made through paid advertising. With a strong discrepancy to it's competitors, the next best performing company was Microsoft.

This dataset originates from DataCamp. Many users have reposted copies of the CSV on Kaggle, but most of those uploads omit the original instructions, business context, and problem framing. In this upload, I’ve included that missing context in the About Dataset so the reader of my notebook or any other notebook can fully understand how the data was intended to be used and the intended problem framing.

Note: I have also uploaded a visualization of the workflow I personally took to tackle this problem, but it is not part of the dataset itself. Additionally, I created a PowerPoint presentation based on my work in the notebook, which you can download from here:
PPTX Presentation

Recipe Site Traffic

From: Head of Data Science
Received: Today
Subject: New project from the product team

Hey!

I have a new project for you from the product team. Should be an interesting challenge. You can see the background and request in the email below.

I would like you to perform the analysis and write a short report for me. I want to be able to review your code as well as read your thought process for each step. I also want you to prepare and deliver the presentation for the product team - you are ready for the challenge!

They want us to predict which recipes will be popular 80% of the time and minimize the chance of showing unpopular recipes. I don't think that is realistic in the time we have, but do your best and present whatever you find.

You can find more details about what I expect you to do here. And information on the data here.

I will be on vacation for the next couple of weeks, but I know you can do this without my support. If you need to make any decisions, include them in your work and I will review them when I am back.

Good Luck!

From: Product Manager - Recipe Discovery
To: Head of Data Science
Received: Yesterday
Subject: Can you help us predict popular recipes?

Hi,

We haven't met before but I am responsible for choosing which recipes to display on the homepage each day. I have heard about what the data science team is capable of and I was wondering if you can help me choose which recipes we should display on the home page?

At the moment, I choose my favorite recipe from a selection and display that on the home page. We have noticed that traffic to the rest of the website goes up by as much as 40% if I pick a popular recipe. But I don't know how to decide if a recipe will be popular. More traffic means more subscriptions so this is really important to the company.

Can your team: - Predict which recipes will lead to high traffic? - Correctly predict high traffic recipes 80% of the time?

We need to make a decision on this soon, so I need you to present your results to me by the end of the month. Whatever your results, what do you recommend we do next?

Look forward to seeing your presentation.

About Tasty Bytes

Tasty Bytes was founded in 2020 in the midst of the Covid Pandemic. The world wanted inspiration so we decided to provide it. We started life as a search engine for recipes, helping people to find ways to use up the limited supplies they had at home.

Now, over two years on, we are a fully fledged business. For a monthly subscription we will put together a full meal plan to ensure you and your family are getting a healthy, balanced diet whatever your budget. Subscribe to our premium plan and we will also deliver the ingredients to your door.

Example Recipe

This is an example of how a recipe may appear on the website, we haven't included all of the steps but you should get an idea of what visitors to the site see.

Tomato Soup

Servings: 4
Time to make: 2 hours
Category: Lunch/Snack
Cost per serving: $

Nutritional Information (per serving) - Calories 123 - Carbohydrate 13g - Sugar 1g - Protein 4g

Ingredients: - Tomatoes - Onion - Carrot - Vegetable Stock

Method: 1. Cut the tomatoes into quarters….

Data Information

The product manager has tried to make this easier for us and provided data for each recipe, as well as whether there was high traffic when the recipe was featured on the home page.

As you will see, they haven't given us all of the information they have about each recipe.

You can find the data here.

I will let you decide how to process it, just make sure you include all your decisions in your report.

Don't forget to double check the data really does match what they say - it might not.

In November 2024, Fox News ranked first among the most popular multiplatform conservative and right-wing websites in the United States with over 91 million unique visitors from mobile and desktop connections. Outkick ranked second with approximately 7.71 million unique monthly visitors.

In March 2024, Amazon.com had approximately 2.2 billion combined web visits, up from 2.1 billion visits in February. In the fourth quarter of 2024, Amazon’s net income amounted to approximately 20 billion U.S. dollars. Online retail in the United States Online retail in the United States is constantly growing. In the third quarter of 2023, e-commerce sales accounted for 15.6 percent of retail sales in the United States. During that quarter, U.S. retail e-commerce sales amounted to over 284 billion U.S. dollars. Amazon is the leading online store in the country, in terms of e-commerce net sales. Amazon.com generated around 130 billion U.S. dollars in online sales in 2022. Walmart ranked as the second-biggest online store, with revenues of 52 billion U.S. dollars. The king of Black Friday In 2023, Amazon ranked as U.S. shoppers' favorite place to go shopping during Black Friday, even surpassing in-store purchasing. Nearly six out of ten consumers chose Amazon as the number one place to go find the best Black Friday deals. Similar findings can be observed in the United Kingdom (UK), where Amazon is also ranked as the preferred Black Friday destination.

In 2024, Facebook was the leading social media platform in most of the Southeast Asian countries in terms of traffic generation to other websites, with the highest share in Timor-Leste at around ** percent. YouTube, X (Twitter), Instagram, and Pinterest were other platforms that had significant social media traffic shares in Southeast Asian markets that year. Social media advertising and web traffic referrals Traffic referrals from social media are crucial in social media advertising. Links shared on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter help direct potential customers to a brand’s website or landing page. This increases exposure, website visits, and conversions, such as sales or leads, which are key benefits of social media marketing according to marketers. Traffic referrals also serve as an important tool for advertisers to measure the effectiveness of their campaigns. Furthermore, by analyzing which platforms and content generate the most traffic, businesses can refine their strategies to focus on the highest-performing channels. Social media advertising – a multibillion-dollar business Revenue from social media advertising has continued to rise rapidly. This growth was driven by the ability to track user behavior, refine ad targeting, and deliver highly personalized content. Social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok generate billions of dollars of ad revenue annually. The owner of Facebook and Instagram, Meta Platforms’s annual advertising revenue exceeded *** billion U.S. dollars in 2024. Countries such as China, Japan, and Australia are among the largest social media advertising markets in the Asia-Pacific region, with China’s projected social media ad spend reaching nearly ** billion U.S. dollars in 2025.

In September 202, adameve.com recorded around *********** visits to its website, making the U.S.-based company one of the most visited sex toy websites worldwide. The Korean adult toy retailer bananamall.co.kr recorded *** million online traffic as well.