Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

Instagram snaps into top 10 social networks

2012-04-12T11:52:00Z

This week Facebook announced the $1 billion acquisition of photo sharing app Instagram. This is a landmark deal for the acquisition of an app but Instagram became the 10th most visited social network in the UK in March 2012, showing the increasing appetite for photo sharing online.

Instagram received almost 13 million UK Internet visits in March 2012, a massive increase from the 300,000 visits it received in March 2011. During the last year Instagram has increased traffic to its website 43-fold. In the US Instagram received 3.8 million visits in a week, which my colleague Heather commented on in her blog.

In the last month alone Instagram has increased UK Internet visits by 44%, a growth which saw the site jump from 12th place to 10th in the social rankings between February and March. 12 months ago Instagram was barely scraping into the top 1,000 social networks, so it has come a long way in a very short period of time.

So where is all this traffic coming from? Using clickstream data we can see that Instagram relies on Facebook as its biggest source of traffic, with nearly 1 in every 5 visits coming to Instagram coming from Facebook in March 2012.

What’s interesting here is not just the amount of traffic Instagram receives from social networks like Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr, but also the prominence of other photo sharing sites like yfrog and TwitPic. What this indicates is that people who like sharing photos do so through multiple platforms and that there is definitely room in this industry for more than one dominant player (currently Flickr with 24 million UK Internet visits in March 2012).

In the last 12 months, Instagram has come to rely less on social networks as a source of traffic and more on Entertainment sites (including other photo sharing sites) and search.

From the graph above you can see that traffic from social networks has fallen from 56.7% of all visits to 39.5% year-on-year. On the other hand visits from the Entertainment category and from search engines have doubled.

Future investments in tech start ups

The acquisition of Instagram has already prompted speculation about which tech start ups will be next on the investors’ list. From the list below highlighted in The Guardian the two companies that are head and shoulders above the rest are Tumblr and Stumble Upon.

Visits to Tumblr have doubled in the last 12 months, whereas visits to Stumble Upon have tripled since March 2011. The fast moving asset of this small group however is Pinterest, which I blogged about last month. Pinterest has increased UK Internet visits 100-fold in the last 12 months, and had its biggest ever month of traffic in March with nearly 5 million visits.

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Facebook acquires photo-sharing network Instagram

2012-04-10T21:29:09Z

Yesterday, Facebook announced the acquisition of Instagram, a popular photo sharing network with over 30 million users, for $1 billion. Visits to the Instagram website have steadily increased over the past 24 weeks and reached 3.8 million last week, up from 68,800 visits for the week ending October 22, 2012. While the majority of activity takes place within the Instagram application, the website provides links to the Apple App Store and Google Play as well as some account management tools, so the growth marks increased consumer interest.

The audience for Instagram is relatively young, with over half of the visitors to the Instagram website are under the age of 35. This is an interesting contrast to the visitors of Facebook’s website, which reflects a more mainstream audience with a higher share of older users. These differences can certainly offer opportunities to promote and grow usage of each of the networks across age groups.

Many users of Instagram share their photos across a number of social networks since within the Instagram application, you can link to your share photos with Twitter, Facebook, Flickr, Tumblr, Posterous (recently acquired by Twitter) and Foursquare accounts. As a result of this integration and heavy use of social networks in general, social networks refer the majority of traffic to the Instagram website. Last week, 25% of the traffic to Instagram from social networks was from new visitors, most likely interested in learning more about Instagram after seeing photos within the feeds of their friends.

Last week, there was considerable excitement around the launch of Instagram app for Android phones, which became available on Google’s recently relaunched digital media store, Google Play. The app reached over 1 million downloads on the first day of availability. Visits to the Instagram website increased 59% over the previous week and Google Play ranked 6th among the downstream websites visited immediately after the Instagram website.

Please note this data does not include mobile traffic.

Kentucky and Louisville Fans have “March Madness” Fever

2012-03-30T21:12:14Z

With March Madness well underway and the Final Four squaring off on Saturday for a spot in the National Championship game, searches around ‘March Madness’ reached a record high the week ending March 17th, up 16% over the same week last year. In fact, searches for variations of ‘March Madness’ have consistently grown each year since 2009.

News was also recently released announcing that March Madness dethroned the Super Bowl as the top betting event of year in 2012. While visits to the Sport Betting category did not grow significantly vs. last year, there was a lift in “NCAA bracket” searches, up 13% compared to 2011. Considering brackets are the standard way people place bets around March Madness, this makes sense. It’s also interesting to note that bracket-related searches typically peak toward the beginning of the tournament when many office pools get started.

Looking at the DMA breakdown of visitors to a custom category of NCAA Men’s Basketball Sites indexed against the online population, the top 4 DMAs which overindexed most during the previous 4 weeks, are close to or are home to a school in the Final Four. The data shows that visitors in the Louisville, KY DMA (where the University of Louisville is located) were 312% more likely to visit college basketball sites compared to the online population while visitors in the Lexington, KY DMA (where the University of Kentucky is located) were 241% more likely. Likewise, visitors from Kansas, specifically Wichita and Topeka, were also highly likely to visit NCAA sites during this time period.

Among DMAs that are located near other schools that made it to the Sweet Sixteen, online users in Cincinnati, OH (University of Cincinnati and Xavier University); Syracuse, NY (Syracuse University); and Lansing, MI (Michigan State University)were all significantly more likely than the online population to visit college basketball websites.

Thanks to Andrew Lopanik, Junior Analystwith the Strategic Services team at Hitwise for today's analysis.

Mother’s Day – top 10 online facts

2012-03-16T10:15:46Z

This weekend is Mother’s Day and as the nation prepares to say a collective thank you to our Mums I thought this would be a good time to share our top 10 Mother’s Day facts for 2012:

1. 10% of all Mother’s Day UK searches include the word ‘when’. It’s Sunday 18 March so get cracking!

2. Since Monday (12 March) over a million UK Internet visits have been made to the Flowers & Gifts shopping category every day as sons and daughters seek to buy Mother’s Day gifts before Sunday.

3. Visits to the Flowers & Gifts category accounted for almost 2% of total Internet shopping in the UK this week.

4. The average online shopper spent 8 minutes and 18 seconds on a Flowers & Gift website this week in preparation for Mother’s Day. In the week before Valentine’s Day the average visit time was 7 minutes 25 seconds.

5. The UK will spend 927,000 hours this week shopping for Mother’s Day gifts.

6. Last year flowers were more popular than Mother’s Day gifts and cards. In the week leading up to Mother’s Day there were 5% more searches for flowers than gifts, and 68% more searches for flowers than cards.

7. This year searches for gifts are three times more popular than flowers, although there is always a late surge in searches for flowers for last minute online shoppers.

8. There is an emphasis this year on getting Mother’s Day gifts which are different from the standard fare. 1.7% of all searches for Mother’s Day gifts included the word ‘unusual’ whereas 1% contained the word ‘unique’. On the other hand 1.4% of gift searches included the word ‘homemade’.

9. Mother’s Day Hampers are the fast moving gift this year with searches for hampers twice as popular this year than last Mother’s Day. Hamper.com and Hampergifts.co.uk were among the biggest recipients of traffic for these searches.

10. Internet users in Stevenage are the most prolific visitors to the Flowers & Gift category in the run up to Mother’s Day. The people of Stevenage are 21% more likely than the average user to visit this category in March.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

2.2 billion visits to Search Engines in February

2012-03-15T09:36:32Z

UK Internet users made an astonishing 2.2 billion visits to search engines in February according to our latest monthly data.

Last month we showed how search was increasing as an online channel with 100 million additional UK Internet visits going to search engines in January 2012 compared to January 2011. The February stats are even more impressive, with 174 million more visits going to search engines when comparing February 2012 with February 2011. The further demand on search represents an 8.7% year-on-year increase in visits and early indications for March suggest this trend is going to continue.

My colleague James Murray has put together a cool search infographic to demonstrate some of the top search stats that we see using Hitwise data. You can also find further search data in our monthly press release which includes the latest search trends.

The February data shows Google was once again the dominant player in the UK search market accounting for 91.57% of all searches made in Britain. Google’s market share of searches was up by 0.93% since January and 0.89% year-on-year.

Meanwhile Microsoft Sites led by bing were unable to build on their growth at the beginning of the year and instead their market share slipped by 0.48% this month. Yahoo! Sites and Other search engines also decreased in market share in February.

You can read more about the most recent search stats in our monthly search press release or you can follow us on Twitter for the latest trends and data.

Search infographic: a Snapshot of Search in the UK

2012-03-15T09:31:11Z

Search continues to grow as an online channel and as the biggest source of traffic to websites in the UK we thought it would be a good idea to encapsulate some of the cool search stats that we use on a daily basis into an infographic. Check out my efforts below with search according to Experian Hitwise:

You can read more about the most recent search stats in our monthly search press release or you can follow us on Twitter for the latest trends and data.

iPad 3 hits new search peak ahead of Apple announcement

2012-03-07T08:43:55Z

Apple’s much anticipated event today has set the rumour mills running into overdrive. If the wisdom of the crowds is to be believed then Apple’s announcement will unveil the new iPad 3.

Demand for the iPad 3 online reached its peak in the last week as 1 in every 2000 searches online were iPad 3 related. ‘ipad 3’ accounted for 18.5% of all searches containing the word ‘ipad’ – six times more searches than there were for ‘ipad 2’.

Having grouped together all of the iPad 3 search terms into a portfolio the recurring terms which people were searching for were for release dates, news, specs and prices. First and foremost among the UK consumer queries was when the iPad 3 would be released, with 19% of all iPad 3 searches in the 12 weeks ending 3 March containing the word ‘release’.

News and rumours accounted for 1.5% of all iPad 3 searches, whereas 0.1% of the searches specifically asked if the new device would have flash on it.

Our downstream data shows who were the top recipients last week from all iPad 3 searches. Unsurprisingly, as Apple itself keeps its cards very close to its chest, the amount of traffic it received is relatively low at less than 0.5% of iPad 3 search clicks. In the absence of official confirmation from Apple, the sites which are seen as authorities on rumours, news and gossip for the iPad 3 are techradar, CNET, the Daily Mail and BBC News.

Although the consensus seems to be that today’s announcement will be iPad related there has also been a spike in searches around Apple TV. Looking at the fast moving search terms containing the word ‘apple’ in the last week, the third and fourth fastest moving terms by volume were ‘apple tv 3’ and ‘new apple tv’ which doubled in search volume in the last week.

It is also worth noting that the last time Apple geared up to make a big announcement in October 2011 consumers were convinced that this would be the heralding of the iPhone 5. Searches for iPhone 5 were five times higher than for iPhone 4 in the first week of October, only for Apple to release the iPhone 4S, which was a surprise for many.

Ultimately only Apple know what is going to happen later on today. It could be the iPad 3 (and the UK has shown quite an appetite for it) but equally it might be a less momentous release of a software upgrade. Either way, we will be watching the trends online with great interest and will keep you up to date on the latest information on Twitter.

Downton Abbey Season 2 Drives Surge in Searches

2012-02-23T16:28:45Z

Whilst this season of “Downton Abbey” brought on fevers throughout the Abbey in the form of the Spanish Flu, the US has been rocked by a severe case of “Downton” fever. Interest in the program has grown by over 1400% during season two versus last year’s season one airing (defined by volume of searches YoY). Not only are people searching for a higher volume of searches for variations of “Downton”, but they are also seeking out information about a broader variety of “Downton” topics. In fact, the breadth of variants for “Downton” is almost ten times larger than the same time last year.

PBS has been the key beneficiary of searches for “Downton” variants, but shops and media outlets are also capturing traffic from the “Downton” effect. Amazon and the PBS Shop are capturing their share through paid search, as consumers seek out their own copies of the series on DVD and the companion guides for the series. Hulu has recently entered the paid search game for “Downton” terms, as Hulu Plus is airing “Downton Abbey” season one.

Search behaviors indicate that I’m not the only person dying to know whether Anna and Bates will finally rid themselves of the scurrilous charges brought against everyone’s favorite valet. Insatiable appetites for the series have web-users not only seeking out the Christmas special episode, but also looking for season three of the series. “Saturday Night Live’s” mock “Downton Abbey” advertisement has also caught attention with its hilarious take on how the show would be seen on Spike TV.

“Downton Abbey” has been a boon to PBS and to anyone who loves a good drama.

Thanks to Margot Bonner, Analyst with the Strategic Services team (and Downton Abbey fan!) for today's analysis.

Voucher sites overtake Price Comparisons sites online

2012-02-15T12:03:49Z

Last year I wrote two blogs on the rise of social shopping and the changing facets of rewards websites like voucher and cashback sites. These proved very popular so I thought I would follow these up with a look at how these websites performed over Christmas.

The Experian Hitwise Rewards and Directories category was one of the fastest growing industries online in 2011. We split this parent category into four key sub-categories: cashback sites like Quidco; shopping price comparison sites like Shopzilla; social shopping sites like Groupon; and voucher sites like HotUKDeals.

Comparing total visits to each of the sub-categories in December 2010 and December 2011 you can see there has been a solid year-on-year increase for cashback, social shopping and voucher sites, but a huge drop in visits for price comparison sites.

Visits to price comparison sites have halved year-on-year, and now voucher websites are the dominant rewards category with 37.4 million UK Internet visits in December 2011, up 28% from last December. Social shopping sites like Groupon and Living Social have also overtaken cashback sites in terms of total visits, after witnessing a 58% growth in traffic year-on-year.

One of the interesting trends to look at is where these rewards categories were sending traffic to during December. I have chosen to focus on some of the key shopping categories, and you can see from the graph below that there are some very disparate results between the rewards categories.

Department Stores like Amazon, Debenhams and John Lewis were the top recipients of traffic from price comparison sites, voucher sites and cashback sites. Social shopping sites on the other hand sent the greatest proportion of their traffic to fashion websites in the Apparel and Accessories category. The chart also reveals some categories which are served well by one particular type of rewards site but not others. Appliances and Electronics for example received 9.5% of all traffic leaving price comparison sites, but not nearly as much from the other rewards categories. Video and Games also received a much higher proportion of the traffic leaving voucher and cashback sites than from the rest of the reward websites.

This data is a great example of how Hitwise can be used to identify the best affiliates for your brand, depending on the industry you work in. It is just worth noting though that not all websites encourage clickthroughs to websites, and therefore looking at the total traffic they receive is more important than the downstream traffic of where visits go to after a visit to the reward website.

Our Christmas 2011 Retail Review is now available to download, and if you missed out on the Christmas webinars over December and January you can catch up with these now on our YouTube channel. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest data updates.

Morrisons double online visits in January

2012-02-14T15:10:30Z

January is usually a pretty bleak month for shopping as people tend to be tightening belts after the excesses of Christmas. True to form, most shopping websites saw a decline in online visits in January 2012 compared to December 2011. But then there was Morrisons, which doubled its visits in January 2012 to reach a trend-bucking 5 million UK Internet visits.

As a result Morrisons became the second most visited Grocery and Alcohol website in the UK for January 2012, second only to Tesco. The supermarket increased its market share within the grocery sector from 5.5% of all visits to 13.4%, a feat all the more remarkable given that customers can’t actually buy goods through the Morrisons website as they can with the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ASDA.

So what was it that was encouraging people to visit the Morrisons website if it wasn’t to purchase products? The answer is the company’s promotional January campaign, which offered prizes including free shopping to customers who entered their shopping receipt details into the website.

The campaign was so successful that ‘morrisons free shopping’ was the second biggest search term driving traffic to the website after ‘morrisons’, and 7.5% of all search terms driving traffic to the website in January contained the words ‘free shopping’. Many commentators suspect that this is a way for Morrisons to accumulate data on the type of people that visit its stores and website in anticipation of the website going fully transactional in the future.

Using our own demographics data we can see the Experian Mosaic groups which started to visit the Morrisons website in January but were not visiting in December. The biggest groups by volume were Suburban Mindsets, Professional Rewards and Small Town Diversity. Interestingly, the groups which saw the greatest increase in January were older demographics, including Active Retirement, Industrial Heritage and Elderly Needs. These three groups are typically in their 60s and 70s who are careful with money and live in small affordable homes.

Comparing the two monthly figures, Active Retirement were 17% more likely to visit the Morrisons website in January than December whilst Industrial Heritage were 10% more likely. Morrisons also started attracting customers online from more rural areas in the UK, namely from the Rural Solitude and the Small Town Diversity groups.

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Pinterest the new social media pin-up

2012-02-14T14:54:46Z

We’ve had a lot of information requests recently from people interested in Pinterest, the online pinboard which is making waves in social media. My colleague Heather Dougherty posted back in December about Pinterest in the US, and now the UK is starting to engage with the website as well.

In January 2012 Pinterest was the 46th most popular social network in the UK, up from 65th position in December 2011 and up from 966th position when it first started gaining traction in the UK in March 2011. You can see from the chart below that the growth of visits to Pinterest has been fairly rapid but in particular there was a big jump between December and January when things have really started to take off.

Since March 2011 Pinterest has gone from 57,000 visits a month to over 1 million visits a month in October 2011. However the real growth spurt came between December and January when Pinterest increased UK Internet visits by 55% to 1.9 million a month. January 2012 also represented a peak in average visit session time for Pinterest, with the average visit lasting 14 minutes 38 seconds, up from 8 minutes and 33 seconds in March 2011. This shows that people not only are people visiting Pinterest more, they are also more engaged with the website as they have more interesting content to browse through.

What’s interesting about Pinterest is that relies heavily on other social networks as a source of traffic. In fact social media was responsible for 27% of all visits coming to Pinterest in January, more than any other category online including search (19.5% of visits).

The bar chart above also shows that since the site’s launch Pinterest has increased its reliance on social traffic as well as growth in the proportion of visits coming from search engines. Google UK remains the single biggest source of traffic, responsible for 17.5% of all clicks coming to Pinterest in January, but Facebook was a very close second with 16.9% of all clicks coming direct from a Facebook page.

As Pinterest starts to find its feet in the UK, using the Experian Mosaic demographics we can see who are the early adopters using the website. Looking at the Mosaic types visiting Pinterest in the last 12 weeks, the early adopters are Study Buddies, University Fringe, Urban Cool and Bright Young Things. These are primarily students or graduates in the early stages of working life, who are well educated and live in the urban areas of the UK.

A quick look at our post code demographics confirms that a lot of the visits to Pinterest are coming from the big cities, with London Internet users 31% more likely to visit Pinterest than the average user, and university cities Oxford, Cambridge, Bristol, Nottingham and Edinburgh all registering more visits than the population averages.

Inevitably with the growing popularity of a new social network will come the question of whether Pinterest is a threat to the well established social media players like Facebook and Twitter. At this stage, Pinterest is some way off being able to challenge the likes of Facebook, which receives over a billion visits a month in the UK alone.

However, even if Pinterest continues to grow (as we fully expect it to) there is no reason to suggest that it presents a threat to Facebook, Twitter or the other major social networks. One thing we have learned over the years is that if a social site is sufficiently different from its predecessors it can flourish in harmony rather than in competition with other social networks. Facebook and Twitter for example are very different social sites and cater to different needs and applications. They are not direct rivals, and our clickstream data shows that the interaction between the two sites is very strong, indicating there are many people online who use both networks freely.

The future of Pinterest in the UK at least will depend on how it differentiates itself from the competition and whether users have enough to keep them coming back to the website as well as using their other social profiles. We will be monitoring the results with interest and as always keeping you up to date with the latest stats and developments.

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Valentine’s Day - 10 lovely online facts

2012-02-13T15:35:20Z

Love is in the air with Romeos seeking out their Juliets and declaring their passion for one another. Valentine’s Day is also a huge commercial opportunity and as brands go into romantic marketing overdrive, I thought we would look at some of the more interesting online trends around Valentine’s Day:

1. 6.7 million UK Internet visits were made to Flowers & Gifts shopping category last week (week ending 11 February 2011). This accounted for 1% of all visits to the parent Shopping Category during that week.

2. 830,000 hours were spent shopping on Flowers & Gifts websites last week. The average visit time for a visit to the Flowers & Gifts category was 7 minutes 25 seconds.

3. Although Valentine’s Day is a key period for online florists, people are more likely to buy flowers online on Mother’s Day than Valentine’s Day. Last year there were 4% more visits to florists on Mother’s Day than there were on Valentine’s Day.

4. Valentine’s cards are more searched for than any other Valentine’s gift online. Cards receive five times as many searches as flowers every year.

5. Valentine’s lingerie is the fastest moving gift year-on-year showing a 10-fold uplift in searches since Valentine’s Day 2011. The most searched for lingerie colour is black, followed by red, pink and white.

6. Gender related searches for Valentine’s gifts are much more skewed towards men than women. Of all the generic searches for Valentine’s gifts in the four weeks ending 11 February 2012, 29% included the word ‘him’ whereas only 8% included the word ‘her’. This suggests women find it much harder to buy for men than men do for women (or that men are much less organised than women and therefore have to do their shopping offline at the last minute).

7. Although Valentine’s Day is all about love, February is actually one of the worst months of the year for visits to dating websites. Between January and February last year visits to dating websites fell by 10% before bouncing back in March.

8. 3% of all Valentine’s searches are for poems. The biggest recipient of traffic from the search term ‘valentine poems’ this year was Poemsource.com, so if you need inspiration for what to write in your card this year, Poemsource would be a good place to go.

9. There were 65 unique search variations in the four weeks ending 11 February 2012 relating specifically to Valentine’s chocolates and sweets. 9.27% of all Valentine’s chocolate searches went directly to Thorntons, followed closely by Hotel Chocolat with 8.75%.

10. Facebook is the biggest recipient of traffic from the generic term ‘valentines day’ perhaps as a result of people posting messages to their loved ones on the UK’s most popular social network.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

“The Forgotten Man” Drives Online Art Frenzy

2012-02-10T18:30:46Z

Art doesn’t often create a stir online, but artist Jon McNaughton’s controversial piece “The Forgotten Man” has done just that. The Rachel Maddow Show used the painting, which depicts President Obama standing on the United States’ Constitution, for a caption contest on the program’s blog. This contest reignited interest in “The Forgotten Man” specifically and McNaughton’s work in general, and caused a spike in visits to McNaughton’s site.

Though this particular story pushed up sales of the work and caused the artist’s site to crash due to heavy traffic, it’s not a new phenomenon for Mr. McNaughton. Depending on writers’ political leanings, McNaughton is cast as the fine artist of Tea Party or a purveyor of the Tea Party agitprop. Regardless of political persuasions, it’s clear that people have very strong views about Mr. McNaughton’s work and the impact of this can be seen online.

In fact, the peak the artist’s piece “One Nation under God” (week of 11/14/09) provoked a market share of visit 5X larger than the share the current controversy (week of 2/4/12) has created. “The Forgotten Man” was originally released in 2010 and created a stir at that time.

As interest in McNaughton’s work has escalated again in recent weeks, the source of the site’s traffic has evolved. Initially, much of the site’s traffic came from YouTube, where a video of the artist discussing his work has garnered more than 3.5 million views. The site is now receiving more of its traffic from Facebook, Google and a variety of news sources.

As the 2012 election season progresses, we can expect more “hot button” stories to emerge and capture the public’s attention. These moments in news stories starkly illustrate that sharing opinions with our social networks creates a ripple effect, regardless of which way we’re facing.

Please visit our Political Data center for more stats.

Jason Wu Collection Drives Visitors to Target.com

2012-02-08T21:39:02Z

Following mysterious tweets from @TargetStyle in early October, Target announced a partnership with fashion designer Jason Wu who became well-known after designing the 2009 Inaugural Ball gown for First Lady Michelle Obama. The official look book for was released online on January 10th in anticipation of the in-store and online launch which took place on Sunday, February 5th. Weekly searches for variations of “Jason Wu” shows consumers seeking out information related to the designer corresponding with these key dates.

Daily search data for February 5th shows that four of the five top searches around the term “Jason Wu” also included mentions of “Target”. An analysis of the individual keywords used in searches for “Jason Wu” on the day of the product launch indicates that “cat”, “poplin” “scarf” and “dress” were the top items that consumers were looking for related to the product line.

Total visits to Target.com were up 8% on February 5th when compared with the previous day, but down 77% when compared with Thanksgiving, which was the most highly trafficked date for Target in the past 6 months. However, total visits to Target were up 22% on the day the Jason Wu product launched when compared with September 13, 2011 - the date the Missoni line launched and the site had trouble keeping up with online consumer demand.However, average visit time to the site was slightly higher on the date of the Missoni launch when compared with the date of the Jason Wu launch (7:51 minutes versus 6:31 minutes).

Thanks to Lauren Rice, Analyst with the Strategic Services team for today's analysis who wishes she lived closer to a Target.

UK search up by 100 million year-on-year

2012-02-08T10:18:43Z

UK Internet users made 2.3 billion visits to search engines in January 2012, up from 2.2 billion in January 2011. Visits to search engines are up by 4.5 per cent year-on-year with nearly 100 million more visits in January this year than last year. Google remained the steadfast market leader with over 90 per cent market share of UK search.

In our latest search engine analysis Google Sites accounted for 90.64 per cent of all searches conducted in the UK in January 2012. You can see from the chart below how dominant Google is against the rest of the search market, even though both Microsoft and Yahoo! made gains in January.

Search now accounts for 12% of all UK Internet visits in the UK. You can see from the pie chart below that Search Engines are the third biggest category online after Entertainment and Social Media websites.

As the UK continues to increase its visits to search engines websites are relying on search more as a channel to deliver traffic. 35% of all visits online came from a search engine in January 2012, up from 34% in January 2011. Now more than ever getting you search strategy correct is essential in order to drive traffic to your website. You can find more on the latest search engine analysis in our press release.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.