Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

Windows 7 Release

2009-11-05T09:41:20Z

Experian Hitwise’s resident gadget, expert Client Intelligence Analyst Richard Seymour, takes a look at the online reaction to the Microsoft’s Windows 7 launch last week.

Using the Experian Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List, we saw that during the week ending 24th October - launch week for Microsoft’s new flagship operating system - 28% of all software searches were for Microsoft Windows 7 terms, overtaking the categories perennial leader Apple iTunes. A week later (w/e 31/10/09) and after the hype had settled, searches for Windows 7 still topped those of iTunes though the gap had closed. Microsoft’s product accounted for 21% of software searches, compared with 17% for Apple’s music software.

The top Windows 7 search terms for the week ending 24th October 2009 were:

1. ‘windows 7’
2. ‘windows 7 download’
3. ‘windows 7 review’
4. ‘windows 7 upgrade’
5. ‘windows 7 release date’

The increase in searches for Windows 7 resulted in a 28% increase in searches for software as a whole, making software more searched for than video games for the first time. The chart below shows this increase in software searches compared to searches over the previous 12 months, with the Christmas shopping season the only point in the last year where searches were above Windows 7 launch time. Not surprisingly, the Microsoft Windows official site received most traffic (10%) from our software portfolio for the week ending 24/10/09.

The Windows 7 launch also stimulated searches for computers, as the chart below illustrates. Searches for laptops, desktop computers and general computer terms all increased during the week ending 24th October - especially laptops, with new terms including ‘windows 7 laptops’, ‘windows 7 laptop’, ‘laptops with windows 7’, ‘laptop windows 7’, and ‘netbook windows 7’. Dell EMEA received most traffic (9.5%) from the laptop search terms, and the computer manufacturer also benefited from the new software release. Dell’s Windows Upgrade program resulted in with the appearance of new search terms such as ‘dell windows 7’, and ‘dell windows 7 free upgrade’.

Looking at the latest data we can see that this increase in searches has been maintained, it wasn’t just a one-week blip during the fanfare of the launch. This data is included in our recent Experian Hitwise Webinar: The Online Consumer Landscape in the run up to Christmas which you can view here for free

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Canadian Banks Brand Association

2009-11-04T16:30:12Z

Internet search data can be an excellent input to understand what consumers associate with a brand name. Looking at the words that consumers include with a brand name in a search query provides insight into the products, services and attributes consumers associate wtih that brand. The data, updated weekly is far more timely and cost effective than the traditional phone surveys to measure brand association.

Today, I want to follow up on a post from last week to show what Canadians associate with the brand names of the big banks. The following table shows the top 10 branded search terms for the Big 5 banks in the twelve weeks to October 3, 2009.

It is not surprising that most consumers are searching first for online banking for all of the banks. We tend to use search engines to navigate the web and banking is no exception. There are a few other things of note, however:

- Bank of Montreal's Mastercard appears at #8 among search terms for Bank of Montreal, while credit card searches don't appear among most other bank search terms. Notice also the brand for their Mastercard product, "mosaic mastercard".
- CIBC's credit card, Visa, is also among its top 10 brand searches, again at #8.
- TD Canada Trust's search terms reveal the continued strength of the TD brand, with "td" at #2 while "canada trust" appears at #10.
- Looking beyond the top 10 terms, I found searches for TD Canada Trust Insurance offering, "rbc visa" and "desjardins visa".

You can view last week's post on the online strength of the brands of the Big 5 banks here.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Predictions

2009-11-02T23:11:09Z

Holiday projections are out and many are predicting a gloomy holiday season for retailers. The NRF forecasts a 1% decline growth in total retail sales for the 2009 holiday season, totaling $437.6 billion. The online channel is poised to fare somewhat better, with Forrester Research projecting an increase of 8% to $44.7 billion. The official shopping season usually gets underway during the Thanksgiving holiday with heavy promotional activity taking place around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However this year, fearful of weak sales, retailers are already starting to release Black Friday promotions and discounts. What else can we expect to see as the holiday season gets going? To delve into potential trends, we pulled together data from across Experian Marketing Services to predict what may happen around Black Friday this year.

Search will continue to play a strong role for Black Friday

Shoppers have been starting their searches for Black Friday sales earlier and earlier each year, with queries beginning in August, when speculation begins about which products may have the biggest discounts during the kickoff to the holiday season. In 2006, the searches took place over a 9 week period leading up to Thanksgiving & Black Friday, growing to 14 weeks in 2007, and 16 weeks in 2008. The number of variations including the term ‘black friday’ have increased significantly as well, increasing 41% year-over-year to reach 7,822 different combinations for the week ending Nov. 29, 2008. The number of websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘Black friday’ during the four weeks leading up to and including the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday increased to from 416 in 2007 to 473 in 2008 – an increase of 14%.

Every year, more consumers flock to Black Friday websites looking for information about sales & promotions both online and off. In 2008, visits to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites grew over the previous holiday season overall – with a 21% increase in visits to this category during the week of Thanksgiving. During that peak week, 53% of the traffic was driven by search referrals.

Source: Experian Hitwise

Overall email volumes will be higher, but will increase at a lower or equal rate

The volume of email sent by Experian CheetahMail on Black Friday increased 64% from 2007 to 2008 and 40% on Cyber Monday from 2007 to 2008. Analysis of the most current email data suggests an expected 30 percent increase in volume on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as compared to 2008, particularly if sales are low towards the end of November. In that case, there is a large chance that marketers will react by increasing volume to an even higher capacity. Mentions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also expected to be more prevalent in email campaigns earlier in the year.

Source: Experian CheetahMail

Expect consumers to start shopping online early

With Thanksgiving falling late again in 2009, consumers are expected to start shopping online a few weeks prior to the official start of the shopping season – Black Friday. In 2007, online purchases peaked during the week ending Monday, November 26 (Cyber Monday) when fully a quarter of all adults bought something online. Online purchases remained high for several weeks after Thanksgiving before falling to 17% the week of Christmas. In comparison, when Thanksgiving fell a bit later in the month last year, online purchase activity occurred earlier – several weeks prior to Black Friday. In fact, between the weeks ending November 3 and November 10, the share of adults who made an online purchase more than doubled – increasing from 11% to 23%.

Source: Experian Simmons

Please join us on Wednesday, Nov. 11th for a webinar on 'Crafting Black Friday Strategies' - register here.

UK Halloween and fancy dress costume searches increasing

2009-11-02T09:58:44Z

Judging by the amount of merchandise for sale in the shops, it feels like Halloween becomes more popular every year in the UK. And Hitwise search data seems to bear this out: the chart below illustrates the breadth of searches for the term ‘halloween’ (which measures the number of different ways that people search for a topic).

Last week (w/e 31 October 2009) we monitored at astonishing 49 distinct search terms containing the word ‘halloween’, and the top 10 were: ‘halloween 2009’, ‘halloween’, ‘halloween costumes’, ‘halloween games’, ‘halloween costume ideas’, ‘halloween jokes’, ‘halloween recipes’, ‘halloween fancy dress’, ‘haunted village pluckley halloween cancelled’, ‘halloween ideas’. The fastest moving Halloween-related search term last week was ‘pumpkin designs for halloween’, and we also tracked 10,786 distinct terms containing the word ‘pumpkin’. After carving related queries, the most popular of these related to recipes, with ‘pumpkin soup’, ‘pumpkin soup recipe’, ‘pumpkin pie’ and ‘pumpkin pie recipes’ all making the top 10.

As you can tell from the list of terms above, fancy dress costumes play a key role in Halloween-related search behaviour. Last week the US put out some data about the most popular fancy dress costume searches, with ‘michael jackson costume’ and ‘balloon boy halloween costume’ topping the list. In the UK the most popular specific costume searches were for ‘vampire costume’ and ‘joker costume’, but more popular were searches for broad types of costume, with cheap, plus size and adult all appearing as popular key words.

We built a custom category of the top 15 online fancy dress retailers in the UK, and its traffic is charted below. While it’s no surprise to see visits increasing significantly in the run up to Halloween, it’s interesting to note that traffic peaks the week before Halloween (i.e. w/e October 24th rather than 31st). This also happened last year – presumably people are ordering their costumes in advance in order ensure deliver in time for parties and trick-or-treat outings.

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What retail categories are Gen Ys searching for online?

2009-10-30T00:45:06Z

In my last post I looked at search terms by 18-24 year old Australian users, and indicated how they were more likely to search for bricks and mortar brands than online players; with an overall tendency to search by brands compared to products.

As expected, some of the retail categories that these brand and product search terms fell into conformed to some gender stereotypes. For example, ‘Apparel’ related terms attracted the highest percentage of search traffic by 18-24 year old female users (25%), while ‘Electronics’ terms were heavily represented by 18-24 year old male users (28%).

· 18-24 year old females, compared to males, were more likely to search in these retail categories: Apparel, Grocery, House and Garden, Ticketing, Sports (e.g. ‘Nike’), Rewards, Books, Health and Beauty, Mall (e.g. ‘Chadstone shopping centre’), Comparison Shopping (e.g. ‘Shopbot’), Toys, Video and Discount (e.g. ‘Best and Less’).

· 18-24 year old males, compared to females, were more likely to search for brands and products in Electronics, Department Stores, Music, Classifieds, Auctions, Automotive, Mobile, Games, Computers, Hardware, Household, Stationery and Notebooks.

·Apparel brands searched on by 18-24 year old females included, ‘forever new’, ‘supre’, ‘valley girl’, ‘dotti’ and ‘sportsgirl’. Product terms included, ‘engagement rings’, ‘sunglasses’ and ‘dresses’.

· Electronics brands searched on by 18-24 year old males included, ‘apple’, ‘jb hifi’, ‘hp’ and ‘dell’. Product terms included, ‘iphone’, ‘nokia n97’, ‘laptops’, ‘mac’ and ‘tomtom’. Brand names on notebooks included, ‘dell laptops’, ‘toshiba laptops’, ‘hp laptops’ and ‘sony vaio’.

Greater price-sensitivity by female shoppers

It was also interesting to observe that 18-24 year old females had a stronger tendency than males to search on terms related to Comparison Shopping, Rewards and Discount categories. This means that retailers should ensure they are well-represented on comparison shopping websites and reward schemes for products targeted at females.

Retailers can use search behaviour on retail categories to help prioritise which products they market to different age and gender groups across all of their marketing activities. Keyword lists can also be fine-tuned by delving further into the search tail by each segment.

This post and the previous one are based on Experian Hitwise Custom data. To find out more, email csm@hitwise.com.

Twitter Revisited - in More than 140 Characters

2009-10-29T17:29:11Z

A quick update from my Twitter post from last month. I had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent conferences this week, iMedia Breakthrough and Digital Media West. During the Q&A of my talk at Digital Media, I was asked about my views of Twitter's staying power versus competition from Facebook.

I think this charts sums up the competitive threat that Twitter may pose to Facebook's astounding 6% of all U.S. Internet visits (read: no threat).

Facebook's dominance minimizes the detail and recent decline in visits to Twitter's domain. This chart gives a clearer picture of Twitter's decline over the last few months. As I noted in last months entry, this chart only portrays web visits to Twitter versus application traffic.

At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per twitter user over the life of their twitter account is 1!

I Believe this figure confirms our original hypothesis of Twitter-stall due to a drop in new users. As Facebook continues to grow, its user-base across Mosaic types shows that its user-base is becoming ubiquitous. Twitter by contrast was showing greater coverage amongst types earlier in its growth phase. Since Twitter's decline in July, the number of over-indexing has narrowed significantly, indicating that early growth may have been the result of significant trail behavior leading up to this summer.

That being said, I still plan to tweet this entry.

Google’s rumored Music service launch today

2009-10-28T20:54:46Z

Google is expected to launch their music service this afternoon, so we decided to look at some of Google’s history with the Music category. Of course we all know that the majority of people start with Google for search - last month, 71% of all searches took place on Google. Out of the top 1000 search terms that took place on Google last week, 6% were music-related (includes bands, music services and content). Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits, 95% of the downstream traffic to Music websites were returning visitors (that had visited Google in the past 30 days).

Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30% of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace.

Last week, 15% of the clicks from the search term portfolio of Music that includes the names of over 900 band & artist names resulted in a visit to a Google property, especially YouTube, among the Top 10 websites to receive traffic.

Now we can just wait and see what Google Music will look like and what overall impact the service will have on the category.

Motor and car insurance search behaviour

2009-10-27T16:00:00Z

Today we present another guest post from Richard Seymour, Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst. The data is based on the excellent research that he carried out for our recent UK Insurance webinar.

The chart below illustrates searches for portfolios containing well over 1000 terms relating to Motor Insurance, Health insurance, Home Insurance, Travel Insurance, and Other insurance (which contains the smaller insurance products, primarily life and pet insurance). As you can see, Motor is the most searched for type of insurance in the UK, typically receiving between two and three times the volume of Travel, the next most popular type.

Last year searches for Motor Insurance increased from Christmas onwards – racing towards the new car registration dates in March before slowly decreasing and finally dropping off just after the second round of registrations in September. However, due to the government scrappage scheme, this year there has been an increase in interest in the motor insurance sector since the New Year, including between March and September, and searches have yet to drop off like they did last year.

Looking into the portfolio in a bit more depth, we can see that 17% of all Motor Insurance searches are currently for the most popular term, ‘car insurance’. However, as the chart below illustrates, during the 12 weeks ending October 3rd 2009, Motor Insurance had the highest proportion of branded search terms amongst all the portfolios, with ‘tesco car insurance’, ‘direct line car insurance’ and ‘go compare car insurance’ the most popular.

The blue line on the chart above illustrates the paid rate on each of these portfolios, and in each case it is either just above or below 50%. Paid search rates are higher in Insurance than any other online sector, illustrating just how competitive and fast moving the market is. Given the nature of the market, it is informative to understand the importance of popular keywords, and the chart below shows the prevalence of certain keywords in searches for motor insurance and the change since last year.

The word ‘car’ appears in 90% of all searches, and this hasn’t changed over the past year. Search terms with the word ‘cheap’ have decreased by 32% over the past year whilst searches with the word ‘compare’ have increased by 92%. Of course this doesn’t show that consumers are not looking for cheap deals anymore, what it shows is that they are confident that they are able to find cheap deals whilst comparing providers on a comparison site.

This analysis is taken from our recent Insurance Webinar, but is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of data! Other topics covered included: analysis of the other insurance products highlighted in the chart at the start of the post, the top insurance sites in the UK, the role of brand, the importance of comparison sites, the role of social media and online customer segmentation. You can listen to recording of the webinar for free here.

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How do Gen Ys search online when they do shopping research?

2009-10-27T04:19:47Z

Now that we’re into the lead up to Christmas shopping, there has been some commentary on what tactics retailers will apply to make the most of online shopping, including social media. Given this could potentially become a crowded space, retailers have an opportunity to gain a competitive advantage by using search data to deepen their understanding of target customers.

Recently we looked at the search traffic of 18-24 year old users in Australia to get a preview of their shopping preferences (based on head of household demographics data, 4 weeks ending 26/9/09). We also broke down searches by gender to see which brands and products resounded with each group.

Some general behaviour we noted:

·Bricks and mortar searches much more dominant than online brands. 18-24 year old females and males were both more likely to search for bricks and mortar brands, accounting for 73% and 70% of searches respectively.

·18-24 year old females are more brand-conscious than males. 85% of top shopping searches by females were for brand names only, compared to 82% for males.

·18-24 year old males are more product-oriented in their searches than females. Product terms accounted for 16% of searches by males compared to 12% for females.

So what does this mean for retailers?

Given the high volume of searches for bricks and mortar brands, traditional retailers need a strong online presence to ensure they’re capturing pre-qualified consumer interest. On the flip-slide, online brands need to do a better job of increasing their brand awareness amongst Gen Ys.

Retailers should also prioritise branding campaigns (above-the-line and display etc.) for attracting 18-24 year old female customers, while Pay-Per-Click budgets should be ramped up for products targeted at 18-24 year old males.

(These principles may well apply across older age groups, but are outside of this study for the meantime.)

Later this week I will publish the top searches by retail categories for 18-24 year old users. Stay tuned.

Has the threat of postal strikes harmed eCommerce in the UK?

2009-10-21T14:30:00Z

The threat of further postal strikes is one of the hottest political issues of the moment, and this is being reflected in our search data. As the chart below illustrates, searches for a portfolio postal strike related terms were up 93% last week, and have increased by 144% over the last month.

Understandably - given the potential impact any strikes would have on its business - the Royal Mail is currently bidding on a lot of strike related terms, and ‘postal strike’ was the eight biggest search term sending traffic to its homepage last week. As the chart below illustrates, the postal service picked up just over a quarter (26.3%) of search traffic from our portfolio, but paid for over three quarters (77.9%) of those clicks. Much of the rest of the traffic is going to news sites, with BBC News currently top of the pile. The Communication Workers Union was the ninth biggest recipient last week, and traffic to its homepage doubled as a result.

However, the site that really caught my interest in the list above was eBay UK. Last week the auction site was the eight biggest recipient of traffic from our Postal Strike search portfolio. Like the Royal Mail, eBay clearly has a commercial interest in the strikes, and it too paid for significant amount of its traffic (23.3%) from the portfolio. Looking at some of the other postal strike related searches it seems that eBay is right to be concerned: the portfolio also includes terms such as ‘amazon postal strike’ and ‘play.com postal strike’.

So, consumers are clearly worried that a postal strike would delay the delivery of goods have ordered online; but has this concern put a significant number of people off online shopping until the situation is resolved? The chart below illustrates UK Internet visits to our Shopping and Classified category, and you can see that over the last few weeks traffic to the category has started is gradual climb up to its pre-Christmas peak at the start of December. Well, until last week that was true anyway. UK online retail traffic actually fell slightly last week – the same week searches for the postal strike really took off.

Coincidence - or is there a link? The best way to find out is to look at the comparable week’s traffic in previous years. The chart below uses an index of visits to our Shopping and Classifieds category to investigate the issue. This year’s increase is illustrated by the blue line, and you can see the slight drop between weeks 41 and 42 (last week and the week before). However, you can also see that last year the drop was even greater (while in 2007 there was an increase).

So, it looks as if last week’s decline can only really be attributed to seasonal fluctuations, despite the clear consumer concern. However, if the strikes do go ahead there may well be a greater impact, including on the type of retailers that people visit (multi-channel players may benefit at the expense of pure-plays, for example). We’ll monitor progress and write about any changes we see, so keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for updates.

Balloon boy floats into popular searches

2009-10-21T19:09:05Z

Americans are fascinated with the story of the ‘balloon boy’ as facts unfold in the highly unusual tale of a boy floating away in a mylar balloon - only to be discovered in the attic three days later. Searches jumped last week for ‘balloon boy’ related news, with ‘balloon boy’, ‘boy in the balloon’ and ‘balloon boy hoax’ leading the search term variations in terms of overall volume.

Among the search term variations for ‘balloon boy’, there were several mentions of the coverage from several television outlets, including the “Today Show’, ‘Good Morning America’. This could be a good opportunity to drive traffic to their websites although a big driver around many of the searches were due to the vomiting incidents that took place during the interviews.

Apparently vomiting may make good TV and online video viewing because many of the searches from ‘balloon boy’ were going to YouTube last week. The top recipient from searches was Google News followed by CNN.com and Yahoo! News. All of the traffic to the top 10 websites was purely organic, so there could be some opportunities to steal visitors via paid search if the fascination with the balloon boy continues.

Kindle searches spike 300% in Australia

2009-10-19T03:29:07Z

The recent announcement that the Kindle will be available to Australian consumers resulted in a 300% lift in searches during the week ending 10 October 2009, with searches maintaining their momentum the following week. Australian interest in the Kindle has long been apparent this year, outstripping searches for other ebook readers including the ‘sony reader’, ‘cybook’ and ‘iliad’.

Opportunity to attract more search traffic from ‘ebooks’

Searches for ‘ebooks’ similarly surged off the back of the Kindle announcement with ebook specialist retailers benefiting from most of the traffic. eBooks.com was the leading website to receive traffic from ‘ebooks’, accounting for 47.76% of clicks, followed by e-book.com.au with 11.08% (4 weeks ending 17 October 2009). Dymocks was the leading traditional retailer receiving search traffic on ‘ebooks’ (13th position overall), while Amazon.com ranked ahead at 8th position. Given the substantial and consistent volume of searches on ‘ebooks’, there is an opportunity for more book retailers to optimise their websites for this term.

Consumers are searching for free ebooks

One of the interesting developments in the publishing industry we’ll see next year is the launch of Google Editions, an online book store. As you can see below, searches for ‘free ebooks’ were top of mind amongst Australian users, signaling that one of the challenges for Google and Amazon will be getting consumers used to paying for their ebooks - in a similar fashion to the online music industry before the itunes era. Also of interest were searches for 'free pdf ebooks' and ‘ebooks for iphone’, suggesting that users won’t necessarily get locked into a specific platform when browsing for ebooks.

Personally, as someone who (shamefully) spends more time these days buying books than actually reading them cover to cover, I’m hoping I’ll spend a lot less money when I can gleam over the latest ebook titles instead.

Liverpool beach ball searches

2009-10-19T11:50:00Z

As you might expect, following Darren Bent’s freak beach ball goal for Sunderland against Liverpool on Saturday, UK beach ball-related internet searches shot up. As the chart below illustrates, the breadth of searches for the term ‘beach ball’ (which measures the number of different ways that people search for a topic) increased eight-fold last week.

Of the 193 variations on the term ‘beach ball’ that were typed into search engines in the UK last week (w/e 17/10/09), 155 of them related to Saturday’s incident. The top three variations on the term – ‘liverpool beach ball’, ‘beach ball goal’ and ‘liverpool beach ball goal’ - were all related, while ‘sunderland beach ball goal’ ranked fifth. Other popular searches for the incident included people looking for videos and YouTube clips, attempts to identify the culprit, and a desire to understand the rules relating to objects on the pitch.

The top recipient of traffic from the term ‘liverpool beach ball’ was Goal.com, but there are also reports of a sudden increase in demand for beach balls from Man Utd fans ahead of next Sunday’s Liverpool vs. Manchester United match. We’re currently testing some data that will allow us to get a much more localised view on UK Internet traffic, so hopefully I’ll be able to provide some more info on whether there has been a surge in traffic to beach ball retailers from Mancunians over the next couple of days. Keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for any updates…

Facebook accounts for 1 in every 7 UK page views

2009-10-16T09:00:00Z

Facebook accounted for 14.5% of all UK Internet page views during September 2009, equivalent to 1 in every 7. The social network is the second most visited website in the UK after Google UK, but because users view a much larger number of pages per visit, Facebook is the clear leader in terms of page views. As the table below illustrates, it currently receives more page views than Google UK, eBay UK and YouTube combined.

As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet visits to Facebook increased by 86.1% between September 2008 and September 2009, and have more than doubled over the last 14 months. During September the site accounted for almost half (49.2%) of all UK internet visits to a social networking website.

Although it has fallen somewhat off the media radar in favour of Twitter recently, Facebook remains far and away the most popular social networking website in the UK. One significant factor is that the site’s growth in the UK doesn’t yet show any signs of slowing. A key measure of success for any social network is average session time; as we have seen with sites such as Friends Reunited and MySpace, when average session times begins to drop off visitor numbers soon follow. Facebook has yet to experience this problem: its average visit time increased from 19 minutes 59 seconds in September 2008 to 26 minutes 14 seconds during September 2009.

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Climate Change – An Online Perspective

2009-10-15T07:14:59Z

Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. I join over 7,000 bloggers worldwide who are all sharing their thoughts and insights into this year’s theme ‘Climate Change'.

The recent release of the fifth annual Lowy Institute poll surveyed public opinion around a broad range of foreign policy issues, including climate change.

Key attitudinal changes towards Climate Change in the poll between findings in 2009 compared to 2006 include;

· ‘People unsure if global warming is really a problem and no action should be taken’ increased 85.7% to 13% of respondents.

· ‘People seeing that it is a serious and pressing problem and requires immediate action' decreased 29.4% to 48% of respondents

Other findings indicated that 76% of people see Climate Change as a problem and 60% see that finding a solution is becoming more urgent.

There seems to be a lowering of concern in these responses and so I have turned to search data to see if general interest around the issues of Climate Change has also cooled.

Searches for terms relevant to Climate Change have increased 6.5% over the past 12 months, (w/e 10 October compared to w/e 11 October 2008) and while there have been troughs and peaks over the past three years the overall level of search around Climate Change has declined 23.3% (w/e 10 October 2009 compare to w/e 14 October 2006)..

As an indicator of interest in a given topic the search results provide a similar view to the results from the Lowy Institute poll.

The chart below represents the downstream websites from a portfolio of search terms relating to Climate Change and Global Warming. I have analysed the top 100 websites and categorised them to provide a view of where Australians go when specifically searching for information around the subject. The top 100 websites represent 76.8% of visits from the search portfolio in the 12 weeks ending 10 October 2009.

While News and Media websites provide coverage and discussion of issues surrounding Climate Change and corresponding Government initiatives, when it comes to the Australian’s looking for specific information they turn to the Government websites, both National and State. Government websites represent 38.2% of traffic from the portfolio, with commercial websites receiving 12.0%, relying on a heavy emphasis towards Government Rebates for greener energy in their marketing efforts.

Organisations such as Greenpeace and the United Nations along with Reference websites like Wikipedia also receive a strong level of visits from the search portfolio, while News and Media websites and Social Media websites do not garner substantial levels of visits around Climate Change.

News and Media websites play an important part in the discussion and dissemination of information and news as it happens, but Government cannot rely on this coverage as a strategic driver for further discovery of policy and legislative direction.

The following table indicates where the 14 State and Federal Government Climate Change websites receive their traffic. Search Engines are the most important driver of visits generating 45.3% of all visits in September 2009, followed by a range of Government and Environmental websites.

News and Media websites generate only 1.52% of traffic to these key Government websites, highlighting the opportunity for the Governments to market their websites to deliver comprehension around complex and often confusing subjects.

Although search levels around Climate Change have decreased in the past year, the level of paid search activity is a low 2.5% (4 weeks ending 10 October 2009) compared to the all websites visited by Australian Internet users paid search rate of 4.9%.

In search marketing it is important to work with the language of the users. Within the portfolio the top search term for the 12 weeks ending 10 October is ‘global warming’ with 11.4% of search volume, well ahead of ‘climate change’ the third ranked search term accounting for 6.3% of the portfolio’s volume.

The opportunities for Governments to maximise interest and generate increased understanding include;

· Internal marketing efforts across Government Departments and between State and Federal Governments.

· Search marketing, both paid and search engine optimisation.

· Domain name strategy, www.globalwarming.gov.au is not being utilised, yet ‘global warming’ search term is almost twice the volume of ‘climate change’.

· Social Media – a resource for continually measuring the heat of the subject as well as being a part of the community conversations.

· Display /affiliate advertising across Portals, Email Services, News and Media, and Weather websites.

Visit www.blogactionday.org for further information and posts relating to Climate Change.

NB: Portfolio comprises of 156 of search terms that drive traffic to the Climate Change specific sites and variations of the term ‘climate’.