Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

All inclusive holidays popular in a weak economy

2008-05-13T10:30:00Z

The combination of a weakening economy, falling house prices and a rising cost of living thanks to inflation mean that many British consumers are looking for ways to cut their expenditure. Add in the impact of a strong Euro (although not Dollar), and it seems likely that one area facing a cutback in consumer spending will be travel. One interesting trend we have noticed which indicates that this may be the case is an increase in searches for ‘all inclusive holidays’. As you can see from that chart below, the amount of traffic that travel websites are receiving from this price-sensitive / budget-conscious search term has increased by 24% compared with last year.

The table below illustrates the top 10 search terms containing the phrase ‘all inclusive holidays’, and it is noticeable that people searching for such packages are more concerned with the 'all inclusive' element than with where they want to actually go. Six of the top 10 search terms don’t mention a location at all, whereas - by way of comparison - nine of the top 10 searches containing the term ‘cheap flights’ over the same period include a destination. Another thing that jumps out is the low success rate for the term ‘all inclusive family holidays’. Almost two fifths of people searching for this term don’t find a relevant result in a search engine that they a happy to click through to, highlighting a potentially lucrative area for SEO or paid search activity.

As you can see, the people currently looking for location specific all inclusive deals are choosing warmer sunshine destinations around the Mediterranean and Red Sea: Spain, Egypt, and Turkey. This leads me on to another hypothesis: as money is tight and the strong Euro means that European destinations are becoming more expensive, will we see a decline in travel to Europe and bumper year for domestic tourism? Throw in 10 days of lovely sunny weather, and it seems likely that UK holiday bookings will be up this year.

Not so fast. I heard a representative from TUI (which owns Thomson Holidays) on the Today program this morning claiming that overseas bookings from the UK were up - and the company’s financial release bears this out. Back to the Hitwise data and the news also isn’t great. As you can see from the chart below, the amount of traffic that searches for both ‘uk holidays’ and ‘british holidays’ send to travel websites is on the decline. Maybe a few more weeks of good weather and some first hand experience of the strong Euro will help reverse this trend? We’ll keep and eye on this and report back with any changes.

Lawnmowers and BBQs: UK searchers celebrate the sunshine!

2008-05-12T10:25:29Z

What a difference the weather can make, particularly after last year’s miserable summer! A week of sunshine has lifted the spirits of everyone in the UK, and also had an impact on their internet searching and shopping habits. As the graph below illustrates, searches for summer essentials – in this case BBQs and lawnmowers – shot up last week. In fact, searches for ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ have already reached a higher peak this year than at any point last summer

With these sudden surges in searches for particular terms, it’s always interesting to see who benefits. As you can see from the table below, for the terms ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ it has primarily been smaller niche and specialist sites that picked up traffic, particularly in the in the BBQ market. Traffic from searches for ‘bbq’ was consolidated into fewer hands, although that is primarily a result of aggressive paid search tactics. For example, www.justlawnmowers.co.uk paid for 28% of its traffic from the term ‘lawnmowers’ and 47% from ‘lawn mowers’; whereas Flaming Barbecues paid for 95% of its traffic from ‘bbq’ and 87% from ‘barbeque’.

Another interesting lesson from this surge is the importance of bidding or optimizing for all variations and spellings / misspellings of popular terms. The table below illustrates the top 10 terms currently sending traffic to Flaming Barbecues. As you can see, it is picking up traffic from a variety of terms, including; ‘bbq’, ‘gas bbq’, ‘barbeques’, ‘barbecues’, ‘barbeque’ and ‘bbqs’. And while much of this traffic is paid, Flaming Barbecues is also picking up significant organic traffic from most of these variations.

Burma / Myanmar Google charity donations

2008-05-09T10:00:00Z

The humanitarian crisis caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma / Myanmar.has elicited a huge amount of public sympathy and support. Yesterday we noticed that Google had taken the unprecedented step of placing a link to a special Cyclone donation service set up in conjunction with UNICEF and Direct Relief International on its main start page.

People clicking on the ‘Support victims’ link (illustrated in the screenshot above) were taken to page that enabled them to donate to either of the two charities / NGOs. Interestingly, these donations were not collected via the organizations’ own websites. Instead, people were sent directly to a Google Checkout page that allowed them to donate the gift of their choice. This appeal has obviously been successful in the UK – as the chart below illustrates, Google Checkout experienced its busiest day in months yesterday, with 33% of this traffic coming from Google’s UK and US search properties (where the donation link resides), up for 28% last week.

Mobile broadband searches increasing

2008-05-08T13:01:31Z

It’s hard to open a newspaper at the moment without seeing an advert for mobile broadband services - from both carriers, such as Three, Vodafone and T-Mobile, and independent retailers such as Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U. The advertising seems to have worked at increasing awareness: as you can see from the chart below, searches for the term ‘mobile broadband’ have increased significantly over the last six months.

It’s interesting to compare the volume of searches for ‘mobile broadband’ with those for the more generic term ‘broadband’. Searches for the latter have been declining since January, while searches for the former have been increasing. Of course, the broader term ‘broadband’ remains more popular, particularly when you look at the breadth of terms. For example, for the 4 weeks ending May 3rd, there were 10, 736 searches containing the term ‘broadband’, whereas there were only 923 containing ‘mobile broadband’. There is some double counting here - all of those 923 ‘mobile broadband’ terms are also included in the ‘broadband’ number. But, even after they are taken out, there are still 9.813 non-mobile ‘broadband’ terms, over 10 times the number of ‘mobile broadband’ terms.

Search term breadth is also a good way of measuring the maturity of a term. The more familiar people are with a word or phrase, the wider the variety of terms they use to search for it - at least until the popularity decrease. Comparing the breadth of searches for ‘mobile broadband’ now with 6 months ago, it’s clear that the phrase is becoming more familiar and people are searching on a wider variety of ‘mobile broadband’ terms. For the 4 weeks ending November 3rd 2007 there were 427 searches containing ‘mobile broadband’, but this figure has now more than doubled to 923. Another sign of maturity for a popular generic term such as ‘mobile broadband’ is that affiliates and comparison sites are picking up a significant amount of traffic from the term. As you can see from the table below, almost half of traffic from people searching for ‘mobile broadband’ for the 4 weeks ending May 3rd went to these types of sites.

It’s also interesting to see how these affiliates are picking up traffic from the term. Broadband Store, currently top of the rankings, is a generalist broadband site and is currently bidding heavily on the term: 96.9% of its ‘mobile boradband’ traffic came from paid search over the last 4 weeks. On the other hand, specialist site Mobile Broadband Genie – currently second in the rankings – has clearly optimized itself for the term. Just 0.7% of its ‘mobile broadband’ traffic came from paid search over the last 4 weeks. The site's overall paid search rate is just 3%, and its top 10 searches include key terms such as ‘compare mobile broadband’ and ‘best mobile broadband’, as well a number of branded terms.

Branded search is currently very important in the mobile broadband market, especially considering Google’s recent trademark changes in the UK. We looked at the top 100 search terms for the last 4 weeks containing the phrase ‘mobile broadband’, and categorized them into 5 categories. The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for each of these 5 categories and, as you can see, just over a third of search volume for these top 100 terms was branded in nature. Just under a half were for generic terms such as ‘mobile broadband’, ‘3g mobile broadband’ and ‘mobile broadband uk’.

The other categories are also interesting. The most popular price / comparison searches related to ‘pay as you go’, ‘compare’ and ‘review(s)’, and these are generally increasing. On the other hand, the number of technical terms - which include terms such as ‘coverage’, ‘laptop’ and ‘usb’ - is on the decline, perhaps a reflection of the maturity of the market. The smallest category relates to overseas usage, but again these are new terms that have emerged over the last few months. There were 5 such terms within the top 100, including ‘mobile broadband france’, ‘mobile broadband abroad’ and ‘mobile broadband spain’.

Coldplay’s website traffic surges thanks to free single download

2008-04-30T16:00:00Z

The BBC is reporting that there has been “massive demand” for Coldplay’s new single, Violet Hill, which has been made available as a free download from the band’s website. Our Internet usage data backs this up - as you can see from the chart below, UK Internet visits to Coldplay’s official homepage soared yesterday. The website was the most visited in our Music – Bands and Artists category, receiving almost 1 in 5 visits.

Last year Radiohead released their album In Rainbows via a free download and experienced a similar peak in traffic to Coldplay. However, for a band that are sometimes derided as Radiohead-lite by critics, it’s interesting to see that Coldplay’s launch seems to have been slightly more successful in terms of driving traffic to their website. Fans requesting the free single are emailed a link for download and, as a result, the most popular downstream site from www.coldplay.com yesterday was Windows Live Mail. In fact, 22.8% of people visited a webmail service after visiting Coldplay’s site yesterday.

London Mayoral elections update

2008-04-30T11:00:00Z

Last week we analyzed UK Internet traffic relating to the London Mayoral elections. With only one day of campaigning left, I wanted to provide the latest data. The chart below illustrates the daily Internet traffic to the three main candidates’ official homepages up until yesterday.

Visits to websites do not equal votes but, as you can see, visits to all three candidates’ websites have increased over the past week. Conservative Boris Johnson’s page was the most popular yesterday, followed by the incumbent Mayor, Labour’s Ken Livingstone, and then the Liberal Democrat candidate Brian Paddick. As the chart below illustrates, Paddick remains ahead in terms of the amount of traffic received from social networks, but both Boris and Ken closed the gap last week.

Google delivers over a third of all UK traffic – trademark changes will have a significant impact

2008-04-28T11:00:00Z

The top 100 Google Internet properties sent over one third of all Internet traffic to websites in the UK during March 2008. A custom category consisting of the 100 most visited Google-owned web properties in the UK accounted for 36.55% of upstream traffic to All Categories of websites in the UK during March 2008, up from 30.19% in March 2007.

So what impact does this have on UK brands following Google’s trademark changes, which take effect on May 5th (i.e. next Monday)? When Google made its announcement a couple of weeks ago, I highlighted the growth of branded / navigational search in the UK. Since then we’ve carried out some additional research that has helped us to quantify the potential loss for sites that rely heavily on search traffic from their own trademarked brand(s). In order to do this, we compared data from the US – where Google already allows non-trademark owners to bid on trademarked terms – with the UK.

Using Hitwise search data we identified to top 100 most searched-for brands in the US and UK during the 12 weeks ending 12/04/2008. We then looked at what proportion of these brand searches ended up at the brand owners’ websites, and what proportion went to a competitor or other site. The results were very interesting: as chart below illustrates, 91.8% of brand searches ended up on the brand owners’ websites in the UK, compared to just 84.2% in the US.

That is a gap of 7.6%, equivalent to millions of searches every day. Of course, there may be other factors at play other than paid search, but our belief is that the ability to bid on trademarked brand terms is the primary reason for this gap. For example, we compared the branded search traffic for Expedia, a brand that is strong both in the UK and USA. 95.7% of people searching for ‘expedia’ in the UK ended up on an Expedia property, compared to 88.6% in the US – a 7.1% gap, and very similar to the 7.6% gap we identified in our research above.

We also looked at the brand term ‘new look’, which is not trademarked in the UK. Because of this, New Look’s competitors and affiliates are currently bidding on the term – meaning that the clothing retailer is already in the situation that its trademarked competitors will find themselves from May 5th. As a result, New Look receives just 83.66% of traffic from searches for its own brand – significantly less than its trademark protected competitors, and much closer to levels experienced in non-trademark protected America than the UK.

So, considering the importance of Google and the potential impact of these changes, what are the most popular Google-owned websites in the UK? The most visited Google property is Google UK, which - with a market share of 7.77% of all UK Internet visits in March - was also the most visited website in the UK last month. Google UK was also the website that sent most traffic to other websites during March, accounting for 27.48% of upstream traffic to all categories. This was followed by Google USA, which had a market share of 1.70% and accounted for 4.43% of all upstream traffic in March.

YouTube is the third most visited Google property, accounting for 1.13% of all UK Internet visits in March, while the UK version of the video sharing site ranked sixth. The popularity of Web 2.0 applications is also highlighted by Blogger, which is currently the seventh most popular Google property and the number one website in Hitwise’s Lifestyle – Blogs category. Google’s webmail service, Gmail, is the fifth most popular Google property, accounting for 0.37% of UK Internet visits in March, and 0.98% of upstream traffic to other websites.

Google is also benefiting from the growth of universal search. The fourth most visited Google property is Google Images UK, which accounted for 0.58% of UK Internet visits in March. However, the site is even more important as a source of traffic to others sites, accounting for 1.27% of all upstream traffic sent to other sites in March, making it the third most important Google property in terms of upstream traffic. Other Google search sites in the top 10 include Google Maps and Google News UK.

If you’re interested in finding out more about the impact of Google’s trademark changes, we hosted a webinar on the topic last Friday. You can listen to a recording of the 30 minute session here.

London Mayoral elections: what does the Internet data say?

2008-04-22T09:00:00Z

A lot has been made about how the candidates and voters for the London Mayoral elections on May 1st have embraced the Internet like never before - at least in British political terms, as this is one area where the US remains well ahead of us Brits. So, how are the candidates doing online? The first place to look is search data; specifically, how does each candidate’s name rank as a search term.

As you can see from the chart above, the Conservative candidate Boris Johnson was ahead last week, and has been for most of the campaign. Labour’s Ken Livingstone has been in second place, but last week was overtaken the Liberal Democrat candidate, Brian Paddick. Of course, it is important to state that searches do not equal votes – voters will be searching for their least favourite as well as their favourite candidate – but looking where people end up when searching for a candidate can be informative.

As you would expect, the top destination for each of the candidates is their main homepage, particularly in the case of Lib Dem Brian Paddick. Wikipedia is the second most popular destination, and is particularly important for Tory Boris Johnson. News and Media sites are most important for Ken Livingstone searches. As the incumbent candidate, a number of searches for the mayor also lead to the official London Government website. Charting traffic to each of the candidates’ homepages, you can see that the ranking for last week is the same as the search terms, although the trend in each case is more clearly upward, and the gaps between candidates are smaller.

Of course, not only do searches not equal votes, but website visits don’t either! However, looking at the story behind these visits provides some more insight. For example, 49% of visitors to Boris’s website live outside of London, while Ken’s site sends the most visitors to election / voter registration websites. This week the Labour party homepage was the fifth most popular downstream site from Brian Paddick’s homepage, while last week Ken’s homepage was the second – data that may have an impact considering the potential importance of second preference votes.

The most popular site visited before Brian Paddick’s site last week was Facebook, which brings us back to the original claims about this being an Internet election. As you can see from the chart below, Brian Paddick is currently receiving the most traffic from social networks, and this has played a part in the growth of his homepage over the last couple of weeks. Boris has gained traction on the social networks as well: his Facebook group is the biggest, while YouTube was the most popular site visited after his homepage last week.

However, when you look at the number of interactions across the social networks, they are actually quite small for an election involving millions of voters. The widely reported ‘I Think I Fancy Boris’ YouTube video has, at time of writing, received less than 22,000 viewings, while the collective membership of the three candidates’ fanclubs / friendship lists on Facebook is just over 11,000. Although the Internet has clearly played a role in this election, it looks like its still early days for online political campaigning in the UK.

Update (April 30th): With one day of campaigning to go, we have provided the latest data.

Apple iPhone UK price drop

2008-04-21T08:00:00Z

Last week Apple and 02 announced that they had cut the price of the 8GB iPhone by £100 in the UK until June 1st. As always with Apple, the announcement generated a huge amount of media interest – including speculation that the launch of a 3G iPhone is now imminent. ‘iphone’ was the seventh fastest moving search term sending traffic to our News and Media category last week, and searches for the term reached their highest peak this year as a result.

So, aside from news sites and blogs, who benefited from this surge in interest? The chart below lists the top 3 websites receiving most traffic from searches for ‘iphone’ during the 4 weeks ending 19 April. As you would expect, these are the 3 authorised sellers of the mobile phone in the UK (Apple, O2, and Carphone Warehouse) - although their ranking has changed since the launch last year, with Apple’s iPhone site overtaking the O2 Shop to gain the top spot.

In order to analyse the specific impact of the price drop and resultant search traffic, we collected the data illustrated in the table below. All three sites experienced an increase in both their overall market share and the amount of traffic that they received from search engines last week, with Apple the big winner in both cases. However, despite the media interest, none of the sites saw an increased in traffic from our News and Media category. It seems that people read or hear about the news and then conduct a search which sends them to a retail site, rather than simply following links / adverts from a news page to a retailer.

How long does it take to recover from a Google ‘blacklisting’? (GoCompare update)

2008-04-16T10:00:00Z

A couple of months ago we highlighted the fate of GoCompare, the insurance comparison site that was ‘blacklisted’ by Google after the search engine discovered irregular linking activity. Just to recap: for the first few weeks of 2008, ‘car insurance’ was sending more traffic to www.gocompare.com than any other search term, including its own brand name. But once the penalty was applied, the site plummeted down the rankings for ‘car insurance’ and other key terms, leaving competitors such as Confused.com and Comparethemarket.com to pick up the pieces.

So how is the recovery going? The chart below illustrates how much search traffic GoCompare receives from ‘car insurance’. The orange line represents its share of traffic from the term since Christmas, while the blue line represents its rank amongst all of the sites receiving traffic from the term over the same period. As you can see, for the first few weeks of the year GoCompare ranked second for ‘car insurance’ (behind Money Supermarket), and at its peak was receiving over 15% of traffic from term (4 weeks ending 25th January 2008).

However, once the site fell down Google’s listings, its rank dropped to a low of 9th for the term ‘car insurance’, receiving less than 2% of traffic from the term for the 4 weeks ending 1st March 2008. Since then it has started the slow climb back up the rankings, receiving 3.75% of traffic for the term for the latest 4 weeks, moving up to 7th place. In other words: 11 weeks since the penalty first took effect, and GoCompare still has a long way to go.

It is interesting to consider what the financial costs of such a ‘blacklisting’ might be. Obviously the biggest cost is the lost business as a result of falling search traffic to GoCompare’s website, but it would have also incurred increased marketing costs in order to aid its recovery. One of these is an increase in paid search activity, as illustrated in the chart below.

The orange line is same as in the first chart, while the pink line represents the proportion GoCompare’s search traffic from the term ‘car insurance’ that came from paid listings. As you can see, when the site was riding high before the ‘blacklisting’, it was well optimized and didn’t rely heavily on paid search for traffic from the term ‘car insurance’; but this situation changed once its organic ranking slipped. GoCompare’s paid search activity for the term shot up and, although this is now declining as the site’s organic ranking recovers, it is still well above the pre-‘blacklisting’ levels.

Google Book Search on the rise

2008-04-15T13:00:00Z

Recently, Google announced that it has released an API which enables websites to link to the books within its Google Book Search functionality. This allows users to preview the book in question in a similar way to the ‘search inside’ feature used by Amazon. Over the last four weeks, Internet visits to books.google.co.uk have increased by 73% as result of this change, and overall visits to the site have trebled year-on-year. The volume of page impressions has also increased by 24% since the beginning of March.

It is interesting to note that until recently Internet users in the UK were visiting both books.google.com and books.google.co.uk properties of Google Book Search, with each site capturing a similar amount of traffic over the year. However, since the API launch, visits to the .co.uk property have increased steadily, whilst visits to the .com property have decreased.

Google Book Search UK is also becoming less reliant on Google search properties for traffic, with 23.9% less upstream traffic from www.google.co.uk year-on-year. At the same time, visits from Google Scholar have increased, and the site has become the second largest driver of upstream traffic after Google UK. This shift in sources of traffic may also be responsible for the changing demographic profile for the website. Visits from users within the 55+ age bracket have increased by 53% since Oct 2007, while at the same time visits from the 35-44 age bracket have decreased by 45%.

Not all books featured with Google Book Search are available to read, and a number of books have a summary and links to online book sellers. This is having an increasing impact on the online book shopping industry, with traffic from the website to the Shopping & Classified – Books category increasing four-fold since April 07. Amazon UK is benefitting the most: it is the number one downstream website from Google Book Search, capturing one in twenty visits last week.

Top 10 UK search terms: social networks dominate the list

2008-04-14T16:00:00Z

We have just announced the winners of the Hitwise UK Online Performance Awards 2007, so congratulations to all of the websites that placed within their industry top 10. In addition to the top websites, we also announced the top 10 most searched for brands of 2007, and the results make for interesting reading.

As you can see from the table above, there were four new entrants into the top this 10 year (highlighted in green). That all four of these terms are the brand names of social networks / Web 2.0 sites nicely illustrates how significant social networking has become in the UK. Half of the 10 most searched for terms in the UK last year – ‘bebo’, ‘youtube’, ‘facebook’, ‘myspace’ and ‘you tube’ came from this sector, and the volume of searches for the top terms continues to grow.

Looking at the rest of the list, ‘ebay’ remains at the top, but other retail-related terms have fallen down the rankings: ‘argos’ and ‘amazon’ remain in the top 10, albeit placed lower, while ‘easyjet’, ‘autotrader’ and ‘ebay uk’ have all dropped out. "Old" media has also suffered, with ‘bbc’ falling three places and ‘cbbc’ departing the top 10. However, it’ll be interesting to see if the continuing popularity of the Beeb’s "new" media iPlayer service leads to a revival in the 2008 list.

Update: Jack Schofield at the Guardian picked up on our list of top websites in his blog, and the comments section contains some interesting debate.

The Independent gains online market share in the UK

2008-04-09T14:52:18Z

Earlier this year we highlighted the growth of newspaper websites in the UK. As the chart below illustrates, the market share of the UK Independent, which has traditionally lagged behind most of its rivals online, has more doubled over the last twelve months. It was the seventh most visited website in our News and Media – Print in March putting it behind the Daily Mail, Times, Sun, Telegraph, Guardian and FT, but ahead of the Mirror and Express

One of the key factors in this growth is the amount of traffic the site is getting from other news sources. The number of visits that the Independent receives from Google News (UK and US versions) has increased 10-fold over the last 12 months (the news aggregator now accounts for one in every 25 visits), while there has also been a significant increase in the amount of traffic that Social Networks and Email services send to the site.

However, as the chart above illustrates, the real change has been the amount of traffic that the paper receives from search engines. An increase in paid search activity has played a role – the proportion of paid search traffic has increased from 1% in November last year to 11% last month – but the key to the Independent’s success seems to be more effective organic search engine optimisation (SEO). Searches for the term ‘independent’ are actually on the decline, and the proportion of traffic that the site sites receives from its main brand term has fallen by 84% since November. But, at the same time, the number of distinct search terms sending traffic to the Independent has increased from under 1,000 in November to over 10,000 in March.

A good sign that the Independent is picking up more relevant hits as a result of improved search traffic is the decline in ‘leakage’ to its competitors. As the chart below illustrates, the amount of traffic that the site sends to other News and Media sites declined notably between Nowember and March. However, the Independent still lags behind its main competitors in one key area: average session time. Although this has increased slightly over the last few months, at 3 minutes 32 seconds in March its lags behind the other broadsheets (all of which are currently over 5 minutes), and the Financial Times, which leads the newspaper market with an average session time of nearly nine minutes.

Google UK trademark changes and navigational search

2008-04-07T14:00:00Z

Google has announced that it will allow non-trademark owners to bid on trademarked terms in the UK and Ireland from May 5th, thus bringing the British and Irish markets in line with the US and Canada. This announcement has sparked concern of a "trademark bloodbath", but how big an impact will it actually have?

Last year we did some long tail analysis, showing that navigational search was on the rise in the UK. We looked at the top 2,000 search terms over the 4 week period ending in the middle of October during 2005, 2006 and 2007, categorizing them into ‘navigational’ terms (e.g. ‘myspace’, ‘ebay’, ‘bbc’) and non-navigational terms (e.g. ‘flights to spain’, ‘free games’, etc.). As the chart below illustrates, we found that navigational search was on the increase; in 2007, 76.0% of search volume for the top 2,000 terms was navigational in nature, up from 63.6% in 2006 and 58.2% in 2005

In other words, there has been a significant increase in navigational search. And because most of these terms are trademarked, that means that there has also been an increase in searches for trademarked terms. Consequently, this change from Google in the UK will have a significant impact on brand owners and affiliates.

On a related note, we have just published some data illustrating that ‘facebook’ has been the most searched for term in the UK for the last couple of weeks, overtaking longtime leader ‘bebo’ for first time.

Update (28 April 08) - we've carried out some additional research and quanitfied the potential impact that these changes could have on brand owners in the UK here.

UK DIY and Screwfix

2008-04-03T13:00:00Z

Apparently, Good Friday is the busiest DIY day of the year, so I wasn’t surprised to see that traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds: House and Garden category increased noticeably during the Easter week. Slightly more unexpected, however, is the growth that the sector has experienced over the last three years. As the chart below illustrates, the House and Garden category has been gradually increasing its share of all UK Internet visits over this period, and during Eater it was the sixth largest of our 17 retail sub-categories.

Despite IKEA being the third largest site, the Shopping and Classifieds - House and Garden category is dominated by the large DIY stores. These accounted for five of the top 10 sites over Easter, including B&Q at number one. The Experian Mosaic lifestyle group that over-indexes most with the category is Rural Isolation, defined as “people living in rural areas where country life has not been influenced by urban consumption patterns”. As you would expect, the largest age group visiting these sites is the over 55s, who account for over a quarter of all visitors to the category. House and Garden sites are slightly more popular amongst women that men, with females accounting for 51.8% of visitors to the category during the 4 weeks ending 15/03/2008.

One House and Garden store that has done particularly well online over the last 12 month is Screwfix Direct, currently the second most visited site in category. It has increased its share of UK Internet visits by 20% since last Easter, and a recent above the line (ATL) advertising campaign has led to an increase in searches for its brand (as the chart below illustrates).

However, brand strength does not seem to have been the only driver of Screwfix’s online growth. Despite being the second most popular site in the sector, ‘srewfix’ is only the fourth most popular search term sending traffic to our Shopping and Classified - House and Garden category, and the site is less reliant on branded search than most of its competitors. As the table below illustrates, Screwfix receives traffic from a larger variety of search terms than its main competitors.

One of the reasons for this long tail is TalkScrewfix, a part of the site that contains forums such as Builders’ Talk and Plumbers’ Talk. These are extremely popular: at the time of writing they contain over 650,000 postings on 70,000 topics. This level of content serves two purposes for a site like Screwfix. Firstly, as we described in our recent webinar, it forms the basis for an effective SEO strategy. Indeed, the top three search engines sending traffic to Screwfix (Google’s UK and US properties, plus Yahoo! UK & Ireland), all over index in terms of the amount of new visitors they send to the site.

The second benefit is that the content forms the basis of a community of loyal users that return to the site. As we mentioned in our Social Networking report, the number of older social network users is on the rise, and sites such as TalkSrewfix are where they’re going. Screwfix receives 5.4% of its upstream traffic from Email services, over twice the industry average, implying that users are emailing tips and links to friends and colleagues. The community aspect also helps with site stickiness: last week, 13.8% of people went from Screwfix to competitor site, compared to 22.5% for the industry as a whole.