Hitwise Intelligence - UK

Mother’s Day: Woodlands Junior School strikes again

2010-03-16T09:58:21Z

A couple of years ago we highlighted the extraordinary case of Woodlands Junior School, the best optimised school website in the UK. It appears high up on the Google SERP for popular seasonal terms such as ‘mothers day’, ‘pancake day’, ‘easter’ and ‘lent’. Back in 2008 Woodlands Junior School was the biggest recipient of traffic from the search term ‘mothers day’, and this year it’s done it again. As the chart below illustrates, for the 12 weeks ending 13/03/10 the site picked up over a third of all clicks on the term – more than three times as much as Wikipedia, and much more than any commercial sites (many of which, unlike Woodlands, paid for much of their traffic).

Over the same 12 week period, the Woodlands Junior School site picked up traffic from over 42,000 different search terms, 349 of which were Mothering Sunday related. The site’s success means that it currently ranks second in our Education – Institutions category, behind the Open University but ahead of all the other University websites in the UK! And this isn’t a freak month: the site has ranked in second position since September last year, and has been in the top 5 for most of the last three years.

Back to Mother’s Day, and it’s interesting to see from the chart below that, although searches for the basic term ‘mothers day’ peaked on the week ending 06/03/10 and declined slightly last week (first chart), taking all the variations into account searches continued to increase significantly last week (second chart).

Clearly what happened was that people searched for information and the data first, before refining their searches closer to the date as they sought presents. The table below lists the top variations on the term ‘mothers day’ last week, with the more transactional terms unsurprisingly attracting higher paid rates.

You can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter, while Woodlands Junior School have a presence here and here.

Is Fairtrade growing in popularity?

2010-03-12T09:00:19Z

Another guest blog by Jonny Steel, Insights Manager, mySupermarket-Insights.co.uk

Fairtrade Fortnight is an annual event which aims to raise the profile of fair and ethical trading values. The supermarkets have been keen to get on board for the past few years, highlighting their growing Fairtrade offering, introducing additional promotions and helping to educate their customers on the virtues of Fairtrade.

But have the millions of pounds poured into Fairtrade education resulted in increased interest and ultimately, sales? Are we spending more on Fairtrade than in previous years? While more British consumers than ever before are familiar with the concept of Fairtrade, and no doubt, if asked, would agree that it is a worthy cause, the question remains whether they’re willing to spend more on their groceries to ensure that a farmer on the other side of the world gets paid fairly. During a recession, when many consumers are concerned primarily with taking care of their own families, what has been the impact on Fairtrade search and purchasing trends?

As the graph shows, online interest in Fairtrade has dropped over the past year, probably as a result of the economic downturn. Similarly, mySupermarket.co.uk, the grocery shopping and comparison website, found that sales of Fairtrade products have fallen by 5% over the past year.

The major peak comes around Fairtrade Fortnight each year, as people respond to the increased publicity. Indeed, Fairtrade coffee sales on mySupermarket.co.uk increased by 57% during the fortnight, compared to the two weeks beforehand. The only other time of year that appears to see a significant uplift is in the period ahead of Christmas, potentially reflecting an uplift in searches for Christmas presents like Fairtrade clothes and bags.

In terms of weekly online internet shopping, Sainsbury’s and Ocado offer the most Fairtrade products, and not surprisingly see the highest weekly spend of all the supermarkets. In an average branch, Sainsbury’s shoppers will find about 157 Fairtrade products, while in Ocado (Waitrose) they’ll find 154. Tesco have 117 and ASDA 65. Ocado shoppers spend the most on Fairtrade (£1.18 per order), compared to Sainsbury’s (57p), Tesco (30p) and ASDA (16p).

Sainsbury’s have taken a strategic approach to Fairtrade, replacing many traditional lines with Fairtrade alternatives. For example, all Sainsbury’s bananas and most of their standard own label tea is now Fairtrade (Sainsbury’s loose bananas are now the country’s top-selling Fairtrade product). This approach smartly takes away the decision-making process from the customer, giving them no alternative to Fairtrade, and resulting in many shoppers buying these products without even realising it. Moreover, in a bid to remain competitive, these Fairtrade products are often priced identically to their equivalents elsewhere that are not Fairtrade. For example, Sainsbury’s bananas are currently priced at 97p/kilo, just as non-Fairtrade ones are in ASDA and Tesco.

During this year’s Fairtrade Fortnight approximately 25% of all Fairtrade products were on special offer at the supermarkets. Many of these offers bring down the prices so much that they’re priced closely to their non-Fairtrade equivalents, offering customers a great way to stock up on Fairtrade items without spending much more than the regular ones.

The top Search terms within the Fairtrade portfolio show that people don’t tend to search for specific Fairtrade products, but rather, are searching for general information. Within the top results, the only specific products to feature are flowers, chocolate and jewelry. This suggests that people still view Fairtrade as something that they might consider giving as a gift, but not something that they necessarily want as part of their own daily life.

Of the groceries, although chocolate is the top Fairtrade search term, there are actually more Fairtrade coffee products available at our supermarkets. Chocolate comes second, followed by tea and sugar. Fairtrade’s popularity at more premium retailers such as Ocado and the low online search for specific Fairtrade products suggests that it remains a niche area of interest. While the more value-oriented supermarkets may focus on it during Fairtrade Fortnight, this may be more as a way to highlight their “ethical credentials” rather than being targeted at meeting their customers’ demands.

The list of websites that receive the most traffic from this portfolio of search terms only includes one supermarket. This highlights once again that while there is general interest in Fairtrade, it doesn’t always convert into purchases. While the official Fairtrade Foundation website receives nearly 60% of the traffic in the period of the last 4 weeks, there is a major absence of the 4 online supermarkets, with only The Co-operative Food at number 13 on the list.

mySupermarket.co.uk is the shopping and comparison website which guarantees you the lowest price for your groceries at Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Ocado.

mySupermarket Insights is a real-time FMCG data solution for businesses, tracking daily prices, promotions and market share for all groceries at the main supermarkets.

Follow Hitwise UK and mySupermarket on Twitter.

Coffee wars: Flat White vs. Cappuccino

2010-03-11T10:20:00Z

Hitwise was started in Australia, and there remains a strong Antipodean influence in our London office. The most recent manifestation of this is a fashion amongst my colleagues for flat whites – a style of coffee that, like the pavlova before it, originated in either Australia or New Zealand and, depending on your opinion, is either a less milky café latte or a weaker, colder café con leche (see this Wikipedia entry for an unintentionally amusing comparison between the drinks). And it’s not only Experian Hitwise employees that are falling victim to this latest coffee fashion: according to this article in the Evening Standard, the flat white is already challenging the cappuccino in some London coffee shops.

Our data also backs this up. As the chart below illustrates, Internet searches for “flat white” first started appearing in the UK towards the end of 2008, but have really taken off since both Starbucks and Costa launched the drink in December and January respectively, and are now neck and neck with “cappuccino”.

During the 12 weeks ending 06/03/2010, people in the UK searched for over 650 different terms containing the phrase “flat white”. Here are the top 10, which includes both Costa and Starbucks branded terms, as well as the two recipe-related terms:

1. flat white (13.58% of searches containing the term)
2. flat white coffee (6.30%)
3. costa flat white (2.23%)
4. flat white london (1.97%)
5. how to make a flat white (1.63%)
6. white flat screen tv (1.56%)
7. flat white starbucks (1.46%)
8. flat white coffee recipe (1.20%)
9. starbucks flat white (1.20%)
10. costa coffee flat white (1.03%)

Interestingly, searches for “flat white” are less prevalent in Australia and New Zealand than the UK. Presumably the reason for this is that our Aussie and Kiwi cousins are already familiar with the drink, so are less inclined to search out fo curiosity.

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The dotcom bubble: 10 years on

2010-03-10T15:45:00Z

Today is the tenth anniversary of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, so I though it would be interesting to see how the Internet landscape has changed over the last decade. Below is a list of the top 20 websites in the UK last week, with Google and Facebook topping the list. Back in the heyday of the dotcom bubble, Facebook wasn’t even a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and Google was still in its infancy.

However, a number of the sites that were big back then remain so today: Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) and Yahoo! Mail still rank in the top 20, and both Microsoft and Yahoo! have other popular UK sites as well. eBay and Amazon remain the most visited retail websites in the UK, although they now face much stiffer competition from both online and multichannel retailers now.

But what about some of the names most closely associated with dotcom boom and bust?

Lastminute.com – one of the great survivors of the bubble; still a top 20 UK travel site.

Boo.com – given the success of fashion retailers like ASOS, which makes such good use of multimedia on its site, maybe the doomed clothing retailer was simply ahead of its time and would have survived in a broadband world?

Broadcast.com – the likes of Last.fm, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, Hulu and YouTube have proved that streaming media can be a success, but they all would have struggled over a dial up connection.

Which of today’s most popular sites do you think will still be widely used in ten years time, and which are likely to fall by the wayside?

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Travel sites show improvement in the latest IMRG-HITWISE HOT SHOPS LIST

2010-03-03T09:42:16Z

Yesterday saw the release of the sixteenth quarterly edition of the IMRG-HITWISE HOT SHOPS LIST, which ranks by popularity, as indicated by visits, the top 50 UK e-retailers selling goods and services within the IMRG Index Classification.

Click here to see the press release and to download the full report

Experian Hitwise's Director of Research, Robin Goad, comments:
"With Christmas and sales shopping mostly out of the way and snow covering much of the country, during January British consumers turned their attention to planning and booking their summer holidays. Seven travel companies moved up the rankings, and easyJet re-entered the top 10. The big travel agencies did particularly well, with Thomas Cook moving 31 positions to 15th and Thomson Holidays 10 positions to 11th, one ahead of Expedia. There was minimal movement elsewhere in the top 10 and the top four remain unchanged. The big retailers that managed to extend their sales beyond the immediate post-Christmas week fared well, while LoveFilm also benefited from the poor weather; why go out in the cold when you can stay inside with a good DVD?"

Where in the UK are financial aggregator websites most popular?

2010-03-01T14:38:31Z

Another guest blog from Richard Seymour, Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst.

In the table below we can see where in the UK financial aggregators are most used. The representation shows the areas which over-index compared to the UK population. In this case we can see that residents of Sunderland are most over-represented in visits to financial aggregators compared to their general internet usage. Behind Sunderland, the North is well represented in the ten most over-indexed areas - particularly the North-West, with Liverpool, Bolton, Preston, Blackpool and Wigan all heavily over-represented in visits to financial aggregators.

However, financial aggregators are less used in London, as the bottom 10 shows above. All London postal areas are significantly underrepresented when it comes to visits to financial aggregators.

Interestingly, however, when compared to a custom category of insurance providers, London – WC appears as the 8th most over-indexed postal area. So, as a rule, those in London – WC do not use financial aggregators heavily, but they do use them more than using insurance providers’ sites directly.

When compared to visits to insurance providers, Sunderland again appears as the most over-indexed postal area, showing that users there would prefer to shop around and compare deals than go direct to insurance providers. In Sunderland financial aggregators are presumably doing a good job in filtering people towards the best deals or products that suit their situation in that area.

The opposite is true for Liverpool. Whilst Liverpudlians are the second-most over-indexed in visits to financial aggregators, they are the most under-indexed when compared to visits to insurance providers, showing that they prefer to go to insurance providers direct - or that they visit multiple insurance providers from the comparison sites.

The original version of this article appeared in the latest edition of the Experian Hitwise UK Financial Services Quarterly Review. To download a copy of the report, click here.

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Chatroulette: a posh webcam?

2010-02-15T13:54:34Z

This morning I stumbled upon an article in Guardian profiling Chatroulette, a new webcam site that, as its name implies, connects users with random strangers for live video chats. According to the article, the site “is proving a sensation around the world” - and our data certainly points in that direction. Last week traffic to the site doubled, and it became the 1,189th most visited website in the UK. That may not immediately sound that impressive, but it makes it the second most visited webcam site in the UK after Justin.tv

Aside from the random nature of the meetings it arranges, the other interesting about Chartroulette is its visitor profile. As the chart below illustrates, compared with other Webcam sites it attracts a much wealthier and more ‘sophisticated’ audience that the webcam category in general. The most over-indexed Experian Mosaic groups visiting the website last week were: Alpha Territory (described as “People with substantial wealth who live in the most sought after neighbourhoods”), Professional Rewards (“Experienced professionals in successful careers enjoying comfortable lifestyles in suburban or semi-rural homes”) and Liberal Opinions (“Young, well educated city dwellers enjoying the vibrancy and diversity of urban life”).

Whether the site is attracting these people because of its novelty value remains to be seen, but many are staying out of more than just curiosity and average session time is currently a relatively respectable seven and a half minutes. As you would expect from a site that has become a viral success, a third of Chartroulette’s traffic currently comes from social networks, with Facebook alone accounting for 23% of visits last week. And of course there is also the Valentine’s aspect to the story: how many of the people visiting the site last week were expecting to find a special someone...?

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Top websites in France

2010-02-09T10:07:29Z

Bonjour! It’s a very exciting day at Experian Hitwise towers today because we have announced the launch of Hitwise France! The Hitwise France service will provide clients with data on website industry and category rankings, Clickstream traffic activity, search behaviour and keyword research. Clients also will have access to additional tools to create custom categories, search term portfolios and customized dashboards.

In order to whet your appetite for all of this exciting Gallic data, we present the first of many insights into French Internet usage…

Google.fr is the most visited website in France, accounting for 1 in every 10 Internet visits

During the week ending 30/01/10, Google France was the most visited website in France, picking up 10.38% of all French Internet visits – equivalent to 1 in every 10. Two other Google-owned properties also appeared in the list of the 10 most visited websites in France during the same week: YouTube at number 4 and Google.com at number 7.

Facebook is the second most visited website in France, accounting for 6.83% of all French Internet visits during the week ending 30/01/10. The site accounted for just under half of all French visits to social networks over the same period, picking up over twice as many visits as second placed YouTube. Skyrock is the third most popular social network in France, and the eighth most popular website overall.

Windows Live Mail (mail.live.com, also known as Windows Live Hotmail) is the third most visited website in France and the most popular webmail service. Orange France Webmail (webmail.orange.fr) is the next most popular webmail service and fifth most visited website overall, while Orange France ranks sixth. The list of the top 10 websites in France is completed by Leboncoin.fr, the most popular Shopping and Classifieds website, at number nine, and MSN France in tenth position.

Social networking is a more popular activity in France than in the UK, but online shopping less so

Search Engines are the most visited category of website in France, accounting for 14.27% of all French Internet visits during the week ending 30/01/10. Social networks and Forums rank second, picking up 12.85% of French Internet visits – more than the 10.61% the industry accounts for in the UK. Shopping and Classifieds websites, on the other hand, account for a higher percentage of Internet visits in the UK (8.74%) than in France (8.44%).

France and the UK have very similar sized Internet populations, so it is interesting to compare the different ways in which the web is used in the two countries. In France, more online time is spent on communication and entertainment than in the UK, with Entertainment websites and Webmail services also picking up a higher proportion of visits. On the other hand, people in the UK are more likely to use the Internet to make transactions and look for information. News and Media, Sports, Travel, and Education websites all account for a higher proportion of Internet visits in the UK than in France.

UK Internet Map (as featured on the BBC’s Virtual Revolution)

2010-02-02T09:25:00Z

If you managed to catch the first episode of the BBC’s excellent Internet documentary, Virtual Revolution, on Saturday night you may have noticed occasional flashes of “Source: Experian Hitwise” at the bottom of your screen. In amongst interviews with such luminaries as Tim Berners Lee, Jimmy Wales and Bill Gates, the Beeb built a couple of funky graphics using our data. The first, at the start of the show, was an Internet map of the UK drawing on our postal data to highlight the top towns for activities such as social networking, blogging and online dating.

The second, towards the end of the programme, was a fantastic 3D visualisation of one our Network Maps. Below, in a somewhat rawer form, is our original, which is based on data from September last year. It illustrates how traffic flows between 30 of the top websites in the UK: the size of the bubble represents the website’s share of Internet visits (so Facebook and Google UK have the biggest bubbles), while the lines illustrate the amount of traffic moving between the sites (using our clickstream data).

The point made in the program is that the web has consolidated around a relatively small number of brands, and to a certain extent this is true (the top 100 sites currently account for 42.5% of all UK Internet visits), but I think the most interesting thing about these maps is the way the traffic flows between the sites. You can see, for example, how Microsoft and Yahoo! send their own properties a lot of traffic, and also how much traffic flows between the very biggest sites. It is also interesting to note how people regularly switch between social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

To see the BBC graphics department’s far superior rendering of this data, you can watch Virtual Revolution on iPlayer. I would suggest watching the whole thing, but if you’re feeling impatient it appears within the last 15 minutes of the program.

For further updates, you can follow both Hitwise UK and BBC Virtual Revolution on Twitter.

Christmas Dinner – Homemade cheesecakes in; roast potatoes out

2010-01-29T10:00:00Z

Guest blog by Jonny Steel, Marketing Insights Manager, mySupermarket.co.uk

With Christmas now behind us, it’s time to look back at how our eating habits changed during one of the most financially challenging festive seasons for years.

mySupermarket.co.uk, the grocery shopping and comparison website, not surprisingly found that “turkey” was the most searched for term in December 2009, leapfrogging all of the usual top searches like milk, eggs, bread, butter and cheese. However, interestingly, sales of turkey were down from last year, perhaps as a result of shoppers opting for cheaper alternatives. Sales of fresh turkey fell 17% and frozen turkey was down 37%. Although searches for “pork” remained unchanged, it seems that this provided a popular alternative for the main course, with sales of pork up 6%.

Elsewhere on the Christmas menu, the perfect roast potatoes were once again hotly debated by the celebrity chefs. Back in 2007 Nigella called for roasting the humble spud in goose fat. Last year she suggested rolling it in semolina. This year Michael Caine joined the debate by boasting on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that his were the best. So what’s his secret? Soaking parboiled potatoes in olive oil before cooking. Both goose fat and semolina seem to have fallen out of favour as the nation’s favourite secret ingredients, seeing their pre-Christmas sales through mySupermarket.co.uk drop this year by 8% and 20% respectively. Olive oil sales were also slightly down, so it would appear that Michael Caine had not become a culinary trend setter either. That doesn’t mean that we ditched the spud completely, though. Maris Piper potatoes, recommended by many chefs as the ideal roasting potato, saw their sales rise by 8% while chilled ready-made roast potatoes rocketed in popularity by 79% and frozen by 32%. It would therefore seem that 2009 will be remembered as the year when we just couldn’t be bothered stressing over our roasted potatoes.

Cranberry sauce was the top search term driving traffic to recipe sites, and the customer purchasing data from mySupermarket.co.uk highlight how big cranberries really were this year. Sales of readymade cranberry sauce increased by 23% with Ocean Spray dominating the category. While sales of dried cranberries increased by 8%, it was the fresh variety that was the real winner this year, with a sales uplift of 57% on last year.

When it comes to dessert time, non-traditional treats seem to have been the flavour of the month. While Christmas pudding and mince pies remain national favourites, Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith and Gordon Ramsay were baking cheesecakes and pavlovas. As a result these desserts topped Christmas pudding in the recipe searches this year. At the same time, mySupermarket.co.uk experienced a 19% drop in sales of readymade cheesecake, presumably as a result of home chefs trying to bake one of their own instead of selecting one from the chilled aisles of the supermarket. Christmas pudding, on the other hand, saw a 12% rise on last year, suggesting that we were putting more confidence in what the supermarkets had to offer than our own creations.

There was a lot of buzz around mulled wine and cider this year, with searches for the traditional Christmas drink far outweighing champagne. Although champagne outsold mulled wine by a long way, we were certainly looking to impress our guests with some of our own home-made mulled wine. Sales of cloves and cinnamon sticks were up 13% while Chianti wine, recommended by Jamie Oliver as the best for making mulled wine, also saw sales increase by 3%.

mySupermarket.co.uk is the shopping and comparison website which guarantees you the lowest price for your groceries at Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Ocado.

mySupermarket Insights is a real-time FMCG data solution for businesses, tracking daily prices and promotions for all groceries at the main supermarkets.

You can also follow both mySupermarket and Hitwise UK on Twitter.

Apple Tablet the fourth most searched for laptop in the UK

2010-01-26T17:35:10Z

Apple’s much anticipated – but not yet even announced, just rumoured – Tablet PC became the fourth most searched for laptop model in the UK last week. The table below is from the latest Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List, and shows that a portfolio of searches including terms such as ‘apple tablet’, ‘apple islate’, ‘itablet’, and ‘ipad’ accounted for 1.9% of all laptop related searches last week, up from 1.1% the week before. Only the Sony Viao, Samsung NC10 netbook and Apple’s own Macbook (although not the Macbook Pro) received more searches.

However, despite the increase in searches and all the hype, the Tablet was far from being Apple’s most searched for product last week. In fact, as the table below illustrates, it accounted for just 0.8% of Apple related searches – 35 times less than the iPhone.

Of course, the UK isn’t the only place getting excited about the Apple Tablet, as Alan Long demonstrated in his excellent blog on Australian searches. With the probable announcement scheduled for today (January 27th), it’ll be interesting to see if the initial spike in searches following the announcement exceeds that for the iPhone. Keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for updates…

UK Internet visits to skiing and snowboarding websites up 18.5% year on year

2010-01-22T11:03:29Z

The recent heavy snow and cold weather may have caused travel chaos in some parts of the UK, but it clearly has also served to remind people of the pleasures of winter sports. For the week ending 9th January 2010, UK Internet visits to Snow Sports websites were up 18.5% on the same week in 2009, as well as 7.0% increase in ski- and snowboard related searches.

While most of the people planning a snow skiing or snowboarding holiday are considering the more traditional resorts in the Alps or North America, some are looking closer to home. UK Internet searches for Scottish Ski resorts have increased faster than any other so far this year, and searches for Glenshee have already quadrupled thanks to the recent weather.

As the table below illustrates, during the week ending January 9th 2010, Glenshee was the most searched for ski resort by UK Internet users, followed by Cairngorm. Searches for Cairngorm are up 60% year-on-year, while the second biggest increase in searches (after Glenshee) was for Nevis Range, also in Scotland. The rest of the top ten resort searches were all in the Alps, with Morzine the most popular overseas destination.

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The profile of online shoppers becomes more affluent over the Christmas period

2010-01-19T13:30:00Z

One of the things we discovered when helping to develop the new Experian Mosaic UK 2009 profiles was that the typical online shopper tends to come from a middle or lower middle income group. However, over the Christmas period, the proportion of visitors from higher income groups increases.

For most of 2009, the largest number of visitors to online retail websites in the UK came from the Ties of Community Experian Mosaic Group, defined as “People living in close-knit inner city and manufacturing town communities, responsible workers with unsophisticated tastes”. However, during December this group was replaced at the top spot by the more affluent Happy Families, defined as “Families with focus on career and home, mostly younger age groups now raising children”.

Other Experian Mosaic Groups that saw their share of visits to the category increase over the Christmas period included Suburban Comfort (“Families who are successfully established in comfortable, mature homes. Children are growing up and finances are easier”) and Symbols of Success (“People with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products”).

This analysis is taken from our new report, The Experian Hitwise Christmas 2009 Retail Review: Was Christmas 2009 the start of the retail recovery?. Using both Experian Hitwise and Experian FootFall data, it analyses online and offline retail traffic during the pre- and post-Christmas periods. The report covers the impact of a number of factors, including: the economic environment, the impact of poor weather and the way consumers responded to the New Year VAT increase. It also looks at the most searched for products over the Christmas period, and the changing demographic profile of online shoppers using the Experian Mosaic lifestyle classification system. You can download a FREE copy here.

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Snow causes traffic to Weather and Transport websites to reach all time high

2010-01-15T14:25:00Z

UK Internet visits to both Transport and Weather websites reached an all time high last week as British people flocked online to keep up to date with the latest snow developments. For the week ending January 9th 2010, Weather websites accounted for 1.5% of all UK Internet visits, three times more than the same week last year, and 26.9% more than the previous peak during the snow in February 2009.

BBC Weather was the 12th most visited website in the UK last week, while the Met Office homepage ranked 22nd. National Rail Enquiries was the 56th most visited website in the UK, up from 80th the previous week), while traffic to Transport websites in general was up 28.9% on the same week in 2009.

The bad weather has caused travel chaos across the UK, and for many people the first place they go to keep up to date with any disruptions in the Internet. In addition to the expected increase in traffic to Weather and Transport websites last week, people in the UK searched for a huge range of snow-related topics. UK Internet users searched for over 146,000 different terms containing the word ‘snow’ during the 4 weeks ending January 9th 2010, with ‘snow forecast’ topping the list. Last week searches for the term were up 378% on the same time last year.

Increases in searches for other popular terms would imply that there were opportunities for some companies amongst all the reports of lost revenues because of the weather last week; searches for ‘snow chains’ increased 23-fold on the same time last year, while searches for ‘snow boots’ were up six-fold. There also a big spike in searches relating to school closures, with much of the traffic going to Local Government websites. As the chart below illustrates, there was a 144% increase in visits to the category last week.

As you would expect, the Local Government websites that experienced the largest increase in traffic last week were in the areas worst affected by the weather. As the table below illustrates, the biggest traffic increase was in Aberdeenshire, and ‘aberdeenshire council’ and ‘aberdeenshire school closers’ were the second and third most popular Local Government search terms (‘tfl’ was number one). There was also a strong correlation between the other fast moving Local Government websites and searches for school closures in those areas.

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Eastenders’ web traffic spikes following E20 launch

2010-01-13T12:44:43Z

Last week Eastenders launched E20, an online spinoff named after the fictional Walford postcode in which the BBC’s flagship soap opera is set. Traffic to the Eastenders’ homepage (which includes the E20 microsite) spiked as a result, with the peak so far occurring on Friday January 8th. Visits to the site are currently at their highest level since March 2009, when Danielle was killed just after she finally reconciled herself with Ronnie.

Given that the online episodes are hosted on the Eastenders’ homepage, another way of the judging E20’s success is to look at the site’s average visit time. Assuming that people are visiting to watch the episodes rather than simply out of curiosity, average visits times should have increased. And they have: as the chart below illustrates, the average time spend per visit on the Eastenders’ homepage has increased from around five to nine minutes since the launch of E20.

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