Hitwise Intelligence - UK

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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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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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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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.

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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Searches for climate change and energy efficiency (Blog Action Day)

2009-10-15T09:40:00Z

Today is Blog Action Day and, as with last year, Alan Long has beaten me to it with an excellent post on this year’s topic, climate change. I’m taking a similar approach, looking at climate changes related searches in the UK. In order to do this I revived a couple of search term portfolios that we’ve blogged about in the past: Environmental Concerns (which consists primarily of searches for information about climate change, such as ‘global warming’, ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘co2 calculator’) and Energy Saving/Efficiencies, which focuses more on searches relating to the practical steps that people are actually making to combat climate change by consuming less energy (e.g. ‘loft insulation’, ‘solar panels’, ‘multi fuel stoves’, etc.)

The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for these two over the last two years. As you can see, there are currently four times as many UK Internet searches for the Energy Saving/Efficiency portfolio as there are for the Environmental Concerns one. This gap has widened over time and is consistent with gradual shift in attitudes to climate change over the last few years; from people looking for information in order to understand the issues to more practical searches related to changing behaviours.

Looking at the chart above you can see that there are clear fluctuations. With the Environmental Concerns portfolio, increases are usually a result of climate change or global warming being in the news. The most recent increase has been driven by two events: the Climate Camp protests and the upcoming intergovernmental climate change conference in Copenhagen. During these peaks, much of the search traffic goes to News and Media websites, but in general the largest amount goes to information sites such as Wikipedia and the government’s Act on CO2 campaign, the success of which we’ve highlighted in a previous blog. At 20.4%, the paid rate on this portfolio is moderate; as the table below illustrates, government websites are currently the biggest spenders on these informational terms.

Searches for Energy Savings/Efficiencies portfolio are less driven by news than seasonality. Many of the most popular terms in the portfolio relate to heating homes or making them more efficient, with ‘underfloor heating’, ‘cavity wall insulation’, ‘double glazing’, ‘heating oil prices’, ‘electricity prices’ and ‘winter fuel allowance’ joining terms described above in the top 10.

As you would expect, searches for these terms increase in the Autumn, and last year they peaked at the start of October. It’s interesting to compare this year with last year. So far it looks as if there were more searches last year, and this may well be thanks to the ‘perfect storm’ combination of environmental concern, poor weather and the recession encouraging people to reduce their fuel bills. On the other hand, the Indian Summer we have just experienced in the UK may just mean that the peak in searches has been delayed a for few weeks. Clearly temperatures have started to fall, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. We’ll revisit the topic in a couple of weeks to find out, so keep an eye on the blog.

Given that many of the searches in the Energy Savings/Efficiency portfolio may result in people spending money, it’s no surprise to see that paid rate is higher (33.8%) and more commercial organisations in the top 10 recipients of traffic. As the table below illustrates, the utilities focussed price comparison website uSwitch received more traffic from the portfolio than anyone else for the 4 weeks ending 10/10/09. Other commercial sites in the top 10 included: Money Supermarket, two affiliates (www.freeinsulation.co.uk and www.government-grants.co.uk), two retailers (Discounted Heating and eBay UK) and energy provider NPower.

Find out more about Blog Action Day by following their Twitter feed, and of course don’t forget to follow us @Hitwise_UK.

Micro pig searches benefit the Daily Mail and Telegraph

2009-10-14T09:48:26Z

As we pointed out via Twitter on Monday, the fastest moving search term in the UK last week was ‘micro pigs’. These extremely cute little pigs are the latest pet trend, and have already picked the inevitable celebrity endorsements - and a price tag to match.

‘micro pigs’ was the most popular of the 2,000+ search terms containing the keyword ‘pig’ that were typed into search engines in the UK last week. In fact, there were 140 different variations on the term ‘micro pigs’, with many – such as ‘micro pigs for sale’, ‘micro pigs as pets’ and ‘micro mini pigs for sale in the uk’ – implying an intent to purchase. Another popular related search term was ‘teacup pigs’, referring to photos illustrating their diminutive nature.

As the chart below illustrates, the Daily Mail and Telegraph received the most traffic from searches for ‘micro pigs’ last week, together accounting for almost two fifths of all clicks (all of their traffic was organic). In fact, ‘micro pigs’ was the 18th biggest search term for the Telegraph last week - and the 26th for the Mail.

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Ukraine vs. England: a success for online video and Bet365

2009-10-12T11:00:00Z

By most accounts, the screening of the Ukraine vs. England football match online was a success. The live video stream picked up an estimated audience of half a million and there were few technical complaints. The website that screened the match, UkrainevEngland.com, ranked first in our Football category on match day (Saturday October 10th), while it was also fifth amongst all Sports sites and 124th overall. As the chart below illustrates, all of this activity meant that UK Internet traffic to our custom category of video websites reached its highest level this year on Saturday.

Looking at the clickstream for UkrainevEngland.com on Saturday reveals some interesting things. The downstream data shows that 18.3% of people leaving the site went to one of a number of video or P2P sites that, it’s probably fair to say, were hosting illegal streams of the match (or at least that’s what their visitor assumed). However, these sites also accounted for 23.2% of upstream traffic to the site, meaning that they sent more traffic to UkrainevEngland.com than they received from it. To me this implies many people were unsuccessful in their hunt for a free stream, so instead opted for the legal, paid-for option – a positive sign for those looking to charge for online content.

Another quirk revealed in the clickstream data is that a number of people visited broadband speed checker sites after UkrainevEngland.com, presumably to ensure that their connection was up to scratch before shelling out the cash. Searches for the term ‘broadband speed test’, which is already the most searched for variation on the keyword ‘broadband’ in the UK, increased by 5% last week.

The final beneficiary on Saturday was Bet365, which showed the game free to customers with a funded betting account. It was the biggest recipient of downstream traffic from UkrainevEngland.com, picking up 15.6% of visitors that left the site. This led to a surge in traffic to Bet365. As the chart below illustrates, it moved to second position in our Gambling category on Saturday, despite ranking fourth for fifth for the month up until then.

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Pre-Christmas sales searches: let the game of Retail Chicken commence!

2009-10-09T08:30:00Z

We’ve written a lot about the growth of voucher searches and the emergence of the ‘maximising consumer’ recently. Indeed, UK Internet searches for discount vouchers continue to increase: as of last week, searches for our portfolio of voucher-related searches were up 40% year-on-year. However, it is important not to underestimate the impact of a good old fashioned sale, particularly for high street retailers. As we’ve already highlighted a couple of times this year, seasonal sales and discount days within the department store and fashion sectors have already had big impacts on both web traffic and search behaviour.

The main difference between discount vouchers and sales is that, while the former perform consistently well during the year, the latter are very much seasonal affairs. Given that the months between the end of summer and Christmas are so important for retailers, they generally try to avoid offering discounts in order to maximise profits. Most of the shopping that takes place during the ‘golden quarter’ is unavoidable (those presents need to be there under the tree on Christmas Day), meaning there is little need to stoke demand further by offering unnecessary discounts. Of course, that is the ‘usual’ logic; during times of recession, conventional thinking sometimes requires a certain amount of modification.

The chart below illustrates the breadth of UK Internet searches for the keyword ‘sales’ (i.e. the number of different searches that contained the term) over the last 18 months. As you can see, last year sales searches dropped off dramatically at the end of the summer and didn’t properly recover until the week before Christmas. This year they have followed a broadly similar pattern so far, but the post-summer decline has been less marked, while the late September spike has also been bigger. Overall, the level of sales searches is currently higher than it was this time last year.

Although the economy may be on the verge of recovery, there is no doubt that consumer confidence will remain low this Christmas. It will be interesting to see how retailers – both online and offline – react to this, and how it affects the traditional pre-Christmas game of chicken between bargain-hungry consumers and profit-maximising retailers. Does the increase in sales related searches mean that consumers have smelt blood and are ready to punish retailers that aren’t willing to feed their discount hungry appetites?

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How do people search for travel in the UK?

2009-10-07T09:30:00Z

Today we present another guest post from Richard Seymour, Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst. The data is based on the excellent research that he and Iain Congdon, another Experian Hitwise analyst in the UK, carried out for our recent Global Online Travel Update webinar.

In the UK, Travel websites rely on search engines for two fifths of their traffic. In order to understand a bit more about what us Brits are actually searching for, we recently carried out some analysis of search behaviour within the UK travel sector. During August we took the top 1,000 search terms sending traffic to websites within our Travel category, and categorized them based on the type of things people were searching for. In order to pick out any notable differences between the markets, we also carried out this analysis in the USA, Canada and Australia.

Looking at the UK data we can see that there is a fairly even spread across the categories, with Agencies \ Holidays the most searched for category – and more so than in the other markets. We see a large number of generic searches in this category - such as ‘holiday deals”, ‘travel agents’, ‘spa breaks’ - as consumers start their holiday research from a general base. Of all the markets, the UK also had the largest proportion of travel review sites (3%) – primarily branded searches for Tripadvisor.

Methods of transport were heavily searched for in the UK, with Flights and Train/Coach searches each accounting for 16%. However, Flights were less searched for when compared to the other regions. A quarter of searches for trains and coaches were generic, relating to train times and tickets. The UK also has the largest number of ferry searches, mostly for French destinations.

People in the UK also make the highest number of airport searches when compared with the other market, with the regional airports featuring prominently. ‘manchester airport’ was the most searched for airport term, followed by Bristol, Gatwick, Heathrow and Birmingham airports. One key variation on airport searches is for airport parking, particularly for the big airports such as Gatwick and Heathrow.

This analysis is taken from our recent Travel Webinar, but is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of data! In addition to providing equivalent analysis for the US, Australia and Canada, we also looked at: flight searches to and from the UK, the most popular destinations in each country, the top airlines and travel brands, plus the impact of social networking. You can listen to recording of the webinar for free here.

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Microsoft Xbox 360 takes console top spot despite Sony PS3 Slim surge

2009-10-02T11:00:00Z

Over the last couple of Christmases, Nintendo (both the Wii and DS) consoles have ruled the roost, but it looks as if this Christmas things will be quite different. The chart below illustrates searches for our portfolios of console-specific search terms over the last 12 months, and you can see that the landscape has changed considerably during 2009.

For most of 2009 the Microsoft Xbox 360 has been the most searched for games console in the UK, while the popularity of the Nintendo consoles has waned significantly. Sony’s PS3 has maintained second place throughout most of year, and received a significant boost last month following the release of its new ‘slimline’ edition. Looking at the PS3 related search terms for the 4 weeks ending 05/09/09 (which coincides with the spike on the above graph), the term ‘ps3 slim’ accounted for 23.9%, while ‘new ps3’ and ‘slim ps3’ were both also in the top 10.

This shift has also had an impact on searches for video games. Last Christmas the Wii Fit dominated the rankings, but now the majority of searches (63.5% last week) are for multi-platform games. Xbox 360 games are the next most popular, picking up 11.9% of searches, followed by Nintendo DS (7.9%). Currently there are more searches for PC games (6.8%) than either Playstation- or Wii-specific games (5.1% and 3.8% respectively.

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50%+ increases in US and Australian Internet searches for flights to the UK

2009-09-30T11:50:58Z

Both American and Australian Internet searches for flights to the UK have increased by more than 50% over the last 12 months. Between August 2008 and August 2009 the volume of Internet searches for a portfolio of search terms relating to searches for flights to the United Kingdom (for example: ‘cheap flights to the UK’, ‘london flights’, ‘flights to glasgow scotland’) increased by 55.6% in the USA and 50.4% in Australia.

The weakness of the Pound against the Dollar and Euro resulted in a boom year for the domestic tourist industry this year, as many Britons chose to take a ‘staycation’ in the UK rather than go abroad. In addition to this domestic boost, the weak Pound has also had the effect of making the UK a cheaper destination for tourists from overseas. This in turn has led to these increases in searches for flights to the UK from two of the most important markets for the UK tourism industry.

Over half of both American and Australian searches for flights to the UK during August 2009 specified London, or one of its airports, as the destination. The second most popular destination for UK-bound flight searches from both countries was Edinburgh. Other popular British travel related terms included ‘map of england’ (which was the most popular UK travel search term in the USA) and ‘car hire uk’ (the most popular non-flight related UK travel search term in Australia).

During August, British Airways was the second biggest recipient of searches for UK-bound flights in the USA after Cheapflights.com, while Virgin Atlantic ranked fifth. British Airways was also the most popular non-domestic airline website in the USA, ranking 17th in the Commercial Airlines category during August, three places ahead of Germany’s Lufthansa. Virgin Atlantic ranked 28th, while Ryanair was 47th and easyJet 68th.

The fact that the main budget airlines serving the UK are receiving traffic from markets they don’t currently serve directly implies that people are flying into London from long haul destinations and then using the city as a base for further domestic or European flights. US Internet visits to Ryanair’s website have increased by 8.7% this year, while in Australia traffic to easyJet’s homepage has gone up by 50.4%.

When it comes to the popular ‘kangaroo route’ between Australia and the UK, the market remains extremely competitive. The airline that received the most traffic from Australian searches for flights to the UK during August was Malaysia Airlines, followed by Emirates and Etihad. Virgin Atlantic ranked 5th, while British Airways was 6th and its codeshare partner Qantas was fourth. Overall, Quantas is the most visited airline website in Australia, but the big Asian and Middle Eastern carriers (including Singapore Airlines, Emirates, Malaysia Airlines and Cathay Pacific – all of which fly between Australia and the UK) all picked up more Australian Internet visits than either British Airways or Virgin Atlantic.

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The importance of photo searches

2009-09-29T11:00:00Z

Whilst looking through this week’s list of fast moving search terms, one term that caught my eye was ‘great north run photos’. As the chart below illustrates, searches for the term spiked last week (w/e 26/09/09) in line with the increase in more general searches for the event.

This made me curious about the popularity of searches for photos related to big events and news stories. Last week we monitored 16,624 different UK search terms containing the word ‘photos’. Of those, ‘flickr.com photos’ was the most popular, accounting for 0.89% of all searches containing the word ‘photos’. ‘great north run photos’ was actually the second most popular photo search term, while ‘great north run 2009 photos’ ranked fifth. Other topical photo searches in the top 20 included ‘good wood revival 2009 photos’, ‘marathon photos’ and ‘nurburgring photos’.

Given the popularity of photo searches for such events, it’s interesting to see that quite different sites are picking up traffic from photo and non-photo searches. As an example, the two tables below list the top 10 websites receiving traffic from the search terms ‘great north run’ and ‘great north run photos’ respectively last week.

As you can see, the GreatRun homepage receives notably less traffic from the photo searches than it does from the core term. Similarly, Marie Curie Cancer Care was bidding on the core term – presumably to pick up sponsors – but received no traffic from photo searches. One the other hand, the BBC seems to have done well from the photo searches, as has the Telegraph. The Beeb’s success may well be due to the submission of user generated photos - one of the corporation’s social media success stories that Nic Newman described in our recent News and Media webinar.

The presence of The Royal Veterinary College on the second list is thanks to the site’s Animal Care Trust sponsorship page, and shows that charities can pick up traffic from photo searches related events. Similarly, the success of both the Shields Gazette and the Sunderland Echo provides an example of an area in which local media providers can win out over the national competition. Given the popularity of photos and other (often user-generated) rich media content, it will be interesting to see how larger and more mainstream sites adapt to plug this traffic gap.

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Nescafe reward scheme and advertising campaign

2009-09-24T11:00:00Z

One industry that has struggled to take full advantage of the possibilities offered by the Internet is Fast Moving Consumer Goods (FMCG). This is partly because it generally doesn’t sell goods directly to consumers, but also a consequence of their reliance on traditional advertising media - particularly TV - to promote their products. The focus on traditional media isn’t a result of some sort of luddite prejudice, however. Most FMCG products are mass-market, and it’s hard to match the impact of a national TV or print campaign online - particularly when economies of scale mean that by buying so much capacity you get a very competitive price.

That said, FMCG companies do utilize online marketing, and often to great effect – think of the viral success of the Cadbury’s Gorilla ads a couple of years ago. Another company that has recently experienced a spike in traffic is Nescafe. The Nestle owned coffer brand has recently launched a series of TV ads based around its new "Coffee At Its Brightest" strapline. As you can see from the chart below, traffic to the company’s British homepage experienced a noticeable spike a couple of weeks ago. For the week ending 12/09/09, Nescafe’s site ranked fourth within the UK Food and Beverage – Brand and Manufacturers category, up from 27th the previous week.

Looking at the Nescafe’s UK clickstream for the week ending 12/09/09, it seems as if the company was doing some advertising with Microsoft’s network of websites: 63% of visits came from MSN UK, while in total three quarters of the site’s traffic came from various Microsoft properties. The vast majority of these visitors were new to the Nescafe homepage, implying that the campaign succeeded in brining

Another way to measure the success of an advertising campaign, particularly an offline one, is to look at the uplift in brand search. As the chart below illustrates, searches for the Nescafe brand have indeed increased since the campaign launched.

However, looking at the list of top search terms sending traffic to the Nescafe homepage, I was interested to note that ‘nescafe’ isn’t actually the top search term sending traffic to the site. As the chart above illustrates, the term ‘nescafe pick me ups’ is actually more popular. This is a loyalty / rewards scheme offered by the company, and other popular related terms include ‘nescafe beans’ (which are collected to generate rewards) and ‘nescafe rewards’. Clearly the combination of a new advertising campaign and popular reward scheme has both contributed to Nescafe’s recent online success.

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