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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific

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Climate Change – An Online Perspective

October 15, 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

· Search marketing, both paid and search engine optimisation.

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

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

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

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

Follow us on Twitter.

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

Posted by Alan Long at 06:14 PM | (4) | (0)
In Categories News and Media | Politics | weather

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