About Hitwise
Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.
Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America
Analyst Weblog
« Paul the Psychic Octopus | Back to school searches growing »
Heat wave offers retail opportunities
July 15, 2010
The recent heat wave in the US has sent many in search of air conditioners to keep cool last week with temperatures reaching over 100 degrees in parts of the country. The share of search clicks on the term ‘air conditioners’ increased 268% for the week ending July 10, 2010 over the previous week and air conditioners ranked 3rd out of over 1,000 products included in a portfolio of top Appliances & Electronics.
Portable air conditioners have become a popular segment and ranked 2nd among all variations of ‘air conditioner’ and the keyword ‘portable’ was included in 185 queries. Last week, Mitsubishi, Goodman and LG were the top searched brands of air conditioners, highlighting opportunities for merchandising and search campaigns based upon consumer demand.
Bestbuy.com and Walmart.com received the highest share of traffic from searches on ‘air conditioners’ last week among websites in the Shopping & Classifieds category. Despite the recent demand for air conditioners, the share of paid search traffic for the term was just under 3% last week, suggesting that retailers may want to invest in paid campaigns to capitalize upon the increase in search activity.
My colleague Heather Hopkins also wrote about our neighbors to the north in Canada that are also on the hunt for ACs.
Tweet
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 04:23 PM
| 
(4)
| 
(0)
In Categories Appliances & Electronics
Comments
Nice find! And this summer is right around the corner. As for it not being a highly lucrative search, it never hurts to beef up your site for it during the off season.
Posted by Kiki | April 22, 2011 08:36 PM
Almost one year later and the heat wave is back! Air conditioning + geo location is a big hit right now.
Posted by Axiom SEO | July 8, 2011 01:15 AM
Archives (view all posts)
Categories
I know for a fact that most of these searches for air conditioners are research and don't produce a massive amount of ecommerce sales. Search floods like that are beneficial though to companies who have invested in proper SEO on those terms.
Posted by Richard A. Lewis | July 16, 2010 05:06 PM