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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK

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Loans & Lessons for Search Marketers

January 25, 2006

At Christmas, UK consumers shopped online in record numbers and Hitwise reported record growth in visits to retail websites. I thought we might see a lift in visits to other online businesses now that consumers are more comfortable, and more experienced, with online shopping. I looked at loans as a natural follow-on from online shopping. Seemed to make sense that consumers would look for options to pay off mounting credit card debt as a result of mounting Christmas spending.

Hitwise Search Intelligence data reveals that searches for 'loans' have increased significantly since Christmas. The share of UK searches for 'loans' were up more than two and a half times last week compared with the week before Christmas. In the past week alone, the share of UK searches for 'loans' increased 13%.

As you can see from the chart below, the share of UK internet searches for 'loans' is highest in the warmer months from mid-May through July. I looked at a Hitwise Search Term Suggestion report for 'loans' to see if there were any differences in the types of loans that consumers were looking for in January 2006 compared with June 2005. Among the 4,815 terms that included the keyword 'loans' in the past four weeks, the top product terms were the same in January as in June: 'loans', 'personal loans', 'cheap loans', 'unsecured loans', 'student loans', and 'car loans'.

Banks are heavily reliant on visits from search with nearly 1 in 3 (29%) of visits to the Hitwise Banks and Financial Institutions category coming from search engines last week. Google dominates, accounting for 1 in 5 visits to websites in the category, or 70% of the visits from search.

The challenge for banks is to earn a positive ROI from visits from search engines. High volume terms such as 'loans' are highly competitive and highly priced. When I looked at Overture's Bid Tool today, the maximum bid for the keyword 'loans' was £5.29. Given this price and the fact that in the last four weeks, Money Supermarket received 20% of visits from searches for 'loans', search marketers may be eager to find other lower volume terms that may also bring a lower price.

For example, the search phrase 'personal loans' was the second highest volume search phrase that included the keyword 'loans' in the past four weeks, and the maximum bid price on Overture was £2.56. Further down the list, 'student loans' was £0.80 and 'car loans' for £1.56. Among the 3,456 terms that Hitwise captured in the past four weeks that included the keyword 'loans', online marketers can find many opportunities. The next trick is to measure the ROI of the term for your business and to continually refine your search marketing campaign as a result of the ROI analysis.

Weekly Share of UK Internet Searches
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