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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - UK
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Swimming Pool, Fans, Air Conditioners - Weather and Search Term Seasonality
July 24, 2006
As a follow up to my post last week on visits to weather sites spiking along with the temperature, we took a look at searches for retail items offering relief from the heat. As you'd expect, searches for "swimming pool", "fans", "air conditioners" and "air conditioning" soared last week.
This offers a very nice illustration of seasonality. As you can see from the chart below, searches for these items rise during heat waves each year. Despite warnings of a hot, dry summer, searches for fans and air conditioners experienced fairly low volume with a few spikes up in June and July. Retailers can benefit from understanding what drives consumer search behaviour and fine-tune a search marketing campaign to maximise ROI based on when consumers are looking for the products you sell.
You may notice something different comparing searches in 2005 and 2006 on the chart. Last summer, UK internet users searched for "air conditioning" about three and a half times more than for "air conditioners". Using the Hitwise search term analysis tool, I found that consumers were visiting very similar sites for these two search queries. In fact, among the top ten sites visited after each of these queries, there were only three that were different.
It is important to consider this when developing a search marketing campaign. For example, Ciao UK appeared as the third organic listing on Google UK this morning and received 4.60% of visits from searches for "air conditioners" in the past four weeks. By contrast, the site did not appear on the first page of results for searches for "air conditioning" and was not among the 76 sites captured by Hitwise receiving visits from the term in the past four weeks. Careful use of sponsored listings can fill gaps left by organic listings, as this instance illustrates.
Also, online marketers should make sure they are geographically targeting paid listings. Sears Home Improvements was the 20th downstream site from UK searches for "air conditioning" and 18th for searches for "air conditioners". I noticed this morning that Sears is showing up prominently on Google UK's sponsored listings for both of these searches (position three and four respectively). Sears is a big North American retailer and the sponsored link takes the UK internet user to a page where US consumers can purchase heating and cooling systems. By targeting your ad to your desired market you should reduce your costs and improve ROI of online marketing.
These tips may seem basic, but in this heat, sometimes it's the basics that slip!
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 03:47 AM
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Comments
An air system is the only way to go and air conditioning is important to the long-term durability of your home. Air conditioning can add heat, moisture and humidity to the air of your home. You should know what size air conditioning system is needed. Some air conditioning units are generally quiet enough to be installed under a window or near a patio, so sleeping or the entertaining of guests is not disrupted. Centralized air systems are in the vast majority of "newer" homes.
Posted by Elby | January 12, 2007 09:14 AM
Funny how people are only searching for pools when it's already hot.. it'll be weeks before they can get it installed.
Posted by Air Tools | October 5, 2006 08:07 AM