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Hitwise Intelligence - James Murray - UK
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Steve Jobs death causes seven-fold increase in pancreatic cancer searches
October 14, 2011
Last week the tech world mourned the death of Apple co-founder, innovator and entrepreneur Steve Jobs. Whilst his passing is a sad loss his legacy will remain, and his much publicised battle with cancer caused a seven-fold increase in searches online for pancreatic cancer in the UK last week.
Like Patrick Swayze and Jade Goody before him, one positive to come from Jobs’ untimely death is that cancer awareness will have been raised because of the high media profile of the former Apple CEO. You can see from the graph below that pancreatic cancer jumped from the ninth most searched for cancer to become the most searched for cancer during the week ending 8 October.
The searches for pancreatic cancer do not include any terms specific to Steve Jobs. In fact there were more cancer-related searches online for English cricketer Graham Dilley, who died on the same day as Jobs, albeit from oesophageal cancer.
Even though people weren’t specifically searching for Steve Jobs cancer, the fact that pancreatic cancer was the number one cancer-related search term of the week, (historically it is always breast cancer) shows the effect that Jobs’ death had on UK search behaviour.
Looking at the downstream recipients of traffic from all pancreatic cancer searches, Wikipedia doubled its share of search clicks, going from 8% to 16% of all pancreatic cancer searches. Somewhat surprisingly, cancer charities Cancer Research and Macmillan both lost market share of clicks for pancreatic cancer searches compared to the previous week.
You can see from the chart above that Macmillan’s Cancer Information site accounted for 19% of all search clicks for pancreatic cancer for the week ending 1 October, but this dropped to 6.6% in the week ending 8 October. Of the top 10 recipients of traffic for all pancreatic cancer terms only three websites were investing in paid search to receive traffic to their websites.
Focusing on the Macmillan site, Cancer Information received 77% of its traffic from paid links in the week preceding Steve Jobs death, whereas in the week ending 8 October 55% of clicks came from a paid link. This might well be as a result of the increased natural traffic coming through because of the rise in overall searches, but if search volumes were increasing, Macmillan could have increased its PPC spend proportionally in order to maintain its market share of visits. However, the drop in market share indicates that this was a missed opportunity for the cancer charities, who could have increased their PPC spend on key pancreatic cancer search terms to ensure they were grabbing searchers at this peak time of interest.
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Posted by James Murray at 09:32 AM
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Comments
10 years ago we had Steve Jobs and Bob Hope -
Now we got no Jobs and no Hope
Posted by dj münchen | October 28, 2011 12:18 PM
Wouldn't it be cool if we could turn all the media attention to important social and medical topics?
Posted by Leo | October 15, 2011 08:38 PM