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Hitwise Intelligence - James Murray - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Valentine’s Day - 10 lovely online facts

February 13, 2012

Love is in the air with Romeos seeking out their Juliets and declaring their passion for one another. Valentine’s Day is also a huge commercial opportunity and as brands go into romantic marketing overdrive, I thought we would look at some of the more interesting online trends around Valentine’s Day:

1. 6.7 million UK Internet visits were made to Flowers & Gifts shopping category last week (week ending 11 February 2011). This accounted for 1% of all visits to the parent Shopping Category during that week.

2. 830,000 hours were spent shopping on Flowers & Gifts websites last week. The average visit time for a visit to the Flowers & Gifts category was 7 minutes 25 seconds.

3. Although Valentine’s Day is a key period for online florists, people are more likely to buy flowers online on Mother’s Day than Valentine’s Day. Last year there were 4% more visits to florists on Mother’s Day than there were on Valentine’s Day.

4. Valentine’s cards are more searched for than any other Valentine’s gift online. Cards receive five times as many searches as flowers every year.

5. Valentine’s lingerie is the fastest moving gift year-on-year showing a 10-fold uplift in searches since Valentine’s Day 2011. The most searched for lingerie colour is black, followed by red, pink and white.

6. Gender related searches for Valentine’s gifts are much more skewed towards men than women. Of all the generic searches for Valentine’s gifts in the four weeks ending 11 February 2012, 29% included the word ‘him’ whereas only 8% included the word ‘her’. This suggests women find it much harder to buy for men than men do for women (or that men are much less organised than women and therefore have to do their shopping offline at the last minute).

7. Although Valentine’s Day is all about love, February is actually one of the worst months of the year for visits to dating websites. Between January and February last year visits to dating websites fell by 10% before bouncing back in March.

8. 3% of all Valentine’s searches are for poems. The biggest recipient of traffic from the search term ‘valentine poems’ this year was Poemsource.com, so if you need inspiration for what to write in your card this year, Poemsource would be a good place to go.

9. There were 65 unique search variations in the four weeks ending 11 February 2012 relating specifically to Valentine’s chocolates and sweets. 9.27% of all Valentine’s chocolate searches went directly to Thorntons, followed closely by Hotel Chocolat with 8.75%.

10. Facebook is the biggest recipient of traffic from the generic term ‘valentines day’ perhaps as a result of people posting messages to their loved ones on the UK’s most popular social network.

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In Categories Shopping and Classifieds