May 13, 2008

All inclusive holidays popular in a weak economy

The combination of a weakening economy, falling house prices and a rising cost of living thanks to inflation mean that many British consumers are looking for ways to cut their expenditure. Add in the impact of a strong Euro (although not Dollar), and it seems likely that one area facing a cutback in consumer spending will be travel. One interesting trend we have noticed which indicates that this may be the case is an increase in searches for ‘all inclusive holidays’. As you can see from that chart below, the amount of traffic that travel websites are receiving from this price-sensitive / budget-conscious search term has increased by 24% compared with last year.

The table below illustrates the top 10 search terms containing the phrase ‘all inclusive holidays’, and it is noticeable that people searching for such packages are more concerned with the 'all inclusive' element than with where they want to actually go. Six of the top 10 search terms don’t mention a location at all, whereas - by way of comparison - nine of the top 10 searches containing the term ‘cheap flights’ over the same period include a destination. Another thing that jumps out is the low success rate for the term ‘all inclusive family holidays’. Almost two fifths of people searching for this term don’t find a relevant result in a search engine that they a happy to click through to, highlighting a potentially lucrative area for SEO or paid search activity.

As you can see, the people currently looking for location specific all inclusive deals are choosing warmer sunshine destinations around the Mediterranean and Red Sea: Spain, Egypt, and Turkey. This leads me on to another hypothesis: as money is tight and the strong Euro means that European destinations are becoming more expensive, will we see a decline in travel to Europe and bumper year for domestic tourism? Throw in 10 days of lovely sunny weather, and it seems likely that UK holiday bookings will be up this year.

Not so fast. I heard a representative from TUI (which owns Thomson Holidays) on the Today program this morning claiming that overseas bookings from the UK were up - and the company’s financial release bears this out. Back to the Hitwise data and the news also isn’t great. As you can see from the chart below, the amount of traffic that searches for both ‘uk holidays’ and ‘british holidays’ send to travel websites is on the decline. Maybe a few more weeks of good weather and some first hand experience of the strong Euro will help reverse this trend? We’ll keep and eye on this and report back with any changes.

Posted by Robin Goad at 10:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Economy | Search | Travel | Weather

May 12, 2008

Lawnmowers and BBQs: UK searchers celebrate the sunshine!

What a difference the weather can make, particularly after last year’s miserable summer! A week of sunshine has lifted the spirits of everyone in the UK, and also had an impact on their internet searching and shopping habits. As the graph below illustrates, searches for summer essentials – in this case BBQs and lawnmowers – shot up last week. In fact, searches for ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ have already reached a higher peak this year than at any point last summer

With these sudden surges in searches for particular terms, it’s always interesting to see who benefits. As you can see from the table below, for the terms ‘bbq’ and ‘lawn mower’ it has primarily been smaller niche and specialist sites that picked up traffic, particularly in the in the BBQ market. Traffic from searches for ‘bbq’ was consolidated into fewer hands, although that is primarily a result of aggressive paid search tactics. For example, www.justlawnmowers.co.uk paid for 28% of its traffic from the term ‘lawnmowers’ and 47% from ‘lawn mowers’; whereas Flaming Barbecues paid for 95% of its traffic from ‘bbq’ and 87% from ‘barbeque’.

Another interesting lesson from this surge is the importance of bidding or optimizing for all variations and spellings / misspellings of popular terms. The table below illustrates the top 10 terms currently sending traffic to Flaming Barbecues. As you can see, it is picking up traffic from a variety of terms, including; ‘bbq’, ‘gas bbq’, ‘barbeques’, ‘barbecues’, ‘barbeque’ and ‘bbqs’. And while much of this traffic is paid, Flaming Barbecues is also picking up significant organic traffic from most of these variations.

Posted by Robin Goad at 10:25 AM | Comments (4) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Weather

May 09, 2008

Burma / Myanmar Google charity donations

The humanitarian crisis caused by Cyclone Nargis in Burma / Myanmar.has elicited a huge amount of public sympathy and support. Yesterday we noticed that Google had taken the unprecedented step of placing a link to a special Cyclone donation service set up in conjunction with UNICEF and Direct Relief International on its main start page.

People clicking on the ‘Support victims’ link (illustrated in the screenshot above) were taken to page that enabled them to donate to either of the two charities / NGOs. Interestingly, these donations were not collected via the organizations’ own websites. Instead, people were sent directly to a Google Checkout page that allowed them to donate the gift of their choice. This appeal has obviously been successful in the UK – as the chart below illustrates, Google Checkout experienced its busiest day in months yesterday, with 33% of this traffic coming from Google’s UK and US search properties (where the donation link resides), up for 28% last week.

Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Charities | Google

May 08, 2008

Mobile broadband searches increasing

It’s hard to open a newspaper at the moment without seeing an advert for mobile broadband services - from both carriers, such as Three, Vodafone and T-Mobile, and independent retailers such as Carphone Warehouse and Phones4U. The advertising seems to have worked at increasing awareness: as you can see from the chart below, searches for the term ‘mobile broadband’ have increased significantly over the last six months.

It’s interesting to compare the volume of searches for ‘mobile broadband’ with those for the more generic term ‘broadband’. Searches for the latter have been declining since January, while searches for the former have been increasing. Of course, the broader term ‘broadband’ remains more popular, particularly when you look at the breadth of terms. For example, for the 4 weeks ending May 3rd, there were 10, 736 searches containing the term ‘broadband’, whereas there were only 923 containing ‘mobile broadband’. There is some double counting here - all of those 923 ‘mobile broadband’ terms are also included in the ‘broadband’ number. But, even after they are taken out, there are still 9.813 non-mobile ‘broadband’ terms, over 10 times the number of ‘mobile broadband’ terms.

Search term breadth is also a good way of measuring the maturity of a term. The more familiar people are with a word or phrase, the wider the variety of terms they use to search for it - at least until the popularity decrease. Comparing the breadth of searches for ‘mobile broadband’ now with 6 months ago, it’s clear that the phrase is becoming more familiar and people are searching on a wider variety of ‘mobile broadband’ terms. For the 4 weeks ending November 3rd 2007 there were 427 searches containing ‘mobile broadband’, but this figure has now more than doubled to 923. Another sign of maturity for a popular generic term such as ‘mobile broadband’ is that affiliates and comparison sites are picking up a significant amount of traffic from the term. As you can see from the table below, almost half of traffic from people searching for ‘mobile broadband’ for the 4 weeks ending May 3rd went to these types of sites.

It’s also interesting to see how these affiliates are picking up traffic from the term. Broadband Store, currently top of the rankings, is a generalist broadband site and is currently bidding heavily on the term: 96.9% of its ‘mobile boradband’ traffic came from paid search over the last 4 weeks. On the other hand, specialist site Mobile Broadband Genie – currently second in the rankings – has clearly optimized itself for the term. Just 0.7% of its ‘mobile broadband’ traffic came from paid search over the last 4 weeks. The site's overall paid search rate is just 3%, and its top 10 searches include key terms such as ‘compare mobile broadband’ and ‘best mobile broadband’, as well a number of branded terms.

Branded search is currently very important in the mobile broadband market, especially considering Google’s recent trademark changes in the UK. We looked at the top 100 search terms for the last 4 weeks containing the phrase ‘mobile broadband’, and categorized them into 5 categories. The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for each of these 5 categories and, as you can see, just over a third of search volume for these top 100 terms was branded in nature. Just under a half were for generic terms such as ‘mobile broadband’, ‘3g mobile broadband’ and ‘mobile broadband uk’.

The other categories are also interesting. The most popular price / comparison searches related to ‘pay as you go’, ‘compare’ and ‘review(s)’, and these are generally increasing. On the other hand, the number of technical terms - which include terms such as ‘coverage’, ‘laptop’ and ‘usb’ - is on the decline, perhaps a reflection of the maturity of the market. The smallest category relates to overseas usage, but again these are new terms that have emerged over the last few months. There were 5 such terms within the top 100, including ‘mobile broadband france’, ‘mobile broadband abroad’ and ‘mobile broadband spain’.

Posted by Robin Goad at 01:01 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Gadgets | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds