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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Wedding and divorce
January 09, 2008
Ask most people when they think wedding season is, and they’d probably answer ‘May to September’. Well, that may be when most weddings take place, but a lot of engagements happen over the Christmas / New Year period. Consequently, as far as retailers and marriage websites are concerned, wedding season is already well under way.
Search engines account for almost half of upstream traffic to websites in our Lifestyle – Weddings category, and therefore sites compete closely for the key terms. The most popular search terms sending traffic to wedding sites are ‘wedding dresses’ and ‘bridesmaids dresses’, the names of popular wedding websites (‘confetti’, ‘hitched’), and the names of popular wedding designers (‘alfred angelo’, ‘maggie sottero’). The table below illustrates the top 10 searches containing the word ‘wedding’ for the last four weeks. As you can see, there are almost 30,000 terms and no one term dominated (the top term only accounts for 2.52% of searches).
All of the most popular search terms follow an annual cycle, and peak depending on where they come in the purchasing order. For example, searches for ‘wedding venues’ peak earlier than searches for ‘wedding flowers’, while there are gaps of a few weeks between searches for ‘wedding dresses’ and ‘bridesmaids dresses’ (with the latter coming after the former) .
While visitors to wedding sites are happily planning their big day, unfortunately there are some married people considering the opposite. We aren’t morbid enough to have a Hitwise ‘Lifestyles – Divorce’ category, but the chart below illustrates the growth since Christmas of a custom category containing the top 10 websites that receive traffic from the search term ‘divorce’.
Quickie-divorce.com receives the most UK traffic from searches for ‘divorce’, with the term accounting for over a quarter of the site’s search traffic. It’s interesting to compare the demographics of visitors to our Wedding category with those of quickie-divorce.com. As the chart below illustrates, there is a notable inflection point as people reach their mid 30s.
And the number one downstream site visited after quickie-divorce.com? Her Majesty's Courts Service.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
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Comments
Great Blog....This is a good blog the writer makes several great points....I enjoyed to be here because one of my point has been cleared here.....the posts are also great....
Posted by Flower Girl | August 18, 2008 06:02 AM
Thank you for that very intelligent and thought provoking post. Though I am not sure what you expected me to take from that.
Posted by Girl Dress | September 24, 2008 03:53 AM
Very insightful observation and comparison on the searches between wedding and divorce, interesting really.
Posted by Ashley| silk wedding bouquets | November 9, 2010 12:15 PM
Finally, one among the questions rolling in my mind got answered by this write up. thanks for this great blog and would luv to be here.
Posted by Flower Girl Dresses | February 9, 2011 03:33 AM
Wow lots of information about weddings, I wonder about bridesmaid dress volume?
Posted by Jordan Fashions | March 10, 2011 04:16 PM
The analysis I would really love to see would be one comparing the amount spent on the wedding and the likelihood of divorce
Posted by Dresses | May 6, 2011 08:19 AM
First come to your site, very beautiful, I like very much!
Posted by EveningDresses | June 24, 2011 08:17 AM
A fantastic insight into searcher behaviour to Weddings and the whole Wedding favours and other services built around the happiest day of people’s lives!
A similar morbid area, but maybe we should look at Divorce Gifts if they continue to rise?
Posted by Chris Bishop | January 25, 2008 01:16 PM