Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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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
Posted to Retail | Shopping and Classifieds | Weather
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Comments
Interesting data - just shows what difference a change in temperature can make!
Posted by: Rob Lewis at May 12, 2008 11:35 AM
Although the weather is having an impact on our shopping habits, it doesn't seem to be having an impact on our holiday plans...yet.
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/05/all_inclusive_holidays_popular_weak_economy.html
Posted by: Robin Goad at May 13, 2008 10:29 AM
Have travel searches in particular flights) been effected at all yet?
Posted by: Rachel Shazell at May 13, 2008 05:02 PM
Hi Rachel - today's travel post might help to asnwer your question. Basically we haven't seen the expected drop in flight demand and increase in searches for domestic holidays yet. However, we have seen an increase in searches for all inclusive holidays as the credit crunch bites.
More info here:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2008/05/all_inclusive_holidays_popular_weak_economy.html
Thanks, Robin
Posted by: Robin Goad at May 13, 2008 05:12 PM
