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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Mobile broadband searches increasing

May 08, 2008

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 | (2) | (0)
In Categories Gadgets | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds

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