Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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June 11, 2008
Euro 2008 and British Football fans
Most of the rest of Europe is in the grip or football fever, but how excited is the UK considering that none of the home nations are taking part? ‘euro 2008’ was the most popular search term sending traffic to websites in our Sports – Football category last week, overtaking the usual club favourites such as ‘arsenal’, ‘man utd’ and ‘liverpool fc’. In addition, ‘euro2008’ was the fastest moving search term in our Sports category last week, while ‘euro 08’, ‘fifa world rankings’, ‘uefa euro 2008’ and ‘fantasy euro 2008’ were all included in the top 10.
However, comparing the volume of searches for ‘euro 2008’ with the volume of searches for ‘world cup’ in 2006 (when England were taking part) provides a stark contrast. As the chart below illustrates, there were 151% more searches for ‘world cup’ during the opening weekend in 2006 than for ‘euro 2008’ last week.
Football websites are also experiencing less traffic when compared with the World Cup tow years ago, but the differential is much less dramatic than with the search data As the chart below illustrates, sites in our Football category are more reliant on the domestic season for their peaks and troughs than on international tournaments. As you can see, the start of the season and January transfer window are the biggest traffic drivers, along with big matches and key victories, such as Manchester United winning the Premier / Champions League double.
Interestingly, sports retailers don’t seem to be suffering as predicted. In fact, as the chart above illustrates, UK Internet traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds – Sport and Fitness category recently reached an all time high recently, and has been on an upward trend since Christmas. Another transactional website that has benefited is Austrian Airlines, which last week experienced its highest ever level of UK traffic. Over the last 2 weeks it has moved up from being the 67th most visited website in our Commercial Airlines category to the 37th. Last week it received 42% more traffic than Swiss, the first time that the Austrian flag carrier has received more traffic than its co-host’s since April 2006.
One reason for this preference for Austria over Switzerland from British football fans may be the much talked about Polish factor. All of Poland’s group matches will be taking place in Austria, so it seems likely that a lot of UK-based Poles will be looking for flights to Vienna and Klagenfurt. There certainly seems to be a lot of Internet discussion from the Polish community in the UK. As the chart below illustrates, traffic to social network Nasza Klasa – currently the most popular Polish website in the UK – reached an all time high last week.
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:00 PM
Posted to Demographics | Football | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Social networks | Sport
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