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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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How to save money in a recession

July 09, 2008

Earlier this week I was talking with Bruno Rost, a colleague from Experian Integrated Marketing who was looking for interesting Hitwise data that he could use in a BBC TV interview discussing the effects of the economic downturn on peoples' search behaviour. One of his questions was: are more people searching for advice on cost cutting measures, such as growing their own food or making their own clothe?. Running a search terms suggestions report for ‘how to’ I was astonished to find almost 170,000 distinct terms containing the phrase over the last 4 weeks. As you can see from the chart below, for the week ending 28 June 1.53% of all UK search terms contained the words ‘how to’, up from 1.25% a year earlier.

uk how to internet searches 2007 2008 chart.png

Earlier in the year we wrote about the growth of ‘how to’ queries in relation to video search / videopedia sites, and it is also something that Bill Tancer analyzes in Click, his forthcoming book. Looking at the latest list of ‘how to’ search terms in the UK, the most popular ones are familiar from the previous analysis: ‘how to write a cv’, ‘how to have sex’, ‘how to kiss’, ‘how to get to’ (both with and without a destination at the end!), ‘how to draw’, ‘how to get a six pack’ and ‘how to lose weight’. Focussing on the more practical recession-beating terms, the top 100 also included ‘how to make bio diesel’, ‘how to grow tomatoes’ ‘how to make cider’ and the more generic ‘how to make’.

However, the most popular credit crunch-related term was ‘how to save money’, which ranked 23rd (although it is still behind ‘how to make money’ at number 6). The site currently receiving most traffic from the term is Money Saving Expert, the consumer advice website run by journalist Martin Lewis. His site has been very successful at picking up traffic from a range of frugal searches, including both traditional financial services terms such as ‘bank charges’ and ‘best cash isa’, as well at travel (‘cheap flights’, ‘cheap train tickets’) and more generic terms (e.g. ‘freebies’).

UK internet traffic to martin lewis money saving expert forum homepage 2007 2008 chart.png

As the chart above illustrates, www.moneysavingexpert.com has grown moderately over the last 12 months. However, traffic to its forum pages has increased at a much faster rate, and it now receives 36% more traffic than the main homepage. forums.moneysavingexpert.com ranked as the tenth most visited site in our Social Networking and Forums category last month, illustrating the hunger not just for ‘expert advice’ on such issues, but also desire to utilise social median for more serious topics.