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Eating out: afternoon tea, listing sites and the MoneySavingExpert
November 14, 2008
Last month we published a blog about recipe searches and promised to follow up with another post about eating out and restaurant websites. Well, here’s the post and there’s a lot to cover, from afternoon tea at the Ritz to cheap offers from the MoneySavingExpert Martin Lewis.
Last time we showed that there has been a growth in visits to our Food and Beverage – Restaurants and Catering category over the last 12 months. In order to understand what has been driving this growth, we’ve created a further three sub-category of eating out websites: listing and directories, chain restaurants, and gourmet restaurants. As you can see from the chart below, all three are currently growing. Of these, listing and directories is the largest sub-category and it experienced a 26% increase in traffic between October 2007 and 2008. The chain restaurants category is smaller but faster growing (49% year on year), while the gourmet restaurants is both the smallest and slowest growing (7%) category.
I’ll look into the listings and directories category first, and to give you an idea of which sites are the biggest, here is the top 10 ranked my market share of UK Internet visits to the category in October:
1. Beer in the Evening (20.6%)
2. Toptable (16.3%)
3. The UK Restaurant Guide (8.6%)
4. Where’s Best (7.8%)
5. TheFoodPlace.co.uk (6.5%)
6. Sugarvine.com (6.5%)
7. London Eating (5.6%)
8. Pub Explorer (5.3%)
9. Squaremeal (4.3%)
10. Just-eat.co.uk (4.1%)
As you would expect these types of sites are extremely reliant of search engines, which accounted for 57% of their traffic during October. The top search terms for the category are branded, with the next most popular being location based (e.g. ‘london restaurants’, ‘restaurants in manchester’, etc.), followed by searches for particular restaurants (current top five: Oxo Tower, Hakkasan, Nobu, Busaba Eathai and, erm, Planet Hollywood).
Another area that drives a lot of traffic to listing and sites is afternoon tea. During the 12 weeks ending 08/11/.08 Hitwise UK tracked over 1,400 distinct search terms containing the phrase ‘afternoon tea’. After the basic term, the most popular search was ‘afternoon tea in london’, while the most searched for venues were the Ritz, Claridges and Harrods (The Wolseley, the Hitwise UK Marketing and Research team’s favourite afternoon tea venue, ranked 85th). As you can see from the chart below, UK Internet searches for afternoon tea have increased by 67% over the last 12 months. Add in the fact that pub guide Beer in the Evening is the top listing site and it becomes clear that, one way or another, us Brits are determined to drink our way through the recession…
Restaurant listing and directory sites are also a good source of traffic for the travel sector. 10.7% of downstream traffic from the category goes to mapping sites, with a further 8.2% going to Destinations and Accommodation providers. The latter category has seen the amount of traffic it receives from restaurant listing and directories quadruple over the last three years, albeit to just 0.2%.
Looking at the restaurants’ own sites, Gordon Ramsey is the winner in the gourmet market, with Raymond Blanc in second place thanks to the success of his recent BBC series, The Restaurant. At the cheaper end of the scale, the top five chain restaurant websites in October were Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, McDonalds, Pasta Hut and JD Wetherspoon.
One chain that has experienced a recent spike in traffic is Zizzi, In August, UK internet visits to the Italian restaurant’s homepage trebled after it released a two for one voucher via Handbag.com. This was then picked up by MoneySavingExpert, and the voucher went viral. During the week ending 16/08/08, 25% of Zizzi’s upstream traffic came from moneysavingexpert.com, with Handbag.com contributing a further 12%. There are a few of these offers around at the moment (Pizza Express is a current example), and the chart below – which illustrates the spike in visits from both MSE and Handbag.com to Zizzi – shows how successful they can be.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 11:30 AM
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In Categories Economy | Food | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Travel
Comments
Excellent post, always good when packed with fact and less opinion.
To take up the point about taleaway outlets.
UK takeaway restaurants have been doing very well over the previous decade. Annual growth has been close to 10% and with the recent financial downturn they’ve picked up business from individuals eager to spend much less and turning to home entertainment rather than eating out at sit-down restaurants. In 2005, home delivery/takeaway gross sales increased by 5.1% while fast food gross sales grew by 8.8%. Takeaway gross sales grew by 9.2% in 2009.
Over the same period, web sales have been rising by 30% per year, so many takeaway companies have increased their business by expanding into online sales.
Until recent years, small, high street takeaways did not have the expertise or the money to set up an internet ordering website. A number of on-line advertising firms like eateasy.co.uk have sprung up to meet this need and in a lot of cases offering discounts to regular online customers. Large, chain restaurants like Pizza Hut, Dominos, and Papa Johns have offered on-line takeout orders for some time. On-line ordering is one of the key ways in which they have expanded their business.
The low cost fast food outlets have performed best with dearer outlets doing considerably worse, especially the premium coffee vendors like Starbucks.
Fast food, home delivery, takeaways and self-service cafeterias increased the number of shops over the previous few years, driven by their more affordable meals.
In 2005, eat-in meals accounted for the large majority of the £4.7billion foodservice turnover in the UK. In 2010 that will likely be nearer to six billion.
Posted by Ralph Price | January 7, 2011 10:46 AM
Wow this seems to be an interesting blog about the resturant category. There is one major difference which also needs to be considered and that is the difference between "home delivery" i.e takeaway and restuarant bookings for sit down meals.
With more people now ordering their food for home delivery with much more choice and the ability to order food online from sites like http://www.just-eat.co.uk expect this category to change very much over the next few years.
Posted by Ash Ali | November 15, 2008 02:49 PM