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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

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Pre-budget report: tax cuts and petrol prices

November 26, 2008

Given the economic conditions and the various rumours last week, the government’s pre-budget report has received a lot of attention online .Looking at the search data up to last week, you can see from the chart below that searches for ‘tax cuts’ have recently increased significantly for the first time in three years. However, so far these haven’t reached the volumes of searches for ‘10p tax’ earlier in the year, nor the more consistent level experienced by the term ‘VAT’.

UK_Internet_searches_for_VAT_tax_cuts_10p_tax_2005_2006_2007_2008_chart.png

Searches for ‘pre-budget report’ have also been increasing over the last couple of weeks, something that has not happened before the actual release of the document before. The tax changes announced on Monday also led to a surge in traffic to government operated websites, with both the Inland Revenue (HMRC) and the portal site Directgov attracting more visitors than usual.

UK_internet_traffic_to_government_websites_hmrc_inland_revenue_tax_man_directgov_following_2008_pre_budget_report_november_chart.png

Another website that benefitted yesterday was petrolprices.com, a site that we profiled a couple of months ago when oil prices were near their peak. On Monday the site published a blog entry on the 2p rise in fuel duty, and this has attracted a huge number of visitors. At the time of writing the post has received 9099 comments – possibly a record, and certainly the highest number I’ve ever seen for a blog post - and that figure is increasing by the minute. Yesterday (25th of November) petrolprices.com was the 196th most visited website in the UK, ranking one position below Top Shop and up from 1,654 the day before. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet visits to the site reached a new peak yesterday, clearly surpassing traffic levels it experienced earlier in the year when petrol prices were at record levels.

UK_internet_traffic_to_petrol_prices_following_fuel_duty_increase_in_pre_budget_report_and_high_oil_prices_2008_chart.png

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Update (Wednesday afternoon)

As you would expect, there was a strong viral aspect to this surge in traffic. Yesterday (November 25th) petrolprices.com received 29% of its traffic from Email Services - seven times the amount that it normally gets via this channel, and three times the amount it picked up from search engines. Websistes in our Social Networking and Forums category contributed a further 5%. Looking at the top downstream websites visited after webmail services yesterday, petrolprices.com ranked 39th, one position above BBC iPlayer.