Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Video game trade in and rentals on the increase
November 28, 2008
As I mentioned on my post a couple of weeks ago, Richard Seymour, Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst will be posting further analysis on consumer electronics in the run up to Christmas. Here Richard discusses an interesting aspect in the video games market that came out of his research for our Video Games webinar which you can view a recording of here. Over to Richard:
As I explore in our webinar and Robin has discussed on this blog before, video games are now searched for more than video game consoles. The increase in video game searches has been helped by the broadening of search terms used by consumers. Gamers are not just searching for the name of the game, they are also searching for cheats, reviews, trailers and an increasingly growing area, trade-ins and rentals.
I have created a portfolio of game trade-in and rental terms and traced it back over the last couple of years, clearly showing the ramp up in interest over 2007 and into 2008, a growth of 900% since January 2007!
We found that whilst with cheats, review and trailer terms, consumers are looking for specific games in their searches, however with trade-ins and rentals, searches are purely generic with ‘game trade in’ the top term. The only console branded terms in the top 20 were ‘rent xbox 360 games’ and ‘rent wii games’, but both are outside the top 10. The top terms from this portfolio so far in November were:
1. ‘game trade in’
2. ‘game trade in prices’
3. ‘gamestation trade in prices’
4. ‘gamestation trade in’
5. ‘game trade in values’
Though it is still a relatively small area at the moment, only 86 terms drove significant amounts of traffic in November, more than 130 websites are picking up traffic from these terms. In volume terms, the portfolio is drawing more than 30 times less traffic than a similar ‘cheats’ portfolio.
Game are the top recipients of traffic from this portfolio with the bonus of benefiting organically from their brand term, with Gamestation paying for 34% of its trade-in and rental traffic to earn second spot. Lovefilm and Tesco DVD Rentals also pay for their traffic from these terms, nearly 90% of it, and are able to use their vast dvd rental distribution networks to move into the video games arena.
Eurogamer.net and AVForums receive all their traffic organically due to their forums where consumers discuss the best and worst trade in deals.
Watch this space for more Consumer Electronics analysis from Richard next week
Posted by Robin Goad at 04:45 PM
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