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BBC F1 and the new England Kit
March 30, 2009
The Formula 1 season kicked off this weekend, with Jenson Button pulling off a surprise victory for the new Brawn team. This year the UK television coverage has returned to the BBC after more than a decade with ITV. In previous years ‘itv f1’ has been the top search term sending traffic to our motorsport category, but last week it was overtaken by ‘bbc f1’. As the chart below illustrates, the volume of searches for the term ‘bbc f1’ last week was similar to ‘itv f1’ during the comparable period week year
Unfortunately we can’t track Formula 1 specific traffic to the BBC website, but overall traffic to BBC Sport was actually down on both Saturday and Sunday when compared with the previous week. Given that the increase in searches for ‘bbc f1’ would have driven a significant amount of traffic to the BBC Sport website, this illustrates the dominance of football in the UK - and in particular the pull of the Premier League.
Of course, there was some football this weekend, but the England vs. Slovakia match was shown on Setanta rather than terrestrial TV. As you would expect, this led to an increase in traffic to the broadcaster’s homepage, which had its busiest day this year on Saturday.
Aside from the goals, perhaps the biggest talking talking point of the game was England’s new ‘no frills’ kit. Despite some criticisms, the plain white strip has obviously proved popular with the fans. As the chart below illustrates, there were significantly more England kit related searches this weekend than in previous years. Looking at the 200+ search terms that contained the phrase ‘new england kit’ last week, most were neutral or positive.
A third of people searching for the term ‘new england kit’ last week ended up at the Official England Online Store. The only site to bid heavily on the term was Kitbag, which received the second largest amount of traffic from the term, most of it paid. The strategy was obviously successful in driving traffic to the retailer. Six of the top 10 terms sending traffic to the site last week were related to the England kit, and visits increased by 22% between the weeks ending 21/03/09 and 28/03/09.
Posted by Robin Goad at 12:10 PM
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In Categories Automotive | BBC | Fashion | Football | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Sport | TV
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Comments
A fair point - perhaps! - regarding the F1 data, but the England football kit searches are noticeably up on previous years.
Posted by Robin Goad | April 2, 2009 02:41 PM
Not wanting to seem negative 'cause I love your articles and stats but isn't this all a bit "bears defecating in the forest"? "High profile launch of internationally known product 'causes spike in internet searches".
Posted by Stuey | April 2, 2009 02:24 PM