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TV and Games are UK's most searched for subjects
March 09, 2009
For our second guest posting on the UK blog, I’d like to hand over to Richard Seymour, Hitwise UK Client Intelligence Analyst, to take us through some of the research he has carried out recently on UK Search Engines.
For my guest post here on the Hitwise Analyst blog I am going to share some of my research on search engines which has already spawned a successful webinar, Robin’s blog about the most searched for brands in the UK, and an article in NMA.
One interesting part of the analysis was which subject areas people searched for and how this differed across different search engines. Looking at the top 1500 search terms used across all search engines during the last quarter of 2008, we pulled out all the non-branded terms and attached a subject area to them. For example, ‘football’ was labelled as sport, ‘tv guide’ as TV, ‘oasis’ as music and so on.
The resulting pattern illustrated in our pie-chart here shows that we are a nation of TV lovers and online gaming nuts! TV was our largest subject area with 14.2% of all non-branded searches, and followed closely behind by Games (of the online variety – not video games bought for consoles or PC’s) with 13.9%. Travel, Sport and Finance complete the top 5 subjects searched for across all engines
The top TV terms for the 12wks ending 3rd Jan 2009 were ‘x factor’, ‘strictly come dancing’, ‘eastenders’ and ‘tv listings’. We considered the popular television programme terms in our list as non-branded terms as they direct a large amount of their traffic to sites other than their official site, such as Digital Spy, Wikipedia and fansites.
The top games terms were ‘games’, ‘free online games’, ‘car games’, ‘cooking games’ and ‘free games’ driving traffic to Miniclip Games, Addicting Games and other free online gaming sites.
The travel subject area was topped by the term ‘train times’, with ‘cheap flights’ and ‘cheap holidays’ also appearing in the top ten showing consumers’ economic concerns. ‘london underground’ and ‘liverpool’ were the most popular destination specific travel terms.
Nine of the top 10 sport search terms were football related, with ‘arsenal’ the top individual football team search term. The only non-football related term in the top 10 sport terms was ‘f1’ as the Formula One season prepared for its exciting climax.
Finally in finance, ‘currency converter’, topped the list, with ‘exchange rates’ and ‘exchange rate’ also appearing in the top 10, as people prepared for their (cheap) winter holidays and the pound continued to fall.
Looking at these same subject areas, but across the top 5 UK search engines, we can see a very interesting pattern. The blue represents the share of searches for that subject performed on Google, (both .co.uk and .com), the red – Yahoo UK and Ireland, green – Live.com UK, and yellow - Ask UK.
The right hand side of the chart shows where Google has a smaller than average share for the subject, and I have highlighted those subjects where at least 10% of searches have taken place on a search engine other than Google – revealing the other engines strengths.
For Dating sites, the remaining 10% of searches were shared equally between Live and Yahoo, and Live takes the advantage in House and Garden searches, with half of the remaining 12% of searches; Ask and Yahoo both had 3% each. Ask then takes the larger proportion of searches for the rest of the subjects on the right hand side, apart from technical searches where Live.com has the larger share of traffic, possibly because of error and informational searches direct from the Windows operating system or Office suite.
Ask has particular strengths in directories, (where terms include ‘postcode finder’, ‘telephone directory’ and the 8 keyword long ‘i need to find postcode within the uk’), animals (with ‘top 100 dog names’ the most popular animal term on Ask) and finally history where world war searches were most popular; no history terms appeared in top 1500 search terms on Google or Yahoo.
Using this idea we decided to see how search traffic was distributed to Hitwise’s main industry categories. We can see that the percentage of a particular categories search traffic coming from Google, ranges from 94.5%, for Computers and Internet - Social Networking and Forums, showing their navigational dependence on Google, to 92.2% for Travel. So from the graph we can see that after Google, Yahoo UK is the search engine that sends most traffic to the top industry categories. Live is generally the next search engine used to drive traffic to the top industries; apart from Business and Finance, and Shopping and Classifieds where searchers on Ask just pip Live. Searches from Yahoo have their largest influence on the travel and shopping and classified industries, which are extremely competitive industries with high paid rates
You’ll be able to find out how these paid rates differ across subjects and search engines, and hear more of our research, by listening to our UK Search Engines Webinar here.
Posted by Robin Goad at 02:18 PM
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In Categories Football | Games | Google | Guest posts | News and Media | Search | Social networks | Sport | TV | Travel
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Comments
Hi Tom,
You make a good point. The term 'liverpool' does indeed drive traffic to Liverpool Football Club's website, however the term also drives traffic to other sites which are non-football related. One in particular Visit Liverpool, received the second most traffic from the term. This coupled with the fact that it was not Liverpool FC's top search term - 'liverpool fc' was - and that we generally tagged cities as travel, meant that we put it in the travel category.
If we had tagged it as sport it would still not have beaten 'arsenal', but would have slipped in at 10th place in the sport table for this period.
Richard
Posted by Richard Seymour | March 10, 2009 05:03 PM
thanks for the great info but those charts are illegible...
Posted by online marketing london | March 16, 2009 08:42 PM
If you right click on an image and do a "save picture as" you can then view the image saved on your hard drive with an image editor. The charts are then fairly legible to get the gist of the data.
regards
Posted by CISSPTutor | March 18, 2009 03:22 AM
Do you not think the 'liverpool' searches might actually have been related to the football team (and therefore in the 'sport' category, as opposed to travel)? I think this is fairly likely, given that the top 2 results relating to this search are related to football, and that liverpoolfc.tv is the most popular team website in the premiership...although I am a Liverpool fan, so might be biased.
Posted by Tom Rowlands | March 9, 2009 04:59 PM