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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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London Marathon: 2010 searches overtake 2009

May 07, 2009

As you would expect, UK Internet traffic to the official London Marathon website spiked last week and was up 25% on the previous year. Searches for the race also increased, but I was surprised to see both ‘london marathon 2009’ and ‘london marathon 2010’ appear in our list of the top 10 fast moving search terms least week. Even more surprisingly, there were actually more UK Internet searches for the term ‘london marathon 2010’ than ‘london marathon 2009’ last week. As the chart below illustrates, the spike in searches for the following year’s marathon happens every year, but this is the first time that current year has received less volume.

UK_Internet_searches_for_london_marathon_2010_2009_2008_2007_2006_chart.png

UK Internet users searched for over 1,100 unique terms containing the phrase ‘london marathon 2010’ last week. Six of the top 10 variations referred to entrance criteria, including terms such as ‘entry’, ‘registration’ and ‘ballot’. All of these had success rates in excess of 85%, implying that a lot of sites were expecting the surge and had optimized their content accordingly.

I was also interested in the Experian Mosaic lifestyle data for visitors to the Marathon website. As the chart below illustrates, the majority were from the more affluent groups, which also over-indexed as visitors to the site. The two groups that were particularly over represented were: Urban Intelligence (defined as: ‘Young, single and mostly well-educated, these people are cosmopolitan in tastes and liberal in attitudes’) and Symbols of Success (‘People with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products’).