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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Revision searches and BBC Bitesize

June 10, 2009

One of the fastest moving websites last week was BBC Schools, which experienced a 40% increase in traffic to become the 106th most visited website in the UK. However, as the chart below illustrates, last week’s spike wasn’t the first time traffic to site has increased this year. In fact, traffic to BBC Schools peaked during the week ending May 16th, when it ranked 94th in the UK.

UK_Internet_visits_to_BBC_Schools_exam_revision_bitesize_2009_chart.png

The reason for the seasonal increase in traffic (something similar happens every year) is that we’re currently in the middle of exam season for school children across the country. All of the top five search terms sending traffic to the site referred to Bitesize, the brand name of the Beeb’s revision guides. In fact, the brand has become so popular that there were 100 times more searches for the term ‘bitesize’ than ‘revision’ last week.

That’s not to say that no one is making revision searches, just that the stand alone term ‘revision’ is not particularly popular. In fact there were over 65,000 variations on the term ‘revision’ searched for in the UK over the last 12 weeks. As the chart below illustrates, the breadth of searches for the term – i.e. the number of different terms containing the word ‘revision’ – has increased very much in line with traffic to BBC Schools.

So what were the top revision related searches? As the list below illustrates, searches for subject-specific revision are the most popular, with Maths topping list. Science and Biology also made it into the top 10, while GCSEs were more popular than SATs and A-levels.

Top 20 UK searches containing the phrase ‘revision’, 12 weeks ending 06/06/09:

1. ‘maths revision’ (1.86% of all searches containing ‘revision’)
2. ‘bitesize revision’ (1.82%)
3. ‘revision’ (1.33%)
4. ‘science revision’ (0.96%)
5. ‘bbc bitesize revision’ (0.94%)
6. ‘gcse revision’ (0.82%)
7. ‘bbc revision’ (0.66%)
8. ‘gcse maths revision’ (0.61%)
9. ‘sats revision’ (0.57%)
10. ‘biology revision’ (0.49%)
11. ‘revision timetable’ (0.46%)
12. ‘geography revision. (0.45%)
13. ‘french revision’ (0.44%)
14. ‘gcse science revision’ (0.40%)
15. ‘a level revision’ (0.39%)
16. ‘chemistry revision’ (0.38%)
17. ‘history revision’ (0.35%)
18. ‘psychology revision’ (0.34%)
19. ‘english revision’ (0.33%)
20. ‘revision games’ (0.33%)

In order to see which other sites were picking up revision traffic I created a search term portfolio of the top 100 revision-related searches, excluding those that mentioned the BBC or Bitesize. As the list below illustrates, BBC Schools still picked up the most generic traffic, but it doesn’t dominate the market. It’s also good to see our old friend Woodlands Junior School at number four!

Top 10 websites receiving traffic from generic revision searches, 12 weeks ending 06/06/09:

1. BBC Schools (26.8% of traffic from searches)
2. S-Cool! (11.9%)
3. MathsRevision.net (7.7%)
4. Woodlands Junior School (3.4%)
5. Facebook (2.4%)
6. Revision Centre (2.4%)
7. SchoolHistory.co.uk (2.1%)
8. www.revisionworld.co.uk (1.9%)
9. The Student Room (1.8%)
10. GCSE Answers (1.2%)