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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

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Searches for climate change and energy efficiency (Blog Action Day)

October 15, 2009

Today is Blog Action Day and, as with last year, Alan Long has beaten me to it with an excellent post on this year’s topic, climate change. I’m taking a similar approach, looking at climate changes related searches in the UK. In order to do this I revived a couple of search term portfolios that we’ve blogged about in the past: Environmental Concerns (which consists primarily of searches for information about climate change, such as ‘global warming’, ‘carbon footprint’ and ‘co2 calculator’) and Energy Saving/Efficiencies, which focuses more on searches relating to the practical steps that people are actually making to combat climate change by consuming less energy (e.g. ‘loft insulation’, ‘solar panels’, ‘multi fuel stoves’, etc.)

The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for these two over the last two years. As you can see, there are currently four times as many UK Internet searches for the Energy Saving/Efficiency portfolio as there are for the Environmental Concerns one. This gap has widened over time and is consistent with gradual shift in attitudes to climate change over the last few years; from people looking for information in order to understand the issues to more practical searches related to changing behaviours.

UK_Internet_searches_for_global_warming_and_energy_efficiency_2009_2008_2007_chart.png

Looking at the chart above you can see that there are clear fluctuations. With the Environmental Concerns portfolio, increases are usually a result of climate change or global warming being in the news. The most recent increase has been driven by two events: the Climate Camp protests and the upcoming intergovernmental climate change conference in Copenhagen. During these peaks, much of the search traffic goes to News and Media websites, but in general the largest amount goes to information sites such as Wikipedia and the government’s Act on CO2 campaign, the success of which we’ve highlighted in a previous blog. At 20.4%, the paid rate on this portfolio is moderate; as the table below illustrates, government websites are currently the biggest spenders on these informational terms.

Websites_receiving_traffic_from_global_warming_climate_change_searches_2009_table.png

Searches for Energy Savings/Efficiencies portfolio are less driven by news than seasonality. Many of the most popular terms in the portfolio relate to heating homes or making them more efficient, with ‘underfloor heating’, ‘cavity wall insulation’, ‘double glazing’, ‘heating oil prices’, ‘electricity prices’ and ‘winter fuel allowance’ joining terms described above in the top 10.

As you would expect, searches for these terms increase in the Autumn, and last year they peaked at the start of October. It’s interesting to compare this year with last year. So far it looks as if there were more searches last year, and this may well be thanks to the ‘perfect storm’ combination of environmental concern, poor weather and the recession encouraging people to reduce their fuel bills. On the other hand, the Indian Summer we have just experienced in the UK may just mean that the peak in searches has been delayed a for few weeks. Clearly temperatures have started to fall, so it’ll be interesting to see how this plays out. We’ll revisit the topic in a couple of weeks to find out, so keep an eye on the blog.

Given that many of the searches in the Energy Savings/Efficiency portfolio may result in people spending money, it’s no surprise to see that paid rate is higher (33.8%) and more commercial organisations in the top 10 recipients of traffic. As the table below illustrates, the utilities focussed price comparison website uSwitch received more traffic from the portfolio than anyone else for the 4 weeks ending 10/10/09. Other commercial sites in the top 10 included: Money Supermarket, two affiliates (www.freeinsulation.co.uk and www.government-grants.co.uk), two retailers (Discounted Heating and eBay UK) and energy provider NPower.

Websites_receiving_traffic_from_energy_savings_efficiency_searches_2009_table.png