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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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Luxury and bespoke searches: travel, fashion and furniture
May 19, 2010
Yesterday I presented at the Luxury Interactive 2010 conference in London, and I thought I’d share a couple of the finding from the research that I carried out for the event. The first thing I did was to look at the most luxurious searches in the UK using our search term suggestions tool. Over the 12 weeks ending 15/05/10 people in the UK searched for nearly 60,000 distinct search terms containing the word ‘luxury’, and the table below lists the top 20.
I was expecting the list to be dominated by fashion related terms, but was surprises to see that three quarters of the top 20 terms were actually travel related, with ‘luxury holidays’, ‘luxury cottages’, ‘luxury hotels uk’ and ‘luxury hotels’ taking the top four berths. Although many of the people searching for luxury travel products end up mainstream travel sites, specialist luxury travel sites do exist. They only account for a tiny proportion of total UK Internet visits to travel websites (less than 1%), but as the chart below illustrates, the proportion has been gradually increasing over the three years.
So if ‘luxury’-related searches are primarily travel related, what about variations on the term ‘bespoke’? As the table below illustrates, travel searches feature prominently in the list (e.g. ‘bespoke hotels’ in first position), but don’t dominate in the same way. As you expect, there are a number of fashion related terms in the top 20 (e.g. bespoke jewellery’, ‘bespoke suits’, ‘bespoke shirts’, ‘bespoke shoes’), but the most frequently occurring are house and garden related, from individual items of furniture to whole kitchens.
House and Garden is one of the fastest growing areas of online retail in the UK, so does this mean that there is growth oat the high end of the market as well in the more mainstream DIY and furniture sectors. It would seem so; the chart below illustrates the increase in searches for a portfolio of high end House and Garden product searches, ranging from luxury bedding to bespoke conservatories. Over the last year, the volume of searches for these products has increased by more than a third.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 11:12 AM
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In Categories Fashion | House and Garden | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds | Travel
Comments
Totally agree with Shine Ecommerce, working with luxurious real estates, even if you are ranking number one for some keywords, traffic is not extremely great, some of those keywords in Adwords could cost up 4£, so it makes sense.
Posted by Serge Pon | May 21, 2010 09:53 AM
'Bespoke Hotels' is a hotel chain hence the high search volume.
Posted by Andy Maclean | October 29, 2010 01:01 PM
As a manufacturer of conservatories we have noticed more people asking for bespoke products. We offer a range of standard conservatories, although 90%+ of the conservatories we create are bespoke.
Would be interesting to have seen the figures before/during/after the recession. I know we had a little dip in searches for "bespoke conservatories" although it has recovered stronger than it was.
Posted by Bespoke Conservatories | April 30, 2011 03:37 PM
Working with a range of upmarket and luxury brands we've found the same, that even when you achieve #1 rankings in google for 'luxury' phrases the traffic just isn't there. The two exceptions seem to be travel and,in the US, 'real estate'.
A classic case of learning to describe your product as your customer does, not as the company does.
Posted by Shine Ecommerce | May 19, 2010 01:28 PM