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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Beijing Olympics - Who's Capitalizing on the online Games?

August 09, 2008

There is no doubt that the Olympics represents a major online media opportunity. As this article in ZDNet Asia points out, search engines have been geared up to distribute the heightened sports-related terms within their respective advertising networks. My colleague, Alan Long has written about the traction of consumer interest in the Olympics across global markets. I'll focus on paid search activity for the Games in Australia.

Our Hitwise Search data demonstrates that 'bejing olympics' sent the most clicks to the Sports – Olympics category, accounting for 6.32% volume, with a 'paid rate' of 1.24% for the 4 weeks ending 2 August, 2008*.

It's interesting to note that other leading terms to the Olympics category in the top 30, such as 'beijing olympics mascots' and 'australian olympians' attracted significantly higher paid rates of 8.59% and 10.12% respectively, indicating where advertisers are seeking out niche search opportunities.

Live and Yahoo! Search Australia - Strong Paid Rates

In a Hitwise Search Portfolio of 100 leading search variations on 'olympics', Google Australia was by far the dominant search engine distributing 75.67% of clicks, with a paid rate of 2.24% for the 4 weeks ending 2 August 2008. Live and Yahoo! Search Australia sent lower overall volumes of clicks, but sent higher rates of paid traffic; 10.3% and 8% respectively.

Yahoo!7 Sport, ninemsn, Telstra and SMH - Leveraging PPC

A Hitwise Search Intelligence report indicates that the official Beijing 2008 (English language) site was the main beneficiary of downstream traffic from Olympic searches, receiving more than 1 in 4 clicks, for the 4 weeks ending 2 August, 2008. Yahoo!7 Sport, ninemsn, Telstra and SMH all received paid traffic off Olympic search terms to their respective websites, with paid rates widely ranging between 3% and 66%. As the games progress, it'll be interesting to see if media players adapt their paid search campaigns to correspond with the success of Australian athletes or otherwise.

Korea Tourism Organization - Seeking to benefit from Olympic Travel

Sports and News and Media industries as you'd expect received significant volumes of clicks from Olympic searches. Interesting to note that Education – Reference was also up there, receiving 6.82% of clicks (driven primarily to Wikipedia). The Travel industry had high rates of paid search traffic off Olympics searches, with the Korea Tourism Organization website aggressively leveraging PPC for Australian interest in the Games.

*A "click" occurs when a user conducts a search, and then clicks on a search engine result to visit a website. "Paid rate" refers to the proportion of sent traffic that was from a sponsored link. Some of the metrics in this post will be available in our upcoming Search Intelligence release.

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Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 10:00 AM | (0) | (0)
In Categories Beijing Olympics