This weekend the UK will celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with bunting, concert tickets and cake topping the party planning lists, according to new data on the top UK search terms.
The study, from Experian Hitwise, looked at how the British public have been searching online.
In the last 12 weeks the firm has seen over 65,000 unique search term variations including the word ‘jubilee’ typed into search engines by the UK population.
The word cloud below highlights some of the top recurring terms which people are using with their Jubilee-related search queries.
The firm have provided some regional breakdowns here and indicators of which online sites are benefitting from the Jubilee hype:
– In the last 12 weeks, more than 65,000 unique search term variations containing the word Jubilee have been typed into UK search engines
– The top recurring search terms were mostly for information around celebrations, holidays and the Jubilee concert
– Excluding these information-based searches, the British public were searching for three things over any other: tickets for the Jubilee concert (24%), cakes (17%) and bunting (14%). Of all those searching for bunting, Amazon UK received 20% of the traffic for those searching for Jubilee bunting
– 30% of those that visited the official Jubilee website were Londoners, making the capital the epicentre of Jubilee interest. The Scots were the least interested, being 47% less likely than the average web user to visit the website
– Experian’s Mosaic segmentation tool shows that Britain’s most affluent groups – Alpha Territory, Professional Rewards and Careers and Kids – that were most interested in finding out about the Jubilee
The top recurring terms are mostly around celebrations, holidays and the Jubilee concert. Interestingly although it is the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee this weekend there were still a lot of searches for ‘golden’ and ‘silver’ either because people weren’t sure which anniversary it was or because they wanted to find out additional information about previous Jubilees.
Excluding the information based searches around the Jubilee, the celebration comes down to three core propositions: tickets, cake and bunting. Looking at all searches for Jubilee-related items tickets accounted for 24% of those searches, cake 17% and bunting 14%. Highlighting the top 10 individual search terms you can see that the most popular item overall was Jubilee bunting which accounted for almost 6% of all Jubilee item searches in the 12 weeks ending 26 May.
Bunting is quite a seasonal item which is only really used in the summer for special occasions like a wedding or events like the Jubilee.
Hitwise data shows that bunting has never been more popular online in the run up to the Jubilee, receiving 3% more searches this year than last year around the Royal Wedding.
The top recipient of traffic for this fast-moving item is Amazon UK. When we looked at the downstream traffic for websites receiving traffic from the term ‘jubilee bunting’ Amazon UK received almost 20% of search clicks, although it invested a lot in paid search to be the top recipient for this term.
This is another great example of being able to jump on emerging search trends and by isolating the key terms, benefiting from a lot of traffic from popular seasonal items. What is encouraging is that a website can emerge from nowhere like www.jubileebunting.com and still compete with the likes of Amazon, eBay and M&S even with no PPC budget. Effective search engine optimisation at its best.
Further analysis form Hitwise:
Who are the people most interested in the Jubilee? By analysing the visitors to the Diamond Jubilee website we can see the type of people who have an interest in this weekend’s festivities beyond the fact that it is two days off work. These are the people who are more likely to buy Jubilee related products. Regionally London is the epicentre of Jubilee interest with London Internet users 30% more likely than the rest of the population to visit the Jubilee website. Scotland is the least interest region being 47% less likely than the average user to visit the website.
Using Mosaic we can also isolate the key demographic groups that visited the Jubilee site. You can see here that its Britain’s most affluent groups – Alpha Territory, Professional Rewards and Careers and Kids that are most interested in the Jubilee.
What other lessons can we learn from the Jubilee weekend? One of the key trends that we see every bank holiday weekend within retail is that people start searching for store opening times over the weekend ahead of bank holiday Monday. This is even more crucial over the Jubilee weekend as both Monday and Tuesday are bank holidays and people want to know when stores are open for them to shop. The message here is make your store opening times clearly visible on your website so that customers can find what they are looking for over the bank holiday weekend.
Source: www.hitwise.com
