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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
Analyst Weblog
Why Facebook hasn’t overtaken Google in the UK (and won’t for the foreseeable future)
March 19, 2010
You may well have seen our data illustrating that Facebook picked up more US Internet visits than Google.com last week (and possibly even seen me talking about it on Channel 4 News). As a consequence of the interest in the American data, a number of people have asked us: what about the UK? The answer is that Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK – and has been for a while now – but Google.co.uk remains ahead of it. As the chart below illustrates, last week Google.co.uk picked up 9.34% of UK Internet visits, while Facebook accounted for 6.01%. In the US, the respective figures were 7.03% (for Google.com) and 7.07%.
So, there are two main reasons why Facebook hasn’t yet caught up with Google in the UK (and doesn’t likely to do so in the foreseeable future):
• Facebook has a very similar share of the social networking markets in both the UK and US (51.9% and 51.3%respectively last week), but social networking is slight more popular in the US, so Facebook’s share of all Internet visits is higher in there.
• Google has a larger share of search market in the UK (over 90%) than in the US (just over 70%), and search engines as a category are also more popular on this side of the Atlantic.
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Posted by Robin Goad at 09:11 AM
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In Categories Google | Search | Social networks
Mother’s Day: Woodlands Junior School strikes again
March 16, 2010
A couple of years ago we highlighted the extraordinary case of Woodlands Junior School, the best optimised school website in the UK. It appears high up on the Google SERP for popular seasonal terms such as ‘mothers day’, ‘pancake day’, ‘easter’ and ‘lent’. Back in 2008 Woodlands Junior School was the biggest recipient of traffic from the search term ‘mothers day’, and this year it’s done it again. As the chart below illustrates, for the 12 weeks ending 13/03/10 the site picked up over a third of all clicks on the term – more than three times as much as Wikipedia, and much more than any commercial sites (many of which, unlike Woodlands, paid for much of their traffic).
Over the same 12 week period, the Woodlands Junior School site picked up traffic from over 42,000 different search terms, 349 of which were Mothering Sunday related. The site’s success means that it currently ranks second in our Education – Institutions category, behind the Open University but ahead of all the other University websites in the UK! And this isn’t a freak month: the site has ranked in second position since September last year, and has been in the top 5 for most of the last three years.
Back to Mother’s Day, and it’s interesting to see from the chart below that, although searches for the basic term ‘mothers day’ peaked on the week ending 06/03/10 and declined slightly last week (first chart), taking all the variations into account searches continued to increase significantly last week (second chart).
Clearly what happened was that people searched for information and the data first, before refining their searches closer to the date as they sought presents. The table below lists the top variations on the term ‘mothers day’ last week, with the more transactional terms unsurprisingly attracting higher paid rates.
You can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter, while Woodlands Junior School have a presence here and here.
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:58 AM
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In Categories Education | Fast moving search terms | Paid search | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
Is Fairtrade growing in popularity?
March 12, 2010
Another guest blog by Jonny Steel, Insights Manager, mySupermarket-Insights.co.uk
Fairtrade Fortnight is an annual event which aims to raise the profile of fair and ethical trading values. The supermarkets have been keen to get on board for the past few years, highlighting their growing Fairtrade offering, introducing additional promotions and helping to educate their customers on the virtues of Fairtrade.
But have the millions of pounds poured into Fairtrade education resulted in increased interest and ultimately, sales? Are we spending more on Fairtrade than in previous years? While more British consumers than ever before are familiar with the concept of Fairtrade, and no doubt, if asked, would agree that it is a worthy cause, the question remains whether they’re willing to spend more on their groceries to ensure that a farmer on the other side of the world gets paid fairly. During a recession, when many consumers are concerned primarily with taking care of their own families, what has been the impact on Fairtrade search and purchasing trends?
As the graph shows, online interest in Fairtrade has dropped over the past year, probably as a result of the economic downturn. Similarly, mySupermarket.co.uk, the grocery shopping and comparison website, found that sales of Fairtrade products have fallen by 5% over the past year.
The major peak comes around Fairtrade Fortnight each year, as people respond to the increased publicity. Indeed, Fairtrade coffee sales on mySupermarket.co.uk increased by 57% during the fortnight, compared to the two weeks beforehand. The only other time of year that appears to see a significant uplift is in the period ahead of Christmas, potentially reflecting an uplift in searches for Christmas presents like Fairtrade clothes and bags.
In terms of weekly online internet shopping, Sainsbury’s and Ocado offer the most Fairtrade products, and not surprisingly see the highest weekly spend of all the supermarkets. In an average branch, Sainsbury’s shoppers will find about 157 Fairtrade products, while in Ocado (Waitrose) they’ll find 154. Tesco have 117 and ASDA 65. Ocado shoppers spend the most on Fairtrade (£1.18 per order), compared to Sainsbury’s (57p), Tesco (30p) and ASDA (16p).
Sainsbury’s have taken a strategic approach to Fairtrade, replacing many traditional lines with Fairtrade alternatives. For example, all Sainsbury’s bananas and most of their standard own label tea is now Fairtrade (Sainsbury’s loose bananas are now the country’s top-selling Fairtrade product). This approach smartly takes away the decision-making process from the customer, giving them no alternative to Fairtrade, and resulting in many shoppers buying these products without even realising it. Moreover, in a bid to remain competitive, these Fairtrade products are often priced identically to their equivalents elsewhere that are not Fairtrade. For example, Sainsbury’s bananas are currently priced at 97p/kilo, just as non-Fairtrade ones are in ASDA and Tesco.
During this year’s Fairtrade Fortnight approximately 25% of all Fairtrade products were on special offer at the supermarkets. Many of these offers bring down the prices so much that they’re priced closely to their non-Fairtrade equivalents, offering customers a great way to stock up on Fairtrade items without spending much more than the regular ones.
The top Search terms within the Fairtrade portfolio show that people don’t tend to search for specific Fairtrade products, but rather, are searching for general information. Within the top results, the only specific products to feature are flowers, chocolate and jewelry. This suggests that people still view Fairtrade as something that they might consider giving as a gift, but not something that they necessarily want as part of their own daily life.
Of the groceries, although chocolate is the top Fairtrade search term, there are actually more Fairtrade coffee products available at our supermarkets. Chocolate comes second, followed by tea and sugar. Fairtrade’s popularity at more premium retailers such as Ocado and the low online search for specific Fairtrade products suggests that it remains a niche area of interest. While the more value-oriented supermarkets may focus on it during Fairtrade Fortnight, this may be more as a way to highlight their “ethical credentials” rather than being targeted at meeting their customers’ demands.
The list of websites that receive the most traffic from this portfolio of search terms only includes one supermarket. This highlights once again that while there is general interest in Fairtrade, it doesn’t always convert into purchases. While the official Fairtrade Foundation website receives nearly 60% of the traffic in the period of the last 4 weeks, there is a major absence of the 4 online supermarkets, with only The Co-operative Food at number 13 on the list.
mySupermarket.co.uk is the shopping and comparison website which guarantees you the lowest price for your groceries at Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Ocado.
mySupermarket Insights is a real-time FMCG data solution for businesses, tracking daily prices, promotions and market share for all groceries at the main supermarkets.
Follow Hitwise UK and mySupermarket on Twitter.
Posted by Robin Goad at 09:00 AM
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In Categories Economy | Food | Guest posts | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
Coffee wars: Flat White vs. Cappuccino
March 11, 2010
Hitwise was started in Australia, and there remains a strong Antipodean influence in our London office. The most recent manifestation of this is a fashion amongst my colleagues for flat whites – a style of coffee that, like the pavlova before it, originated in either Australia or New Zealand and, depending on your opinion, is either a less milky café latte or a weaker, colder café con leche (see this Wikipedia entry for an unintentionally amusing comparison between the drinks). And it’s not only Experian Hitwise employees that are falling victim to this latest coffee fashion: according to this article in the Evening Standard, the flat white is already challenging the cappuccino in some London coffee shops.
Our data also backs this up. As the chart below illustrates, Internet searches for “flat white” first started appearing in the UK towards the end of 2008, but have really taken off since both Starbucks and Costa launched the drink in December and January respectively, and are now neck and neck with “cappuccino”.
During the 12 weeks ending 06/03/2010, people in the UK searched for over 650 different terms containing the phrase “flat white”. Here are the top 10, which includes both Costa and Starbucks branded terms, as well as the two recipe-related terms:
1. flat white (13.58% of searches containing the term)
2. flat white coffee (6.30%)
3. costa flat white (2.23%)
4. flat white london (1.97%)
5. how to make a flat white (1.63%)
6. white flat screen tv (1.56%)
7. flat white starbucks (1.46%)
8. flat white coffee recipe (1.20%)
9. starbucks flat white (1.20%)
10. costa coffee flat white (1.03%)
Interestingly, searches for “flat white” are less prevalent in Australia and New Zealand than the UK. Presumably the reason for this is that our Aussie and Kiwi cousins are already familiar with the drink, so are less inclined to search out fo curiosity.
Follow Hitwise UK and Hitwise AP on Twitter.
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:20 AM
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In Categories Demographics | Fast moving search terms | Food | Local | Retail | Search
