| Olympics winners: sports websites, bike retailers and sportswear manufacturers |
UK sports websites - both information and retail websites - were the ones that benefited most following the Beijing Olympics and the success of Team GB. UK Internet traffic to websites within the Sports industry shot up to an all-time high, accounting for one in every 29 visits for the week ending 23 August 2008. The big winner was the BBC Sport website (http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport), which received one in every five visits to a Sports website during the Olympics.
Although the Shopping and Classifieds - Sports and Fitness industry received less visits than the overall Sports industry, it reached a new peak during the Olympic Games. Traffic to Shopping and Classifieds - Sports and Fitness was up 36% year-on-year the week ending 23 August 2008. Looking at the top sports retail websites during this period, four of the top 10 were cycling websites, including Halfords (www.halfords.com) at number one. Each of the top four cycling websites experienced increases in traffic over the Olympic fortnight, which could be attributed to Britain's success in cycling.
Another company that gained traffic as a result of the team GB halo effect was Adidas (www.adidas.com/uk), the official kit sponsor. Searches for 'adidas' reached their highest level this year during the week ending 23 August 2008, with almost 80% of this traffic going to the Adidas websites. The largest independent recipient of traffic was JD Sports (www.jdsports.co.uk), which received 5.7% of traffic from searches for 'adidas', although it paid for almost 90% of that traffic.
Two other sportswear manufacturers that benefited by association were Puma (www.puma.com) and Speedo (www.speedo.com). Puma sponsored the fastest man in the world, Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, and traffic to its website shot up thanks to its 'Race Bolt Game'. The traffic peaked on August 20, the day Bolt won gold in the 200m sprint, breaking the world record in the process. The other big star of the Games was the American swimmer Michael Phelps, who wore a much talked-about Speedo swimming suit. However, unlike Puma, which experienced a sudden peak, UK traffic to the Speedo website increased steadily over the Olympic fortnight as Phelps racked up one gold medal after another.
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| Flyzoom - www.flyzoom.com |
Position for week ending 23/08/2008: #22
Position for week ending 30/08/2008: #15
Positions Jumped: 7
Following the announcement that Zoom Airlines had grounded its planes and was preparing to go into administration, www.flyzoom.com became the 8th most visited website in the Hitwise Commercial Airlines industry on 28 August 2008, entering the top ten for the first time in its short history.
The largest beneficiary from the Zoom website on 28 August was British Airways (www.ba.com), followed by FlyGlobeSpan (www.flyglobespan.com) and Canadian Affair (www.canadianaffair.com). This suggests that for customers booked to fly with Zoom, the main priority was to find replacement tickets with other airlines. Almost 40% of the website's downstream traffic went to other travel websites on that day, with Air Canada (www.aircanada.com), Virgin Atlantic (www.virgin-atlantic.com), and Glasgow Airport (www.glasgowairport.com) also in the top 20.
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| New Hitwise Search Intelligence™ |
Search is now one of the single greatest drivers of the digital economy. Are you staying ahead in the increasingly important search game?
To give marketers a competitive advantage when planning and measuring search marketing campaigns, Hitwise has introduced a range of enhanced features and reports within the Hitwise Search Intelligence™ tool.
The new and improved Search Intelligence™ includes:
- Paid and Organic reports across industries, custom categories, individual search phrases and portfolios. Use this tool to compare your website's paid and organic ratio to the overall industry and the paid ratio across key search phrases for your business.
- Paid and Organic Advanced filtering options, including the ability to filter the paid and organic split to a website or industry by search engine and including/excluding search terms in results (e.g. branded terms).
- Advanced portfolio features including paid and organic rates across a group of terms, keyword breakdown, search engine share and searches versus clicks.
- AJAX interface for cleaner reports and faster results.
To find out more about how the New Hitwise Search Intelligence™ can help grow and protect your business, click here or email support.uk@hitwise.com.
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| Fast Moving Search Terms: August 2008 |
It's not surprising that six of the top ten fast moving search terms during August were related to the Beijing Olympics. Interest in the Games meant August was the busiest month ever for the BBC Sport website (www.bbc.co.uk/sport). During the week ending 16 August 2008, BBC Sport ranked as the 14th most visited website in the UK, entering the top 10 websites list for the first time on Saturday, 16 August.
The start of the English Premier Season also boosted traffic to football websites. A new season also means the traditional surge in traffic to fantasy football websites, with searches for the official Premier League website, the Fantasy Premier League and the Sun's Dream Team all featuring in the top 10 fastest moving search terms table.
The only non-sport search term in the August top 10 was 'leeds festival', with searches for the annual music festival held in Reading and Leeds, up 19% from 2007.
Fast Moving Search Terms for All Categories, ranked by largest increase for the 4 weeks ending 30/08/2008 compared with the 4 weeks ending 02/08/2008
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| 1. |
beijing 2008 olympic games |
0.04% |
| 2. |
olympics |
0.03% |
| 3. |
beijing 2008 |
0.02% |
| 4. |
olympics 2008 |
0.02% |
| 5. |
leeds festival |
0.01% |
| 6. |
premier league |
0.01% |
| 7. |
fantasy premier league |
0.01% |
| 8. |
bbc olympics |
0.01% |
| 9. |
beijing olympics |
0.01% |
| 10. |
sun dream team |
0.01% |
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| Sarah Palin more popular than Barack Obama in the UK |
UK Internet searches for 'sarah palin', the recently announced Republican vice-presidential nominee, were 45% higher for the week ending 30 August than those for the previously most searched-for US nominee, 'barack obama'. The top website capturing visits from searches for Palin was Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) (38% of searches), followed by Google News (news.google.co.uk) (4.5%).
To view more Hitwise To Go click here.
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