“Facebook” Queries Up 5x, “Twitter” Up 14x Since Last Year
Written by Simon Schanche (contact - e-mail) -- August 26th, 2009 |
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July search term biggest movers are here! What terms drove the greatest query volume spike? Let’s take a look at some of the fastest growing terms since this time last year to get a better idea of the trend in consumer search interest.
Findings:
- Facebook, Craigslist, Twitter, and YouTube have seen explosive traffic growth in the past year and to follow suit their query volumes have grown substantially
- While portal properties Yahoo! (141MM Uvs) and AOL (55MM Uvs) haven’t significantly grown in traffic, they have seen 50%+ increase in brand queries since last year
- No sharp traffic trends in webmail properties Yahoo! Mail and Hotmail, but brand terms for both of these properties have risen sharply
Overall, brand term use is on the rise. Why, might you ask? One answer is that consumers are becoming more dependent on search for navigation (typing a brand into the search bar instead of navigating directly to the brands website). It’s not that consumers don’t know the names of these brands – they’re using the exact brand name as their search query as you can see below.
Taking a quick look at the top 5 keyword referrals (data taken from site profiles on compete.com) to some of the domains mentioned above, we see that navigational search nearly always encompases the top 5 keyword referrals to the sites (and a large portion of search referral traffic).
Search (as a means of navigation) is on the rise, at least in terms of traffic to some of these big online brands. Did internet surfer laziness take over (‘www.’ and ‘.com’ became too hard to type)? Are consumers showing more engine loyalty/trust in their engine’s results? I’ll admit I’m one of them.
Check back next month to see how this trend continues to take shape.
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August 26th, 2009 at 4:48 pm
Do you have any data regarding the proliferation and use of search engine toolbars embedded in user browser windows? That could have something to do with this phenomenon, don’t you think?
August 27th, 2009 at 5:27 am
I figured that facebook would take the cake, however I didn’t think it would be this much. Honestly, facebook is really a wonder to me.
September 2nd, 2009 at 2:50 am
This was so expected! Facebook topping the leader board is no surprise. Craig list being second best did shocked me, but on second thoughts it is leading the advertisement industry.
November 18th, 2009 at 8:47 am
Thats not strange. Its quite obvious that most popular social networking websites are growing rapidly great.