FIFA.com Dominates World Cup Searches, Sponsors See Boost in UK Traffic
For the four weeks ending Saturday, June 19, 2010, FIFA.com received the vast majority of traffic for the search term “world cup,” according to Experian Hitwise.
FIFA.com grabbed 43.02 percent of all search clicks for “world cup” searches for the four weeks ending on June 19. Facebook was second with 7.19 percent, followed by Yahoo! Sports – World Cup 2010 with 5.39 percent, YouTube with 4.80 percent and Wikipedia with 4.36 percent.
ESPN Soccernet (3.02 percent), Yahoo! (2.25 percent), Google News (0.59 percent), Foxsports Soccer (0.55 percent) and FanHouse – Football (0.53 percent) rounded out the top 10 for those four weeks.
Meanwhile, Experian Hitwise also revealed that brands associated with the World Cup and its competing teams are seeing significant growth in searches from users in the U.K.
For instance, South African Airways saw a 129.2 percent week-over-week boost in related searches for the week ending June 12.
Heineken saw a 75.0 percent surge in searches, while Carlsberg saw a 50.0 percent rise, Corona saw a 50.0 percent boost and Budweiser experienced a 33.3 percent increase.
Jack Marshall at ClickZ notes that since the World Cup kicked off its action on June 11, looking at data after a full week of actual matches could lead to even more dramatic boosts in searches for World Cup-related brands.
“It’s also likely, however, that such drastic growth in searches for South African Airways simply mirrors users’ desire to track down last minute flights before the tournament began,” Marshall writes.
Brands aren’t the only ones seeing surges in search growth, according to Experian Hitwise. Robert Green, the now-infamous goalie who bailed out the U.S. team with a sloppy attempt at a save, saw searches for his name grow 12-fold, while searches for the also-infamous vuvuzela ballooned 20-fold.
Experian Hitwise also reported that Bing is seeing huge year-over-year increases in the percentage of U.S. upstream traffic its sending to the automotive, health, shopping and travel verticals. Nevertheless, Google is still far and away the leader in this realm.
Queries with seven keywords saw a 2 percent dip in May, while those with eight or more words also saw a 2 percent decline.
Google finished May with 72.17 percent of the U.S. search market, a 1 percent boost from April. Yahoo! was second with 14.43 percent, a 3 percent decline, while Bing was third with 9.23 percent of the market, a 2 percent drop. Ask.com had 2.14 percent of the market in May, a 2 percent decline.
Sources:</strong
http://www.hitwise.com/us/datacenter/main/dashboard-10134.html
http://www.hitwise.com/us/press-center/press-releases/google-searches-05-10/
