Summer is the busiest time for car hire companies, and this applies to their websites as well. We’ve recently carried out some analysis of car hire search behaviour in the UK, and I wanted to share some of the key finding here. A quick note on methodology: we created customer category of 100+ car hires sites and then categorized almost 2,000 search terms sending it traffic for the 12 weeks ending 02/08/2008). We tagged these search terms based on the occurrence of certain key words, such as a brand, location or car type. The chart below illustrates the importance of the different types of keywords. We’ve used two metrics: the volume of searches containing each type of keyword, and the actual number search terms containing each type of keyword (equivalent to the Search Term Breadth metric in the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence tool). As you can, the most frequently occurring key phrases are locations - e.g. the searcher specifying a particular country or city, such as Spain, Florida or Dublin. 41.6% of searches sending traffic to car hire websites specified a location, while 71.6% of actual search term included a location. The reason these numbers are different is because many of the search terms specifying a location are found in the long tail, and therefore don’t receive a huge number of searches. The 10 most searched for locations were: Spain (included 25.7% of searches), UK (25.0%), USA (10.4%), France (8.7%), Italy (5.4%), Portuga ...
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Summer is the busiest time for car hire companies, and this applies to their websites as well. We’ve recently carried out some analysis of car hire search behaviour in the UK, and I wanted to share some of the key finding here. A quick note on methodology: we created customer category of 100+ car hires sites and then categorized almost 2,000 search terms sending it traffic for the 12 weeks ending 02/08/2008). We tagged these search terms based on the occurrence of certain key words, such as a brand, location or car type. The chart below illustrates the importance of the different types of keywords. We’ve used two metrics: the volume of searches containing each type of keyword, and the actual number search terms containing each type of keyword (equivalent to the Search Term Breadth metric in the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence tool). As you can, the most frequently occurring key phrases are locations - e.g. the searcher specifying a particular country or city, such as Spain, Florida or Dublin. 41.6% of searches sending traffic to car hire websites specified a location, while 71.6% of actual search term included a location. The reason these numbers are different is because many of the search terms specifying a location are found in the long tail, and therefore don’t receive a huge number of searches. The 10 most searched for locations were: Spain (included 25.7% of searches), UK (25.0%), USA (10.4%), France (8.7%), Italy (5.4%), Portuga ...