Has the recession affected consumer thought patterns? To answer this question we culled over half a million search terms containing a certain modifier. For instance: Keywords containing the word cheap would include cheap flight, cheap car rental and so on. Next we aggregated the keywords into groups based on the modifier and measured their Year over Year (Q1 2009 vs Q1 2008) changes in impression volume and revenue per click ( i.e. the per click monetization change).
The conclusions are significant. In the financial vertical, keywords such as credit, lending and mortgage have seen a huge jump in impression volume while keywords containing loans have seen a drop. Interestingly while mortgage and credit monetize better now than last year, loans and lending related keywords are not performing as well. In our experience, changes in traffic patterns and behavior are closely related to changes in the economic environment. An increased number of consumers are searching for financial information but are not necessarily converting on the clicks. This is because they are not qualified as they once were (due to more stringent lending criteria) or are simply looking for information and are not interested in buying a financial product.
In the travel vertical, cheap and discount related keywords have seen big jumps in impression volume and are monetizing better. The same is not true for cruise and hotel related keywords where the revenue per click is lower than it was last year. Clearly frugality is in.
For more details, download our quarterly search engine report for Q1 2009.
Siddharth Shah
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