Britons Searching for Travel, Social Networks, Reference Info

The multi-category travel sector (containing brands such as Lastminute.com, Expedia and Thomson) received the most click-throughs from UK searches in July, according to (pdf) a Nielsen/NetRatings study of which sectors receive the most UK click-throughs from search engines, writes MarketingCharts.

Among the findings:

• In July, the multi-category travel sector received 41.6 million click-throughs, or 4.7 percent of the total.
• Britons clicked on over 1.3 billion search results - that’s over 29,000 every single minute.
• Google is now responsible for four in every five (80 percent) search click-throughs in the UK.

“Britons online are most likely to be searching for travel deals, social networks or reference information through sites like Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers,” said Alex Burmaster, European Internet Analyst at Nielsen/NetRatings.

“To see how deeply ingrained search is in the internet today, one needs to look no further than the fact that the fourth most popular search destination is search itself. In other words, people use search engines to find other search engines!”

Sectors that have the greatest percentage of visitors coming from search, according to NetRatings:

• Research sites (such as Wikipedia and Yahoo Answers) have the greatest percentage of visitors coming from search (79 percent).
• Next are travel destinations (such as About Britain and Visit Scotland) with 68 percent.
• Government has 67 percent coming from search.
• Directories/local guides have 66 percent of their traffic coming from search.

“Reference and information sites have the greatest percentage of visitors coming from search - whether it’s people looking for information on a place to visit, a local service, a hotel or something to buy. Research tools, dominated by Wikipedia, receive around four in every five visitors due to search - not surprising, when you consider how often Wikipedia shows up in the first page of Google results,” said Burmaster.