Apparently, Good Friday is the busiest DIY day of the year, so I wasn’t surprised to see that traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds: House and Garden category increased noticeably during the Easter week. Slightly more unexpected, however, is the growth that the sector has experienced over the last three years. As the chart below illustrates, the House and Garden category has been gradually increasing its share of all UK Internet visits over this period, and during Eater it was the sixth largest of our 17 retail sub-categories.

Despite IKEA being the third largest site, the Shopping and Classifieds – House and Garden category is dominated by the large DIY stores. These accounted for five of the top 10 sites over Easter, including B&Q at number one. The Experian Mosaic lifestyle group that over-indexes most with the category is Rural Isolation, defined as “people living in rural areas where country life has not been influenced by urban consumption patterns”. As you would expect, the largest age group visiting these sites is the over 55s, who account for over a quarter of all visitors to the category. House and Garden sites are slightly more popular amongst women that men, with females accounting for 51.8% of visitors to the category during the 4 weeks ending 15/03/2008.
One House and Garden store that has done particularly well online over the last 12 month is Screwfix Direct, currently the second most visited site in category. It has increased its share of UK Internet visits by 20% since last Easter, and a recent above the line (ATL) advertising campaign has led to an increase in searches for its brand (as the chart below illustrates).

However, brand strength does not seem to have been the only driver of Screwfix’s online growth. Despite being the second most popular site in the sector, ‘srewfix’ is only the fourth most popular search term sending traffic to our Shopping and Classified – House and Garden category, and the site is less reliant on branded search than most of its competitors. As the table below illustrates, Screwfix receives traffic from a larger variety of search terms than its main competitors.

One of the reasons for this long tail is TalkScrewfix, a part of the site that contains forums such as Builders’ Talk and Plumbers’ Talk. These are extremely popular: at the time of writing they contain over 650,000 postings on 70,000 topics. This level of content serves two purposes for a site like Screwfix. Firstly, as we described in our recent webinar, it forms the basis for an effective SEO strategy. Indeed, the top three search engines sending traffic to Screwfix (Google’s UK and US properties, plus Yahoo! UK & Ireland), all over index in terms of the amount of new visitors they send to the site.
The second benefit is that the content forms the basis of a community of loyal users that return to the site. As we mentioned in our Social Networking report, the number of older social network users is on the rise, and sites such as TalkSrewfix are where they’re going. Screwfix receives 5.4% of its upstream traffic from Email services, over twice the industry average, implying that users are emailing tips and links to friends and colleagues. The community aspect also helps with site stickiness: last week, 13.8% of people went from Screwfix to competitor site, compared to 22.5% for the industry as a whole.