With the economy slowing and prices rising, everyone is on the lookout for a bargain. Vouchers have become a popular way of promoting discounts, particularly around Christmas time. In fact, they have become some popular that price sensitive shoppers are looking for them in increasing numbers. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet searches for ‘vouchers’ have shot up recently, having increased 12-fold over the last three years

We recorded almost 10,000 variations on the search term ‘vouchers’ over the last 12 weeks. The table below illustrates the top 10 suggestions, which includes ‘discount vouchers’, ‘money off vouchers’ and ‘free vouchers’. Of course, in addition to generic vouchers, this list also includes searches for popular shop-specific vouchers for the likes of Tesco. As we highlighted in December, viral voucher campaigns can be very successful ways for retailers to drive traffic to their sites.

As you would expect, a number of voucher aggregation / affiliate sites have sprung up to meet the rising demand for vouchers. The chart below illustrates the growth of top 5 sites, with MyVoucherCodes and VoucherCodes currently the two clear leaders. The combined market share of these five sites has increased almost five fold over the last year.

Looking at the clickstream data, voucher sites sent 62.4% of their traffic to Shopping and Classifieds sites last month. Of this 24.3% went to our Rewards and Directories category, which implies that people are browsing multiple voucher websites to find the best deals. The top 3 retail sub-categories receiving traffic from voucher sites in May were Department Stores, Apparel and Accessories, and Appliances and Electronics. Asda Electricals is currently the individual retailer receiving most traffic from voucher sites, and they accounted for 2.7% of its upstream traffic last month. MyVoucherCodes was the sixth site in its upstream clickstream, making it the highest ranked non-Asda or Google site.