Judging by the amount of merchandise for sale in the shops, it feels like Halloween becomes more popular every year in the UK. And Hitwise search data seems to bear this out: the chart below illustrates the breadth of searches for the term ‘halloween’ (which measures the number of different ways that people search for a topic).

Last week (w/e 31 October 2009) we monitored at astonishing 49,000 distinct search terms containing the word ‘halloween’, and the top 10 were: ‘halloween 2009′, ‘halloween’, ‘halloween costumes’, ‘halloween games’, ‘halloween costume ideas’, ‘halloween jokes’, ‘halloween recipes’, ‘halloween fancy dress’, ‘haunted village pluckley halloween cancelled’, ‘halloween ideas’. The fastest moving Halloween-related search term last week was ‘pumpkin designs for halloween’, and we also tracked 10,786 distinct terms containing the word ‘pumpkin’. After carving related queries, the most popular of these related to recipes, with ‘pumpkin soup’, ‘pumpkin soup recipe’, ‘pumpkin pie’ and ‘pumpkin pie recipes’ all making the top 10.
As you can tell from the list of terms above, fancy dress costumes play a key role in Halloween-related search behaviour. Last week the US put out some data about the most popular fancy dress costume searches, with ‘michael jackson costume’ and ‘balloon boy halloween costume’ topping the list. In the UK the most popular specific costume searches were for ‘vampire costume’ and ‘joker costume’, but more popular were searches for broad types of costume, with cheap, plus size and adult all appearing as popular key words.
We built a custom category of the top 15 online fancy dress retailers in the UK, and its traffic is charted below. While it’s no surprise to see visits increasing significantly in the run up to Halloween, it’s interesting to note that traffic peaks the week before Halloween (i.e. w/e October 24th rather than 31st). This also happened last year – presumably people are ordering their costumes in advance in order ensure deliver in time for parties and trick-or-treat outings.

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