Just after Easter we wrote a blog about the popularity of searches for shop opening times / hours. That analysis showed that searches for retailer opening times spiked during the May and August bank holidays, over Easter, and at Christmas time as people look for pre-Christmas and Boxing Day opening hours. The post-Christmas spike is the biggest of these and, as the chart below illustrates, was highed this year than ever before. Searches for variations on the terms ‘opening times’, ‘opening hours’ and ‘store locator’ were up 11% last week when compared with the same period last year – and 112% on this year’s Easter peak.

The table below lists the most popular of over 30,000 variations on the term ‘opening’ types into search engines in the UK last week, with the supermarkets dominating the top 20. There are six Tesco-related terms (including the number one term: ‘tesco opening times’), two for Asda, and one each for Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Waitrose. Other popular searches included the generic term ‘christmas opening hours’; references to popular fashion and department stores such as Argos, Matalan, Next and Marks & Spencer; and searches for shopping centre / mall opening hours including the Trafford Centre, Bluewater and Brent Cross.

The majority of search traffic generated by the terms last week was organic, but there are two terms in the list above with relatively high paid rates. The two sites doing most of the bidding on the generic term ‘christmas opening hours’ were eBay UK (which picked up 8.9% of clicks) and Shopping.com (8.3%). eBay picked up traffic from over 300 opening times / hours related terms last week.
The other term attracting a significant amount of paid traffic was the second most popular, ‘sainsburys opening times’. Looking at the data, its interesting to see that Sainsbury’s itself was paying for this traffic and picked up 28% of clicks last week. However, the biggest recipient of traffic from the term ‘sainsburys opening times’ was an affiliate site, Opening Times, and all of its clicks were organic. This site is one of a couple affiliates picking up opening hours related search traffic, the other being The Opening Hours. As the chart below illustrates, Opening Times is the larger of the two, having more than doubled its traffic over the last 12 months.

One of the points that I highlighted in my last post on this topic was the low success rate on a lot of opening hours / times searches. It is therefore perhaps no surprise to see that a couple of savvy affiliates have picked up on this and are now generating significant traffic from such searches. The table below illustrates the top 20 downstream sites visited after Opening Times last week, and the amount of traffic that it is currently sending to retail websites would imply that its strategy has been successful.

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