Yesterday Alistair Darling unveiled the final Budget before the election and, as you would expect, it has come under significant scrutiny from the media, the City and voters themselves. For many people the Internet was the first place they went to find out the details, and the chart below illustrates the increases in traffic to a number key Business and Finance related categories of websites.

The relatively neutral response from the City is reflected by the absence of a spike in visits to Stock and Shares websites. Given that most headline grabbing aspect of the Budget was the changes to stamp duty, I was expecting an increase in visits Property websites. But it wasn’t so; maybe it will be a longer term effect that takes a while to filter through to our data.
However, the category that did see a significant increase was Business Information. This was driven by large spikes in traffic to the two biggest sites, Money Saving Expert (up 129% yesterday) and Yahoo! Finance UK (up 42%). Another site that experienced a boost was the BBC Blog Network, while Deloitte was best the performing of the large accountancy and consultancy firms (which usually do well around budget time). Yesterday UK traffic to the firm’s homepage trebled yesterday and it picked over a fifth all visits to our Business and Finance – Consultancies category.

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