With the unveiling in June of the Universal theme park, the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the movie trailer for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and the release of Lego Harry Potter: Years 1-4, it’s fair to say that Harry Potter fever is casting a spell over online audiences again.
Of the 32 million distinct search terms that UK internet users typed into search engines over June, nearly 16,500 of them contained the term “harry potter”, meaning 1 in every 2,000 search terms was Harry Potter-related. Such was the popularity of the fantastic boy wizard that “harry potter” was a more popular search term than “ipad uk”, the second most popular Apple iPad related search term.
These three Harry Potter events accounted for the majority of the search traffic and search terms. Of the top 20 Harry Potter-related search terms, five were related to the new theme park in Orlando, four were related to the Lego game and three were related to the new movie.

Despite having the fewest search terms, search traffic for the seventh Harry Potter movie was the highest in volume terms, accounting for over 8% of Harry Potter searches. Searches for the Universal theme park accounted for over 5.7% and the new Lego game took 3.8% of the market share of related searches.

In the lead up to Daniel Radcliffe and other stars from the movies opening of Universal’s Wizarding World of Harry Potter on 18 June by, online searches received a noticeable spike in traffic.

Of the key search terms related to the Harry Potter theme park, Universal benefited from nearly a third of all search clicks. News sites including the BBC, Metro and Daily Mail made up the bulk of the remaining sites that received traffic boosts having featured stories about the launch of the theme park. From the travel industry, both Virgin Holidays and Travel Republic were among the top 20 websites to receive traffic from the collected Harry Potter search terms. Both travel companies received the majority of their traffic from paid clicks.

What’s particularly interesting to note about the Harry Potter searches is that they are all vying for attention combatively rather than collaboratively. Intuitively, you would expect fans of the saga to be interested in all things Harry Potter. The natural assumption then would be that searches would increase in tandem across the key events. The data shows however, that during the rise of searches for terms relating to the Harry Potter theme park, searches for the Harry Potter movies dropped off.

These results indicate that a joint marketing approach to promote both theme park and movie at the same time is a risky strategy. Far better to grab the Harry Potter fans for one event at one time and then grab a “second wind” with a follow-up announcement.

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