Halloween is becoming a bigger and bigger calendar event every year in the UK as the British and American cultures become more intertwined and universal.

Two years ago, online searches for Halloween and all related terms, from ‘halloween costumes’ to ‘halloween recipes’ accounted for 1 in every 303 searches in the last week of October. Last year Halloween-related searches accounted for 1 in every 280 searches, and this year Halloween searches are on course to become even more popular.

Much like last year the most popular search terms in the run up to Halloween are costume related. Variations of costume search terms seem to be much more prevalent this year as Internet users expand their searches beyond the simple two word phrases such as ‘halloween costumes’. Last week alone there were 18,000 different search term variations which included the word ‘halloween’.
A look at the fastest-moving search terms year-on-year shows how more users are using longer keyword phrases to search online. Within the top 10 fastest-moving search terms between 2009 and 2010 were ‘halloween costume ideas’, ‘kids halloween costumes’ and ‘scary halloween costumes’.

As ‘halloween costumes’ was the most popular Halloween search term last week I thought it would be interesting to see which retailers were benefiting the most from this lucrative search term. Despite ‘halloween costumes’ accounting for 12% of all Halloween searches, the downstream websites that capitalised on the traffic from this term were all niche retailers, with the exception of Very.co.uk.

Even a site as strong as eBay was squeezed out of the top 10 by specialist fancy dress retailers like Jokers’ Masquerade and Angel Fancy Dress, although eBay has increased its visits from the term ‘halloween costumes’ by 75% this year compared to October 2009.