At midnight last night thousands of video games fans queued to get their hands on the latest must-have game – Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Obviously there were plenty of people who couldn’t buy a copy last night and instead decided to buy the game online. There was a surge of online activity last week with UK Internet users searching for news, reviews and the best places to buy the latest instalment of the Call of Duty franchise.
Using our new Search Sequence tool, we can now see what searches are being conducted before and after a given search term. Looking at the search sequence after the term ‘call of duty black ops’ for last week, the results show an interesting mix of search behaviour.

What this data shows is that, of all of the searches conducted after searching for ‘call of duty black ops’, 1.32% of searches were refined to ‘call of duty black ops zombies’. 1.62% of people searched for ‘call of duty black ops zombies’ within the next five searches that they conducted after ‘call of duty black ops’. The prominence of searches for zombies is a reference to the return of the survival mode within the game where players have to fight off waves of zombies for as long as they can. This is an interesting insight for game publishers Activision and developers Treyarch that the zombie sub game was more popular for players than finding out about the main Black Ops storyline or trailers of the actual gameplay.

In the console wars, PS3 would appear to be the most popular platform for the game with ‘call of duty black ops ps3′ the second most popular search term after searching for Black Ops, whereas ‘call of duty black ops xbox 360′ was the 10th most popular term.
In terms of online retailers, Amazon was the top search term searched for after the game, followed by GAME, Argos, Asda, Play.com and Amazon UK. It is interesting to compare the search sequence with our clickstream data: as the table below illustrates, the top downstream websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘call of duty black ops’ are quite different.

From the downstream sites GAME appears to be receiving the lion’s share of the retail traffic from the popular Black Ops search term. 8.06% of all search clicks for ‘call of duty black ops’ went to GAME’s website, of which two thirds of those clicks came from paid links. Amazon UK features much lower in the downstream list in ninth place, but this is not taking into account the search sequencing data. Although only 2.78% of clicks went to Amazon when searching for the Black Ops game, many online users already know that they want to buy from Amazon, so having found information about Call of Duty (perhaps from the main dedicated website) the next search term they typed in was for Amazon.
Search sequencing gives a much broader picture of the intentions of Internet users, and gives a much clearer and comprehensive view of where people are searching online, and how the path that they take in the decision making process.
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