It’s red nose time and once again the UK turns its thoughts to sponsored runs, baking extravaganzas and taking baths in baked beans – all in the name of raising money for charity.

As you might expect, searches for all terms relating to Comic Relief and Red Nose Day have all increased significantly in anticipation of tonight’s huge telethon event. Interestingly ‘red nose day’ is a much more popular search term than ‘comic relief’, with the former claiming 17% of all Comic Relief related searches, and the latter responsible for 12% of searches.
In the last week our Community category has been dominated by Comic Relief websites, and yesterday (17 March 2011) there were no less than four dedicated Comic Relief websites in the top 10 Community sites, including the Red Nose Day mobile site, which received one fifth as many visits as the main Red Nose Day website.

You can see from the chart below that visits to the key Comic Relief websites have been increasing significantly in the run up to the main event tonight. The large spike of traffic to the BBC Red Nose Day site (the orange line) on 5 March 2011 was during the 24 Hour Panel People show, which as the title suggests was a 24 hour marathon session of panel shows hosted by David Walliams.

The one brand to really benefit from Comic Relief traffic was TK Maxx this year. The fashion retailer is a sponsor and supporter of the 2011 event selling Comic Relief merchandise including special Red Nose Day T-shirts. 3.66% of all searches for Comic Relief terms went to the TK Maxx website, although the majority of those clicks came through paid links.

The other big recipient of traffic in the last few days has been the Radio1 website. Visits to www.bbc.co.uk/Radio1 increased by 500% between 15 March and 17 March as DJ Chris Moyles and Comedy Dave raised £2.4 million in a record breaking 52 hour radio show.

Enjoy Comic Relief tonight and please give generously to the charity. You can follow us on Twitter for more data updates.