This weekend is Father’s Day and in the run up to the celebratory day on Sunday, search term behaviour has revolved around, dates, gift ideas and cards.

What becomes immediately apparent when looking at the search data for the last four weeks ending 11 June is the number of search terms relating to the actual date of Father’s Day. Three of the top 10 search terms were variations of the question: when is Father’s Day? Looking at all of the Father’s Day variations in those four weeks, 11% of all search terms included the word ‘when’.

This desire to know the date of Father’s Day 2011 led to a much higher proportion than you might expect of Father’s Day searches ending up on content based websites. Certainly given the lucrative opportunities that Father’s Day presents for retailers, it is surprising that Getting Personal is the only stand out retailer receiving traffic from all searches for Father’s Day search terms.

Unlike the highlighted content based sites above, Getting Personal has a noticeable amount of its traffic coming from paid links (28% of all clicks) but the retailer is also head and shoulders above the retail competition, receiving 2.82% of all clicks from UK Internet users searching for a Father’s Day term.
What’s interesting this year about the Father’s Day search data is that there was a big year-on-year increase in search terms relating to homemade crafts and personalised gifts that children could make for their fathers. Within the fast moving search terms between the four weeks ending 11 June 2011 and the four weeks ending 12 June 2010 people were searching for cards and craft ideas that they could do with their children to make for fathers.

However, although the emphasis this year seems to have shifted from buying gifts to making gifts, online retail still has a big part to play in the run up to Sunday 19 June. There was still a 12-fold increase in searches for Father’s Day gifts and presents in the last four weeks.

Looking at the top recipients of downstream traffic from searches for Father’s Day gifts and presents the interesting trend here is the lack of big multi-channel retailers receiving traffic from gift searches. Of the top 10 recipients, only M&S is a recognisable high street name, with consumers preferring more niche online specialists like Firebox.com, I Want One of Those and NotOnTheHighStreet in order to find special Father’s Day gifts.
Follow us on Twitter for more Father’s Day revelations and to all the fellow Dads out there, make the most of your day.