With a number of new musicals coming to the West End, visits to the ticketing category have risen by 13.5% in the last four weeks.

Clearly not all of the growth throughout June has been driven by searches for musicals as the Ticketing category also attracts traffic across multiple verticals for music gigs, festivals, sporting events and theatre.

However, the prominence of the musical terms within all searches driving traffic to the ticketing websites indicates that a significant proportion of this growth is attributable to musicals rather than other events.
The hottest new show in town is definitely Shrek the Musical, with an eleven-fold increase in search traffic in the first week of June alone.

Looking at all of the search terms relating to Shrek typed into search engines so far in June, 65% of those have contained the word ‘musical’ and 8% of them have also contained the word ‘tickets’. Despite the success and prominence of searches for Shrek the Musical though, what’s interesting is that the loveable green ogre wasn’t able to topple the equally loveable lion Symba from the top of the musical tree.

You can see from the table above that the most searched for musical in the four weeks ending 18 June 2011 was indeed the Lion King, narrowly beating Shrek in the total search volume driving traffic to the Ticketing category.
Whilst Shrek might well have aspirations to be king of the musicals, for now at least, the Lion King still reigns supreme with UK Internet users.
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