If nothing else, the birth of Harper Seven Beckham has taught us that Shakespeare was wrong. “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” wrote the Bard, yet the phenomenal interest online caused by the naming of baby Beckham proves that really there is quite a lot in a name.

In the last week searches for all terms including the word ‘harper’ increased six-fold,. During the week ending 9 July 2011 the most popular variation was ‘harper adams‘, before being resoundingly overtaken by ‘harper seven beckham’ for the week ending 16 July 2011. Such was the popularity of the new Beckham girl that 55% of all ‘harper’ search variations that week also included the word ‘seven’ and 34% included ‘beckham’.

UK Internet users have a voracious appetite for information about celebrity babies, which almost rivals the incessant fascination with amusing pictures of cute cats. On 11 July Harper Seven was the most searched for person in the UK, followed by Victoria Beckham and Rebekah Brooks. To put the figures into context, ‘harper seven beckham’ was the 56th biggest search term in the UK on 11 July and there were more searches for Harper Seven than for Rebekah Brooks, Rupert Murdoch, Jeremy Clarkson and Cheryl Cole combined!
One of the key trends to emerge from the search data was that people were interested in the meaning of the name Harper Seven. The Beckhams later revealed on Facebook that they chose the name Harper after Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird. Our search term sequence tool shows what people were searching for immediately after a search for ‘harper seven’

The eighth most popular search performed immediately after a search for ‘harper seven’ last week was for ‘harper lee’ which in turn generated searches for To Kill a Mockingbird.

Between the week ending 9 July and the week ending 16 July, searches for ‘harper lee’ increased 10-fold, whilst searches for ‘to kill a mockingbird’ doubled. Various news stories yesterday announced that To Kill a Mockingbird surged to number 22 on Amazon’s bestsellers list as a result of Harper Seven. However, looking at the downstream traffic from the search term ‘to kill a mockingbird’ Amazon received surprisingly little traffic from the term, with the majority of visits going to Wikipedia last week.

Given the increase in interest in the book, this represents a real missed opportunity for Amazon, and all online book retailers, especially when the paid rates were so low, a well timed PPC campaign could have generated a lot of visits for a canny retailer. Interestingly, when we looked at the fastest moving search terms driving traffic to Amazon on Monday (18 July) To Kill a Mockingbird didn’t even make the top 10.
The fastest moving search term on Monday for Amazon was in fact ‘curved nail file’ – congratulations to Lord Sugar and Apprentice winner Tom Pellereau for increasing searches for curved nail files 100-fold in the space of a week.
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