It’s Halloween this week which means it’s time for all manner of frightful revelry again. Online Halloween search trends focus around three core themes: costumes, events and recipes. Of these three costumes is the biggest online Halloween topic with 32% of all searches including the word ‘costume’ or ‘costumes’ in the last four weeks.

The themed word cloud below shows the key recurring terms that have been typed into search engines by UK Internet users along with the word ‘halloween’. The terms that leap out are ‘costumes’, ‘fancy’, ‘womens’, ‘girls’ and ‘kids’ which indicate a strong skew towards what to wear for Halloween this year.

Most popular Halloween searches. Created in Tagxedo using Experian Hitwise data

Halloween-related searches have quadrupled in the last four weeks. One of the interesting things we’ve noticed this year is that Halloween costume searches are starting to increase in volume well before October. The first significant increase in search volume this year was in the last week of August, and perhaps not surprisingly it is terms for women’s costumes that are starting to increase earlier in the year. Male costume searches start to pick up much closer to Halloween itself.

Taking a deep dive into costume searches over the last 12 weeks, we can see the top generic costume ideas the UK was having for their Halloween festivities (i.e. people not searching for a specific character but a generic costume).

Top of the list is the Zombie, which accounted for 16% of all generic costume-related searches over the past 12 weeks. Second most popular was the Pirate costume, a little surprising given Pirates don’t have a natural affinity with Halloween in the same way as Vampires, Skeletons, Devils, Witches and Ghosts (all popular within the top 10). 23% of the generic searches for costumes were for “Other” assorted themes including Mummies, Elves, Werewolves and Ninjas.

One of the perennially popular themes for Halloween costumes is to dress as a superhero or movie character. It being Halloween, this tends to favour the more gothic characters, and so Tim Burton movie characters have been popular this year with high volumes of searches for Mad Hatter costumes, Corpse Bride costumes and Willy Wonka costumes.

However, more popular still this year was the glut of superhero costume searches. Of the 20 most popular character-based costume searches, 12 of them were for superheroes or supervillains from comics. Again, the darker, more gothic superheroes tend to have more appeal around this season so there was huge demand for Batman, Catwoman, Joker and Poison Ivy costumes. This year’s Avenger’s film has also had an effect on costume searches, with people looking to dress up as Iron Man, Thor and The Incredible Hulk.

Looking at the online retailers that were receiving traffic from Halloween searches this October you can see that a lot of the search clicks went through to specialist party and fancy dress shops.

Interestingly, despite a high paid rate of 42% Amazon UK was only the sixth biggest recipient of Halloween search traffic, receiving fewer clicks than eBay UK. Amazon is such a universal shopping destination that it is quite rare to see it appear this low in the downstream list for virtually any item, but it just goes to show there are still search opportunities available for retailers to capitalise on either by attaining additional clicks or by reducing paid search spend.

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