This week my colleague, Kathleen Campbell, upon seeing my previous post on sandals and boots, brought up the fact that Sandals is a very popular resort chain. The January spike in “sandals” I mentioned may be from vacation shoppers, since at Hitwise we know that visits to travel sites spike the first week in January. Using Hitwise Search Term Analysis, I was able to see that for the four weeks ending January 29, 2005 64% of the domains receiving traffic from the term “sandals” were either Sandals Resort sites or related travel sites. The bulk of the remaining sites receiving visits from the term were shoe sites. However, during prime sandal-shopping season, the four weeks ending June 4, 2005, only 43% of searches on “sandals” resulted in a visit to the Sandals Resorts website, and the remainder were mostly sandal retailers. This exercise demonstrates 1) that online marketers need to be careful about double meanings of their keywords, and 2) the meanings of keywords can take on a different significance depending on the season.
A colleague in our New York office, Carrie Berman, sent me a chart that may suggest cowboy boots may be in this year, while Ugg boots are on their way out. Last winter, Ugg boots were everywhere, and they were hard to find as many stores were sold out. This year, we might see less of them, and potentially more cowboy boots, if our search term data is any indication.

In order to double-check this theory, I went to the Hitwise Search Term Suggestion tool, entered the term “boots,” and found that for the four weeks ending October 8, 2005, “cowboy boots” was the number one variation, comprising 1.11% of the 5,089 keywords we captured containing the word “boots.” At the same time, “ugg boots” was number 6 and made up 0.74% of the “boot” keywords. Because it’s not quite cold enough for Ugg boots in early October, and cowboy boots can be worn with shorts, particularly if you’re Jessica Simpson, I checked last year’s data and found that for the week ending October 9, 2004, “ugg boots” comprised 1.84% of boot searches, while “cowboy boots” accounted for 0.76%. I think the fashion conscious will be wearing cowboy boots this winter, although they may need to dig out last year’s Uggs when the weather gets really cold.