I just can’t seem to get away from prom dresses (click here for my history on the subject, subscription required)! While preparing for last week’s Hitwise Search Breakfast, I created a chart on the search volume for the query “prom dresses.” The chart below is an excellent example of search criticality with the insight that searches from “prom dresses” spike as early as the second week of January.

On a whim I decided to create the same chart using our UK data (when in London…). To my surprise there is a similar pattern of searches.

In talking with our UK marketing manager Jannie Cahill, she registered some concerns as there are no proms in the UK. Not to be deterred, I performed a search term analysis on prom dresses and found a number of UK domains listed as receiving traffic on the term, one of them was teentoday.co.uk. Jannie and I decided to phone the proprietor of this site, Ollie, and ask him a few questions about this phenomenon…
According to Ollie, while there are no proms in the UK, there are end-of-school balls, and with the increasing number of US television shows making their way to the UK, teens in the UK are increasing their searches on “prom dresses.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of the UK chart is the magnitude of prom dress searches during the months leading up to winter formals. We see a much less pronounced trend here in the U.S. Our hypothesis was that searches use “prom dresses” as a proxy search for holiday ball gowns.
While there are some interesting sociological take-aways from this, for the search marketer, it’s a good illustration of the use of proxy search terms. O.K. enough talk about prom dresses! I’m moving on to another favorite topic: shotguns and pickup…