With holiday shopping behind us and the economy in recession, I wondered if we’d see any change in Internet searches for credit cards. Hitwise data indicate a 29% decrease in the share of US Internet searches for “credit cards” year on year in the four weeks to January 10, 2009. I also looked at search terms that include the words “credit card”. They are down 14% year on year. Does this mean we are racking up less credit card debt?
The latest data I could find were from November and indicate that consumers are becoming thriftier and spending less on credit. Perhaps this results in fewer people needing to shop around for credit cards.
I looked more closely at the data and as usual the plot thickens. I looked at the top 100 search terms that included the words “credit card” in the past four weeks (to January 10, 2009) and the equivalent period in 2008. While we’ve seen a sharp decline in the share of generic (or non-branded) queries, we’ve seen an increase in branded queries, in particular searches that include a financial institutions’ brand name.
To give you a taste of the data I looked at here’s a table showing the top 10 search terms that included the words “credit card” in the four weeks to January 10, 2009.

Notice that the top term is “chase credit card”. Other brands are also prominent on that top 10 list. In fact, looking at the top 100 search terms that include the words “credit card”, 59% include the brand name for a financial institution. After financial institutions, store brands are the most common terms included in queries with “credit card”. Searches that include a store brand with the word “credit card” made up 20% of queries.
Generic queries, those that didn’t include a brand name, only made up 15% of queries. The bar chart below shows searches by type in the most recent four week period and the equivalent period in 2008.

Looking at that chart, you will notice that the way consumers search for credit cards has changed. While branded searches have always dominated credit card queries, the share of searches with “credit card” that include the name of a financial institution has increased 46% year over year and searches that include a store brand have increased 68%. At the same time, generic queries have decreased 33%.
Has the credit crisis made consumers even more brand aware. We’ve heard of a “flight to quality” for investment products, perhaps there is also a flight to quality for credit cards?