With her new book out, an appearance on Oprah and a controversial photo on the cover of Newsweek, searches for “sarah palin” rocketed last week.
Searches for “sarah palin” increased more than 3 fold last week to account for 0.024% of all US Internet searches. Last week, searches for “sarah palin” didn’t reach the levels when she first entered the national stage as John McCain’s running mate, but she did make it into the top 100 search terms, ranking #95 among all search terms in the week to 11/21/2009.
Last week there were 1,600 search terms that included the word “palin”. While Going Rogue, her new book, and the Newsweek cover dominated media attention, Internet search data reveals that consumer interest was consumed by “hot photos”. The #2 search term that included the word “palin” last week was “sarah palin hot photos”. Also among the top Search Term Varaitions were searches for her book tour and the Newsweek cover.
Among the top 15 Fast Moving to Google News last week were “”sara palin newsweek coverage” and “sarah palin book tour schedule”.
Book sellers capitalized on the frenzy but focussed paid search efforts on book related searches. While 98% of clicks on searches that contained the word “pain” went to organic listings, searches related to the book saw much higher levels of paid clicks. The top search term for the book was “going rogue” with 23% of clicks going to paid listings. Barnes and Nobel was the top recipient of clicks on the term “going rogue” last week. The term “going rogue sarah palin” saw 78% of clicks go to paid listings while “sarah palin book” saw 14% going to paid listings wiht Amazon.com was the #1 recipient for both terms.
Fast moving search term reports can be a great source of insight into the new products and services consumers are searching. Downstream websites reveals the sites visited after those queries allowing firms to benchmark their share of voice on various terms.