On Friday July 30, the iPhone 4 was launched in Canada and Hitwise data reveals that Canadians turned to social networks, blogs and retailers after searching for the highly coveted phone.
In the week after the launch (week to 7 August 2010) “iphone 4″ was the top Canadian search term that included the word “iphone”, followed by “iphone” and “iphone 4 canada”. The top downstream websites from the search term “iPhone 4″ were Apple.com, Telus Mobility and Bell.ca.
Social networks were popular sources for information and reviews In the week of the launch (week to 31 July 2010), Facebook was the #2 downstream website from searches for “iphone”, receiving 20% of clicks. Last week, YouTube was the #4 downstream website (after Bell.ca), receiving 5% of searches.
I created a Search Term Portfolio to look at downstream websites for the top 100 search terms that included “iphone 4″ in the past twelve weeks. Again, Apple.com was the #1 downstream site receiving 14% of iphone 4 clicks. Telus was #2 with 12% of clicks and Bell.ca #3 with 8% of clicks. The popular blog, iPhoneinCanada.ca had been the #1 recipient of iphone 4 searches two weeks before the launch but took the #4 spot last week. Facebook and YouTube were again among the top 10 downstream websites for iphone 4 searches.
As the following chart illustrates the traffic to Bell.ca and TelusMobility.com from iPhone 4 searches spiked up post-launch indicating that paid search marketing was employed to capture visits. This is also a nice case study of how important social networks and blogs were to information gathering and decision making in the lead up to the launch.

On a separate note, this will be my last blog post for a while as I will be on maternity leave as of the end of this week.