What were the popular Valentine’s Day gifts this year? To identify new trends, we’ve taken a look at the top gift related terms that sent traffic to the Experian Hitwise category of Flowers and Gifts leading up to the much loved (or loathed) Valentine’s Day. The terms that sent more or less traffic to an industry is a great way to understand how customer intent and behaviors have changed over time.
While naturally there are many terms related to flower sellers, the fastest growing search term and top driver of traffic to the industry for the past two years, was “edible arrangements”. These gifts continued to be a big hit this year as they combine the visual aesthetic of a bouquet of flowers with a fruit basket.

Further filtering the terms driving traffic to the Flowers and Gifts category for only food related terms validates the importance of the Edible Arrangements brand in driving traffic. In addition to ‘edible arrangements’, terms related to websites selling berries, chocolate, and popcorn were also more popular year over year.

Given that ‘edible arrangements’ is a branded term, we decided to take a look at a top generic fruit-related term, ‘fruit baskets’, driving traffic to the Flowers and Gifts category. This was also a win for Edible Arrangements, they received over a quarter of all the traffic from the term “fruit baskets” through all organic traffic. Among the top 5 destination websites, all others depended upon paid traffic to help drive search traffic. Opportunities from search terms that are not highly visible can yield excellent results to both understand the level of competition before optimizing or incorporating into your paid search campaigns.

Thanks to James Varughese, an Analyst in our Custom Data & Analytics team for this Valentine’s Day analysis.