Comic Relief websites dominate traffic survey and search terms
Howard Lake | 27 March 2005 | News
Comic Relief’s website achieved a massive rise in traffic in the month before Red Nose Day and the final of the celebrity Fame Academy competition on 12 March 2005.
According to web traffic monitors Hitwise UK, “the Red Nose Day activities prompted a huge surge in traffic to several key sites, including Comic Relief’s official RND ’05 website (www.rednoseday.com), the BBC’s Red Nose Day site (www.bbc.co.uk/rednoseday) and the Comic Relief website itself (www.comicrelief.com)”.
The rednoseday.com site ultimately achieved a massive market share figure of 14.6% on Friday March 12, becoming the second most popular site in the Hitwise Community sector. It was beaten only by the BBC’s Red Nose Day site, which jumped more than 227 places overall to achieve a remarkable 20% market share of the Community category. This was the URL promoted on the BBC telethon. Thus two Comic Relief site’s achieve 34.6% share of the Hitwise Community category.
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Celebrity Fame Academy, part of the Red Nose Day campaign, raised more than £1.3 million for the charity by registering 8.25 million votes in the weeks leading up Friday’s final. At the same time the offical Fame Academy site at www.bbc.co.uk/fameacademy achieved a four-fold increase in traffic. According to Hitwise UK, “the site held just over 1% of all traffic to the Hitwise Television category on Friday 4th March, and this increased to almost 4% by Thursday 11th March as viewers cast last-minute votes for their favourite celebrities.”
Comic Relief’s success was in part driven by online searches, and it dominated the month’s most popular search terms. Both ‘red nose day’ and ‘comic relief’ dominated the top terms in March, with a combined market share of over 3%.
At the same time, Oxfam’s Make Poverty History campaign also did well, with the term ‘make poverty history’ the ninth most searched-for term resulting in traffic to the Community sector.
Other popular terms in the Community sector search terms for March list included ‘wristbands’ at number seven, reflecting the craze for charity wristbands.
According to Hitwise UK, the top 10 search terms in the community category, based on data for the four weeks ending 19 March 2005, were:
Search Term Share (%)
1. red nose day 1.69
2. comic relief 1.59
3. national trust 0.68
4. rspb 0.49
5. oxfam 0.48
6. rspca 0.43
7. wristbands 0.38
8. telephone preference service 0.38
9. make poverty history 0.35
10. race for life 0.34
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.