Hitwise has been asked by TIME Magazine online to write a regular column titled “The Science of Search”. If this isn’t an indication of the mainstream appreciation for search marketing and search data analysis, I don’t know what is.
Even better, their first column is about Health and Fitness!
- Click here to read about The Four Day Diet Craze -
Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise, writes about the endless cycle of Diet Madness, and the fleetingness of our interest for the topic.
After studying the “Diet Search” trends for the last four years, he has discovered that the yearly pinnacle happens – not surprisingly – during the first week of January. However, Mr. Tancer says “What is surprising is just how fleeting an interest Internet users have in losing weight.” His findings show that, by the second week of the year, diet searches begin a 32% plummet and do not recover until the summer swimwear season, and even then coming nowhere close to our New Years Resolution search volume. The poorest performing holiday for Diet-related searches is on Thanksgiving Day, and diet searches remain very low all the way through to the first week of January, when the whole cycle repeats.
One interesting tidbit is that “diet” related searches were leaps and bounds ahead of “health” and “fitness” searches, and among the diet searches, quick fixes outperformed long-term solutions by a mile. Tops searches were for things like “cabbage soup diet” and “three day diets” or “special K diet”. That really tells you something about the society in which we live, not that it should come as a surprise.
I don’t know if I have ever said this on my blog, but I LOVE HITWISE. They are extremely pricey, but if you can manage to put their data into action – rather than just reading it for pleasure – it can be worth the spend. If not, perhaps you should subscribe to the Hitwise Blog, and Bill Tancer’s Blog, where you can get free tidbits from time to TIME.
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