Edinburgh Festival drives travel searches

Heather Hopkins at Hitwise UK writes:

With the Edinburgh Fringe Festival kicking off on Sunday, the Edinburgh International Festival starting Sunday week and the Edinburgh Military Tattoo kicking off Friday, travel related searches for Edinburgh have taken off.

Two weeks ago, searches for "edinburgh festival" shot up to become the top search query to contain the keyword "edinburgh", overtaking searches for "edinburgh airport" which typically tops the list.

Share of UK searches for "edinburgh festival" are up 60% compared with two weeks ago; "edinburgh hotels" are up 248%; "hotels in edinburgh" are up 86%; and "cheap flights to edinburgh" are up 146%.

Despite being overtaken by "edinburgh festival", searches for "edinburgh airport" are also up, 31% compared with two weeks ago.

Searches for "edinburgh festival" send visits to the official sites for the Edinburgh International and Fringe Festivals as indicated in the following table:

Eif.co.uk – 54.53%
Edfringe.com – 21.16%
Edinburgh-festivals.com – 4.9%
Edinburghguide.com – 1.96%
Theatrebreaks.com – 1.79%
Scotsman.com – 1.63%
Edinburghfestivals.co.uk – 1.36%
Wikipedia.org – 0.98%
Edlets.com – 0.98%
Edfilmfest.org.uk – 0.98%

Last week, the Edinburgh Fringe Festival website received more than 2.5 times more visits than the Edinburgh International Festival website, which received slightly less traffic than the website for the Edinburgh Military Tattoo.

The top downstream sites from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival website last week were for venues, including the Gilded Balloon, Pleasance Edinburgh, and Traverse.

Also among the top downstream sites were several travel sites, with 8% of the sites downstream visits going to travel sites last week.

The most prominent were accommodation sites, which are linked to from the Fringe Festival website, including Active Hotels, Ed Lets and Late Rooms.

Active Hotels is not only depending on the partnership with the Fringe Festival website to drive hotel business in Edinburgh, the site is also among the top recipients of visits from searches for "edinburgh hotels".

In the past four weeks, Active Reservations, Active Hotels' reservation site, was the number 2 recipient of visits from searches for "edinburgh hotel" after Hotel Direct.

Active Hotels has effectively diversified its online marketing to receive visits not only from the relatively expensive term "edinburgh hotels" but also from a partnership with the festival's website.

Such partnerships can be an effective way to reduce customer acquisition costs and maximise ROI.

Heather Hopkins, vice president for research, Hitwise UK

Read more from Heather on her Hitwise blog