The online research company recorded almost 10, 000 variations on the search term 'vouchers' over a period of only ten weeks. While generic searches for discount or free vouchers were prominent in the top ten phrases, the list also included searches for shop-specific vouchers for big names such as Tesco. The top five variations of voucher searches they found were:
- Discount vouchers
- Vouchers
- Tesco vouchers
- Childcare vouchers
- Tesco clubcard vouchers
Viral voucher campaigns can be an effective way for retailers to entice consumers onto their sites - in December Hitwise showed an increase in traffic for a number of sites who released voucher campaigns.
As the demand for vouchers rises, enterprising sites materialize to capitalise on the demand. There a number of dedicated voucher aggregation/affiliate sites and Hitwise charted the top five. The comined market share of these five has increased almost five fold over the last year - with MyVoucherCodes and VoucherCodes currently outperforming the rest.
However, by studying clickstream data Hitwise surmise that people are browsing multiple voucher websites in the hopes of finding the best possible deal - voucher sites sent 62.4% of their traffic to Shopping and Classifieds last month and 24.3% of that went to their Rewards and Directories category.
If users carry on searching for vouchers that will save them cash on their online shopping - a trend that's likely to increase in the run up to Christmas if last year's figures are anything to go by - then affiliate and voucher aggregation sites may be on their way to having stuffed stockings over the fireplace too.
