Today sees the start of Wimbledon and with conversation around the office turning to strawberries, cream, and how long it will take Andy Murray to disappoint us all for another year; I thought it would be nice to look at how the UK Internet population were reacting to the SW19′s biggest annual sporting event.
Looking at the seasonality of searches for all terms concerning the tennis tournament the first thing to notice is that there are two spikes in search traffic each year in June and in December.
Clearly the search spikes in June correspond to the occurrence of the tournament itself, whereas the December spike in search volume coincides with the closing date each year of the AELTC Public Ballot for tickets which traditionally closes in the third week of December. What’s interesting about this year is that Wimbledon searches have been building to a crescendo as early as February this year, much earlier than the typical spike which tends to come a couple of weeks before the tournament. This is most likely attributable to Andy Murray’s performances this year, with a grand slam final in the Australian open at the end of January, a strong performance in the French Open and winning at Queen’s earlier this year, Murray is raising hopes of a British Wimbledon champion and hence searches have been increasing earlier in the season.
As ever at Wimbledon, the weather is going to play a key role over the next two weeks. With the weather being decidedly unpredictable over the last week or so, it wasn’t surprising to see a number of weather related terms sprinkled in the ‘wimbledon’ search term variations. In fact the word ‘weather’ was included in 1.76% of all search variations for Wimbledon in the week ending 18 June. This differs quite a lot from last year’s tournament, which was unusually blessed with beautiful sunny weather. You can see how this was mirrored in online behaviour in the chart below by tracking visits to our Sports Tennis category and the News and Media Weather category.
In 2010 there was very little correlation between visits to tennis websites and visits to weather websites during the course of the Wimbledon tournament (highlighted above in blue). In fact when visits spiked during the first week of Wimbledon 2010, visits to the weather category actually decreased. Compare those results to this year (highlighted in green) and you can see how closely intertwined visits are to both categories. As interest grows in Wimbledon, online consumers are also keen to see if the matches will be played, or rained off.
For those of us who won’t get the opportunity to see the tennis live, there is of course plenty of action to be seen on TV, and for the first time ever the Wimbledon final will be broadcast in glorious 3D. Interestingly in the week when searches for all terms relating to Wimbledon 3D spiked, searches online for 3D TVs decreased by 8.33%.
However, one brand that saw an increase in traffic from 3D TV searches was Sony. The Sony website increased its traffic from 3D-related searches by 3.64% during the week of the Wimbledon 3D announcement. This is largely due to the advertising campaign that Sony put out in the run up to Wimbledon, as well as the Bounc3D micro site which saw a ten-fold traffic increase in the week ending 18 June.
Enjoy the tennis, and don’t forget to follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.
