Cheapflights has hit back at research by search marketing agency Greenlight that suggested that it had suffered a 25% drop in search visibility.
The company said it “suspects their source data might be at fault” and that Greenlight may have placed too much importance and weight on the single word “flight”, suggesting it accounts for 59% of all searches.
A spokesman for Cheapflights said: “We respectfully disagree with this weighting and in fact, Cheapflights’ data shows this is a considerable over-estimation and skews the data.
He added: “According to Hitwise figures for last December, the term ‘cheap flights’ drives around 85 times more traffic than ‘flight’. In addition, the term ‘flight’ was not amongst the top 600 plus terms driving traffic to the industry. Only a few years ago the top name associated with the search word ‘flight’ was NASA!”
He added: “Applying Hitwise figures for December to Greenlight’s data would fundamentally change the order of most visible sites. We suspect it would leave Cheapflights.co.uk at or very close to the top of the pile.
“Whilst Cheapflights may not have top visibility for every flight related term, the Company’s attention is focused firmly on the terms that we believe are important for consumers, and consequently Cheapflights continues to enjoy strong visibility across the board.”
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I’d have to agree with cheapflights’ analysis… just looking at a one-word search term in isolation is pretty meanigless. People tend to search for a massive range of much more specific terms. For example, if you want to get to Venice from Manchester cheaply, you’re much more likely to enter “cheap flights from Manchester to Venice” than you are to enter just “flights”. It’s the same thing with villas. People don’t tend to search for just the term “holiday villas”. They’re much more likely to search for something like “holiday villas in tuscany” — the more specific you are in your search term, the more likely you are to filter through the noise and find something relevant to you. It’s a similar idea to Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail”
Tom
Speaking of broadcasting, I am wondering what thoughts you have on heritage and the world of “add-ons” connected to TV.