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Searching for love - Hitwise has the winners this Valentine's Day

As Valentine's Day approaches, people are turning to the search engines for romantic inspiration. Here's who's benefiting from all that lovely search engine traffic.

Personalised card company Moonpig.com is currently experiencing its highest ever level of UK Internet traffic in the run up to Valentine's Day, according to Hitwise, the leading online competitive intelligence service.

For the week ending the 2nd of February 2008, UK Internet visits to the Moonpig website have grown six-fold by comparison to the same week in 2006, making it currently the most visited website within Hitwise's UK Flowers & Gifts sector.

Searches for 'moonpig' have doubled year-on-year to the four weeks ending 2 February 2008 and it is now the second most searched for term sending traffic to Flowers & Gifts websites, after 'interflora'.

The majority of visitors to the website are women, who accounted for 60-65% of visitors to the website over the last year. The website allows you to select from a wide range of cards that can be personalised.

"Flowers still remain the number one Valentine's gift this year," commented Robin Goad, Director of Research for Hitwise, "but the success of Moonpig and other similar sites illustrates just how popular online card delivery sites have become."

In 2007, 'valentines poems' was the largest search term containing the word 'valentines' during the week ending the 17th of February 2007, overtaking searches for 'valentines gifts' and 'valentines cards'. This trend looks to be replicated this year, with searches for 'valentines poems' already on the increase.

Poemsforfree.com received 30% of UK Internet traffic from searches for 'valentines poems' last year during the valentine season, and has received 41% of traffic from searches for the term over the last four weeks. Over half (59%) of visitors to the website are female.

The most popular types of poems being searched for are 'short valentines poems', 'funny valentines poems' and 'rude valentines poems', with the vast majority of sites receiving traffic from searches relying on organic rather than paid search.

In addition to sending cards and poems to their loved ones, Britain's Valentine lovers are also busy booking romantic breaks.

There have been more searches for romantic getaways this year than there were in 2007, with searches for 'romantic weekend breaks', 'romantic hotels' and 'romantic breaks' on the increase during January.

UK consumers are visiting boutique hotel booking websites as opposed to larger travel agencies, with sites such as Roomforromance.com, Romantichotels.co.uk and Offpeakluxury.com among the top recipients of traffic.

11th February 2008


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Five Questions to find out what makes an internet entrepreneur tick?

Kieran Donoghue

 "I believe some people have a little something in their head that makes them look at things in a slightly different way. Some people absolutely cannot envisage doing anything but working for somebody else - and that is fine. However I believe entrepreneurs are born and will always find a way to do things differently."
Kieron Donoghue,
ukoffer.com

Take one internet entrepreneur - for instance Kieron Donoghue (pictured above) - and ask them Five Questions.

Also in the Five Questions hot seat this month is Victoria Vanstone of yourdeathwish.com.



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