Halloween more popular than Christmas in the UK

Research carried out by Marler Haley has identified that in the UK, more people search for Halloween than Christmas. Read more about these findings...

The findings suggest that Halloween has surpassed Christmas for yearly number of related searches.

Understanding seasonal trends is important to businesses who are looking to produce seasonal products and content to engage with their website visitors at the right time.

55% more searches for Halloween than Christmas

From new seasonal products, to writing engaging content that can drive more website traffic, understanding seasonal trends plays an important role in every business.

Marler Haley’s findings show that in 2016 there was 55% more search traffic for Halloween in October than Christmas searches in December.

 

 

• Halloween had 11.4 million related searches in the UK in October 2016 as compared to Christmas’ 7.3 million related searches in December 2016.

Talking about this research, Andrew Pocock, Marler Haley’s managing director said:

“We were shocked to see that more people search for Halloween related content in October than Christmas in December in the UK.

“For businesses, search trends play an important role in understanding when to launch seasonal content.

“These findings highlight that when developing seasonal content, not every UK holiday or celebration should be treated with the same development timeline.

“People begin to search with earnest for both Halloween and Christmas in September, even though the celebrations are two months apart.

“This suggests that if you’re planning seasonal content for your business, then it’s best to check the seasonality for the exact holiday you’re planning for to maximise potential traffic and profit.”

Christmas success due to early searches

Although Halloween has more people searching in October than Christmas in December, Christmas has a much longer search tail, with people starting their festive searches in September.

• 69% of Halloween’s annual search volume is in October as compared to Christmas, where December has 48% of its annual search volume

Christmas was stolen by Halloween

Given the annual trend data, Marler Haley found that in 2016, Halloween has a higher annual search volume than Christmas related terms.

• In 2016, Christmas had 15.4m related searches, as compared to Halloween, which had 15.9m related searches.

Halloween is more mobile than Christmas

More people were found to search for Halloween on a mobile device as compared to Christmas.

• 47% of searches for Christmas related terms  were mobile as compared to 63% of Halloween searches being mobile.

There was no statistical difference between the percentage of search in the month of the celebration verses the annual total, but this may be due to the high percentage of total search in the celebration month.

About the research

The research was carried out by Marler Haley using Google trends to search for ‘Christmas’ and ‘Halloween’ in the UK.

These trends were cross referenced against search volumes for words that contain these keywords in Google Adwords Keyword planner.

This created approximate monthly search volumes going back to 2004 for searches that contained these keywords.

For a raw data pack, please email marketing at marlerhaley dot co dot uk