DirectLineHolidays and FirstChoice top Greenlight’s integrated search report for the holiday sector

London, 4 November, 2009 - Greenlight, the UK's leading independent search marketing agency has released its first quarterly integrated research report for the holiday sector. Each report consists of both natural and paid search data, to offer a fully integrated analysis. The report determines the most visible holiday operators and aggregators in Google natural and paid search results for Q3 2009.

This latest research is based on more than 29 million searches that took place between June and August 2009 for holiday related search terms. The searches were categorised into generic holiday terms and broken down by short haul and long haul destinations. This data was then used to rank the most visible brands on page 1 of Google's search results.

According to Greenlight's report, the most visible websites in natural search results during July 2009 were DirectLineHolidays, Thompson and HolidayHypermarket, achieving 71%, 62% and 55% visibility respectively. The agency's natural search league table shows that only 16 out of the 60 top sites were visible to more than 10% of the searches performed in July 2009.

Greenlight's research analysed 3200 of the most popular generic keywords for holidays. The generic term 'holidays' accounted for 25% of all holiday related searches that took place in July 2009. The most popular destination-based search term was 'Turkey holiday'. This differs from other travel sectors such as flights and hotels where Greenlight's analysis has seen Spanish-related terms consistently being the most searched for.

The paid search section of the report determines an advertiser's share of voice based on how often they appear on Google, which ad position they are bidding for and the search volume generated for the keywords they bid on. The ranking represents visibility across the top 90 keywords in July 2009.

FirstChoice was the most visible advertiser in paid search reaching 65% share of voice, achieved largely by effective bidding on 68 of the 90 keywords analysed in Greenlight's report at an average ad position of four. Second and third positions were achieved by TeletextHolidays and IceLolly with 51% and 40% visibility respectively. Of the top 10 advertisers only three were direct providers, FirstChoice, ThomasCook and Thomson. This is consistent with Greenlight's other travel sector reports, such as hotels and flights, where aggregators bid aggressively in the paid search space.

Greenlight currently produces quarterly research reports covering a broad cross section of industries including insurance, gaming, car hire, retail banking, travel and white and brown goods amongst others.

Please note: If you plan to run this story online, please link any references to Greenlight via the following: http://www.greenlightsearch.com/sectorreports/holidays.html