Dig Into Holiday Recipes
November 9th, 2010 | Published in Google CPG
Post by Scott Townsend, CPG Account Planner and Ali Manning, CPG Industry Analyst
Earlier this year, Google CPG held our first “Dig Into Data” session, where we explored holiday recipe opportunities for advertisers. There are over 500M recipes [1] during the holiday season, which makes November and December a critical time to win for CPG advertisers. Not only have we consistently seen searches spiking around the holidays, but the volume of searches has increased year over year, as depicted here:
Interestingly, both the Super Bowl and Cinco De Mayo appear to have become more popular holiday eating occasions within the last four years.
During the winter holidays, people are 3x more likely to be searching for “easy recipes”. Easy pie recipes, in particular, top the request list [2]:
As we dug through the data, we find that Thanksgiving recipe Searchers often prepare in 3 phases (Research, Plan, and Last Minute). Among the core items searched for, the items broke down into Pie, Turkey, and sides.
Baking takes center stage during Christmas with core items including Christmas cookies, which receive 45% of all cookie related searches, and cheesecake which gets 71% of all cake related searches during the Christmas season.
Our data also shows that during the winter holidays, consumers are 1/2 as likely to search for “healthy recipes” than any other average point in the year. Perhaps people save their healthy recipe searches for after the New Year, thinking that if you’re going to do the holidays right, you might as well go big or go home!
Sources:
[1] Hitwise + Ad Planner source
[2] Google Internal Data