As an online retailer specialized in jewellery for men, Karus Chains has already made a name for itself with its online research into Internet search trends for jewellery. The e-commerce site has now presented the findings of its research into searches for watch brands over the period 2014-2015.
The big digital marketing agencies will go into great detail on Internet searches, covering a multitude of different search terms and charging a fortune for their results. Karus Chains takes a much simpler approach and publishes its findings free of charge on its own blog.
Apple Watch the brand
The simplified methodology of taking the most representative term for each search (usually just the brand name or a brand name followed by “watch”) sheds an interesting light on the results. Not surprising, since considering “Apple Watch” as a brand immediately puts it at the top of the list with around 60 million searches, compared with less than 10 million in 2014.
Taking the traditional Swiss watch brands into account, the picture is more familiar, with Rolex at the top and TAG Heuer just pipping Omega into second place compared with 2014 by virtue of its increase in search traffic (while Omega’s remained stable). Beyond that, however, you start to see the effect of the averages that Google’s Keyword Planner produces each keyword. According to this, TAG Heuer, Omega and Swatch all received identical search volumes last year, followed by Michael Kors watches, Tissot and Breitling on equal volumes of 5.4 million, then Patek Philippe, Hublot and Seiko on 4.4 million.
The unruly law of averages
Even allowing for these generalized averages, there are still some surprises. Piaget fares well (probably because the brand is famous for its jewellery as well, and no “watches” was added to the search term in this case), as does Panerai, both with nearly two million annual searches. Cartier and Tudor, on the other hand, are found towards the bottom of the table, in 37th and 49th position respectively. Is this an accurate reflection for a brand whose watch production puts it in the top three and another whose increasing popularity as an alternative to Rolex for collectors has seen its image soar and a unique piece fetch 100 times its estimate at last year’s Only Watch auction?
See the top 10 watch brands searched for on the Internet.
We have taken the top 50 compiled by Karus Chains and filtered it by those active in the fine watchmaking sector only. Here is the result based on annualised average monthly search volumes provided by Google’s Keyword Planner tool.
Top 26 luxury watch brands by Internet search volumes (2015)
1 Rolex 18,000,000
2 TAG Heuer 8,076,000
3 Omega 8,076,000
4 Breitling 5,400,000
5 Patek Philippe 4,416,000
6 Hublot 4,416,000
7 Seiko 4,416,000
8 Audemars Piguet 2,952,000
9 Longines 2,412,000
10 IWC - 2,412,000
11 Piaget – 1,980,000
12 Panerai - 1,980,000
13 Jaeger-LeCoultre – 1,620,000
14 Ulysse Nardin – 1,320,000
15 Richard Mille - 1,320,000
16 Vacheron Constantin – 1,086,000
17 Oris - 1,086,000
18 Raymond Weil - 1,086,000
19 Cartier – 888,000
20 Hamilton – 726,000
21 Frédérique Constant - 726,000
22 Breguet - 594,000
23 Franck Muller - 594,000
24 Corum - 594,000
25 Blancpain - 594,000
26 Tudor – 486,000
