Firefox 3 Launch Affects Web Traffic

Polvi previously highlighted some interesting Firefox related search patterns via Google Trends.  With the recent launch of Firefox 3, we thought it’d be wise to update that analysis.  Internally, we could see that web traffic to www.mozilla.com spiked by a wild factor on Download Day and that traffic coming in through our search engine marketing programs similarly increased.  But, what did this mean more broadly?

Looking outward via a tool like Google Trends can help us better put our evidence into perspective.  While I’ve been waiting for the regular Google Trends chart to optimally show the impact of Download Day, in the meantime we can see some of the impact via Google’s Hot Trends.  Looking at the data for June 17th, you’ll notice that three Firefox related terms appear in the top 100 list: #27 is “mozilla firefox 3 download”, #80 is “get firefox” and #99 is “firefox 3 release date”.  As Google explains here, “Hot Trends aren’t the search terms people look for most often — those are pretty predictable, like [weather] or [games]…  Instead, the Hot Trends algorithm analyzes millions of searches to find those that are deviating the most relative to their past traffic.  And the outcome is the Hot Trends list.”

The drill-down capability is a cool feature.  For example, looking at “mozilla firefox 3 download” below, you’ll notice that the hotness factor was “On Fire” and 10am pacific time represented the peak hour of day (which was also true of the other two search terms).