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Financial Crisis & Recession: Consumers decide to choose for a savings account

By t.lentjes

Tags: financial crisis, google insights for search, recession

The financial crisis is without any doubt one of the most hottest items at the moment. Google Insights for Search, a Google tool that recognizes trends in search engine traffic shows us some interesting insights. Noteworthy is that specific events like the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers on the 15th of September, but also governmental plans to influence the financial crisis have severe influence on search engine traffic for financial crisis in both the US as the Netherlands. And what do people do in times of financial insecurity? Right, they go back to putting their money on a savings account. At the moment that the first signs of a recession show up, consumers massively start searching for savings accounts in Google and the insecurity of investing in stocks is put aside and so less searches on those terms remain.

After using Google Insights for the search term ‘financial crisis’ some interesting insights show up. As of 15 September one can see that the search traffic for the term ‘financial crisis’ increases, which is a logical response to the bankruptcy of Lehman brothers on that specific day. This increase in traffic on ‘financial crisis’ remains until the 19th of September. On this day the US government announced that it was working on a rescue plan for the financial sector, which caused a higher closing of Wall Street and above that a certain amount of trust was spread that lead to a decrease in search on ‘financial crisis’. Also the Google news result at [B] refers to this event. What though has to be taken into caution is that less financial searches are being performed during the weekend. After the weekend the worries about the financial crisis rose again as some critical notes were made about the rescue plan. This trend continued until the 26th of September, when the weekend started and President Bush made a statement that something had to be done to cool down the crisis in the financial world (Google News Result A). Now that on Monday the rescue plan was turned down by the parliament, there is no doubt that the increase in searches on financial crisis will keep on rising.

Until the rescue plan is fully approved, it looks like there will be enough rumor and so searches concerning the financial crisis. Next to that one can say that although the fact that it is only an indication, there sure is a certain amount of commotion that lives around the topic financial crisis that can be seen with Google Insights.

Also the Netherlands was hit by the financial crisis in the US. The increase in searches on the term ‘kredietcrisis’ (financial crisis) appears to be the same as in the US. But what is the thing that Dutch people do in the event of a financial recession? They return to old Calvinistic values in which the secure savings account becomes more important compared to the insecurity of investing in stocks. Google insights show that at the moment that the Dutch Economy start showing signs of a recession, the consumer starts looking for security and so searches on savings accounts (*sparen) etc. started to take off compared to risky investments (*beleggen). Anyway this is the time for banks to go loose in the search engine with saving related products as the consumer is now looking for this.

About t.lentjes

Theo Lentjes is a SEA Consultant at Onetomarket. He advices clients like American Express, AEGON Bank & FD on Search Engine Advertising.

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