It hasn’t received much attention in the media over the last week so you probably haven’t noticed, but the iPhone goes on sale in the UK today. 02 is the exclusive British carrier, although the phone will be available via three separate retailers: 02, Apple and Carphone Warehouse. As the table below illustrates, these three companies combined received over 60% of all traffic from the search term ‘iPhone’ during the 4 weeks ending 3rd November.

When you combine the share of its two sites, Apple received the most traffic from the term - although it’s interesting to see that more people went to the global iPhone page than the UK homepage. A successful paid search campaign has helped www.o2.co.uk rise to the top of the pile: ‘iPhone’ is now third most popular search term sending traffic to its homepage, and it has been steadily increasing its share since the 02 / Apple partnership was announced in September.

The chart below illustrates the volume of UK searches for ‘iPhone, and there are a number of clear peaks. The first, and so far largest, was back in January when the product was first revealed by Steve Jobs at the Macworld convention. The second occurred in the summer, when the product was released in the US, while the third occurred in September when the UK release date was announced. So far this fourth peak hasn’t exceeded the initial January peak, but then we don’t yet have the search data for this week. When we have this data next week we’ll let you know what happened, as well as revealing which of the three retailers saw the biggest boost in traffic to their websites as a result.

Robin Goad

Robin Goad is Research Director, Hitwise UK. This piece was originally published on Hitwise analyst blog here.

Flickr Image By fridgeuk