The most popular products in the different categories
Average monthly search volume data from H1 2019 to H1 2020 reveals some interesting changes.
Dr. Fauci’s calls to wash hands every two hours have had a big impact. Hand sanitizer was one of the top 5 most searched products in the Health sector this year, with average monthly searches in the first half of 2020 at 638,400 globally (up from 74,000 in the same period last year).
Interestingly, the rest of the top 5 Health products remain similar year-over-year, so this change is clearly related to the pandemic.
With more people working from home, searches for webcams (3,045,000 in H1 2020 vs. 1,000,000 in 2019) replaced searches for drones in our year-over-year analysis of the most searched products in the Consumer Electronics category.
Home & Garden also indicates some shifts in consumer interest in turning homes into workplaces, as searches for office chairs (1,254,000 vs. 417,200) outpaced those for mattresses.
Searches in other industries have remained more or less consistent between these two periods.
Most popular products in online shopping during the pandemic
Certain products experienced a significant spike in online searches during the pandemic. We analyzed the items that demonstrated the largest year-over-year growth in searches across all e-commerce categories during the peak of the coronavirus outbreak (March-April 2020 vs. the same period in 2019):
Hand hygiene
A surge in demand for hand sanitizers during the pandemic was to be expected, but the numbers are staggering: online searches for hand gel increased by 19,038%: