Thinking about the New York Times article As Economy Is Down, Vitamin Sales Are Up that highlights there’s more sales of vitamins and health supplements as the economy continues to worsen.   I wanted to see if I could find out more, like which Vitamins are being bought more, which are being bought less.

Because I had Comscore MyMetrix running,  figured I’d look there first, but since it Comscore is based on site properties, it doesn’t really do a good job of gauging demand of a product (unless a site is very closely associated with a particular brand, and in this case, a particular vitamin – which isn’t the norm).

While some sites might show a rise in traffic (like Everyday Health), the rest, didn’t.

So what’s the real story?

Figured I’d make my life easier by first figuring out what are the most searched on Vitamins and work off of that – adding any others, like Co-enzyme Q10, that I’m especially interested in.     I used Google Keywords Tool and Exact Match.

Next, I used Google Insights for Search and tried to figure out which vitamins might be used more, and found Vitamin D was definitely being searched for more than a year ago (and was most highly searched in Washington, Oregon and North Carolina), but the rest of the vitamins, were not searched on (as a sign of intent to buy the supplements) any more than a year ago.

So … I figured, let’s make a simple segment – yes Google Insights for Search can be fooled into creating simple segmentation….

My first segment = vitamin d + vitamin c + co Q10 + Coenzyme Q10 + vitamin c + vitamin b12 + vitamin a

My second segment = prenatal vitamins + vitamin b + vitamin k + vitamin b complex + vitamin shop + vitamin b6 + b vitamins + hair vitamins

In reality, I could have up to 5 segments and put in as many vitamins as I’d have wanted (up to whatever string limit Google permits); I could have also chosen to add vitamins in one segment that were more similar – but I decided to just take them in the order, more or less, that I got them out of Google’s Keyword Tool.

Guess what? …. for the first segment (with the highest trafficked vitamin terms) search volume is up by around 15% Year to Year.  The Economy?  Probably  – just take a 5 year view, and judge for yourself – the data speaks (to us) directly:

Search Demand for the vitamins in the first segment went up right around the time the Economy starting going belly up with the Sub-Prime Mortgage Meltdown in mid 2007, and now is up 40% over pre 2007 search volume numbers, according to Google (US Searches only).

Assuming I’d right, and you take my word for it that the New York Times article is correct, and demand in the US is up by 40% for these supplements  then who is getting the benefit of this traffic – where’s it going to?

I used Compete.com, and thanks to their kind assistance (giving me a “Pro” version of the account) to test out Vitamin D, but didn’t get quite what I expected ( a few vitamin brands, etc):

Taking this one step further – I should be able to put some of these sites into Compete.com’s trending tool and see the same increases I saw in Google Insights for Search.

Not so sure about the rest, but it’s clear WebMD did pick up it’s traffic, and right about the time the Economy started to tank, in mid 2007.

So there … I’ve proven the Times article is, more or less, correct in saying that more people are buying vitamins as the economy continues to worsen as they can’t afford doctors, in some cases.

Anyway, I think I’ve gone far enough with this post – which was kinda fun to do.