Belfast is one of the regions in the UK that is most fond of asking the question: ‘Is Santa real?”
People here have racked up around 320 searches per month relating to this question.
That’s according to research carried out by OnBuy.com.
It found average monthly searches relating to Santa Claus are currently highest in Warrington in England. In fact, in the last 30 days, there have been 1,950 individual searches for Santa in this region, which equates to 11.33 searches on average per 1,000 population.
According to OnBuy.com’s research, Warrington residents have Googled Father Christmas or Santa approximately 700 times in the past month, plus, there have been over 100 searches for “is Santa real” and over 800 searches interested in the Santa tracker.
Warrington currently has three times the number of searches compared to Cardiff, which is the region at the bottom [or top!] of Santa’s naughty list, with the lowest number of searches relating to Santa Claus [560 searches in total or 1.60 searches per 1,000 population].
Following Warrington’s festive lead are the regions of Belfast and Peterborough, with 3,530 [10.73 searches per 1,000 population] and 1,870 [10.64 searches per 1,000 population] Santa-related searches on average per month, respectively. Interestingly, Belfast is one of the regions that asks “is Santa real” the most, with 320 searches per month relating to this question!
Comparably, the spirit of Christmas is harder to find in regions Luton, Swansea and Cardiff.
In Luton there are just 690 searches [3.10 searches per 1,000 population] a month containing keywords like Santa tracker.
While in the Welsh regions of Swansea and Cardiff, we find interest around Father Christmas to be seemingly very low in accordance with population size. Cardiff for instance only had 1.60 searches on average per 1,000 population recorded in the data from OnBuy.com.
More Magical Insight from the UK
Key insights looking at the total number of searches for the UK as a whole, in accordance with population size:
- 480 searches a month ask “does Santa exist?” while nearly 30,000 of us [28,700] ask is Father Christmas or Santa Claus real?
- 6,600 people in the UK want to know “how old is Santa?” and almost 3,000 more want to know “where does Santa live?”
- In the past month, over 20,000 of us have searched for the “Santa tracker” and over 18,000 of us have inquired “where is Santa?”
Study Methodology:
- Found list of top 40 UK cities by population from https://www.thegeographist.com/uk-cities-population-1000/.
- Came up with list of search phrases about Santa: does Santa exist, father Christmas, how old is Santa, how to find Santa, is Father Christmas real, is Santa Claus alive, is Santa Claus dead, is Santa real, Santa, Santa Claus, Santa pictures, Santa tracker, Santa’s address, Santa’s real name, when will Santa come, where does Santa live, where is Santa, where is Santa now.
- Entered search phrases into Google Ads https://ads.google.com/intl/en_uk/home/ to find search volumes for each city.
To account for population differences between cities, the total search volumes were divided by the corresponding city population and then multiplied by 1,000. This shows the total searches per 1,000 population.
- The same procedure in step 4. was repeated based on Google’s “Reach” estimate. Reach is an estimate of how many people are in, or interested in, the location you select. It’s based on the number of signed-in users visiting Google sites.
