Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

Searching to stay cool

2009-07-06T13:30:00Z

Following last week’s heat wave, us Brits turned to the web in order to find ways to keep cool. The fastest moving search term sending traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds category last week was ‘paddling pools’. This was joined in the list of 15 fastest moving retail search terms by ‘swimming pools’ (3rd), ‘air conditioning units’ (4th), ‘air conditioning’ (7th), ‘fans’ (8th), ‘air conditioner’ (12th) and ‘birkenstock shoes, (15th).

The chart below illustrates searches for the most popular of these terms, and as you can see these are currently running their highest level since 2006. Given how awful the weather has been over the last two summers, this is not perhaps so surprising!

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Are online discount vouchers on the decline?

2009-07-01T12:50:00Z

As we’ve reported a number of times, online vouchers have been one of the recent online success stories. Voucher searches shot up massively in the run up to Christmas as savvy shoppers looked to find a bargain during the recession. But recently we’ve heard some talk that the boom times for discount vouchers may be coming to an end. This begs the question: are consumers and retailers tiring of discount vouchers? To test this hypothesis, I charted searches for the term ‘vouchers’ over the last two years.

As you would expect, there has been a significant decline since Christmas; but last week (w/e 27/06/09) searches for ‘vouchers’ were also down 28.6% on the equivalent week last year (28/06/08). So voucher searches are down? Not so fast – the above chart only includes searches for the single term ‘vouchers’. Over 96% of UK searches containing the word ‘vouchers’ are for a longer term (e.g. ‘discount vouchers’, ‘tesco vouchers’, etc.) rather than just the single word ‘vouchers’, so it important to consider the broader picture. The chart below tracks the breadth of searches for the term ‘vouchers’ – i.e. the number of search terms in the UK that contained the term ‘voucher’.

The breadth of searches for ‘voucher’ has also declined since Christmas, but in this case it is still up year-on-year. This data points to an increasingly sophisticated voucher-searching audience. Now that people are used to looking for vouchers online, they are searching for specific discounts rather than more generic terms. Certainly, the rate of increase in voucher searches has flattened – it is now starting to look more like a mature than a growing market.

The final piece of the puzzle is to look at traffic to voucher specific websites (such as Hot UK Deals, Money Saving Expert and My Voucher Codes). As the chart below illustrates, this has flattened since Christmas and is actually down 12.1% on last year. However, from the retailers’ perspective, voucher sites are sending more traffic now than a year ago. During May 2009 the top voucher websites accounted 0.53% of all upstream traffic to the Shopping and Classifieds industry. This was down from the peak of 0.82% during December, but up from 0.43% in May 2008.

So, in conclusion: the online voucher market is still huge and voucher sites are sending a significant amount of traffic to retailers. But the market is maturing fast and is no longer growing at the rate it once was.

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The King, the Angel and the Hoax.

2009-06-30T02:24:44Z

Pop culture is a substantial driver of online behaviour, and the untimely death of the King of Pop Michael Jackson and the passing of Charlie’s Angels Farah Fawcett last week provided celebrity websites with large single day gains of Australian Internet visits. While actor Jeff Goldblum’s death on set in New Zealand was prematurely reported it also added to media frenzy and online activity.

The King
Michael Jackson’s death has seen sales of his music dominate the Amazon best seller list (25 of the top 50 CDs on 29 June) and six of the top 10 albums on iTunes, it has also propelled celebrity websites up the rankings locally.

As news of Michael Jackson’s death hit Australia on Friday 26 June 2009, the Hitwise Lifestyle - Personalities category experienced an increase in daily traffic share of 61%, while Music - Bands and Artists increased 89% and News and Media – Print increased 13% . TMZ.com credited with breaking the news first jumped 750 rankings to 84, while perezhilton.com improved its ranking to 133, increases of 848.4% and 49.2% respectively in market share of visits by Australian Internet users on the same day. Michael Jackson's site www.michaeljackson.com, rocketed from a ranking of 73,911 to become the 134th most visited website in Australia on 26 June 2009.

Searches terms / phrases containing ‘michael jackson’ jumped from 296 during week ending 20 June 2009 to 8,569 during week ending 27 June 2009, indicating the breadth of information Australians wanted. Search queries included information about his songs, how he died, his children, his planned tour, pictures, his biography, video and lyrics (no doubt almost every cover band in the world played a Michael Jackson song over the weekend in tribute).

A total of 1,407 sites received traffic from the search term ‘michael jackson’ during week ending 27 June 2009, up from 33 the week prior, notably Google News received a higher share of visits from these searches than the key News and Media – Print websites combined, providing it with the largest single day share of Internet Visits by Australian in the past three years.

The leading websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘michael jackson’ during week ending 27 June 2009 were;

The Angel
Leading to her death, Farah Fawcett one of the original Charlie’s Angels in the 70’s TV series of the same name and former Playboy Bunny was also the subject to media attention offline and online over the past weeks and months. This included the recent announcement of the intended marriage of Fawcett to long time beau Ryan O’Neal.

Search activity for the term ‘farah fawcett’ increased 30x during the week ending 27 June, 2009 compared to the week prior and featured at number 4 in the fastest moving search terms last week. There were 76 search term variations relating to her name including playboy, movies, latest news, her son and cancer.

Google News and Wikipedia again became the focus of searchers over more traditional news sources such as the Australian newspapers websites, with some international websites also taking share away from local publishers.

The Hoax
While Jackson and Fawcett have been in the news for various reasons – Jackson for his anticipated London shows and Fawcett for her brave battle against cancer, Jeff Goldblum had no reason to be featuring prominently while reportedly on a film shoot in New Zealand.

Goldblum’s death reportedly originated from the website FakeAWish.com. When a celebrity name is entered into the website, a news story is produced under a false news agency name ‘Global Associated News’.

The story caused search activity on Jeff Goldblum to increase 572 times in week ending 27 June 2009, 91% higher than searches on Farah Fawcett, but 75% less than Michael Jackson searches. Again Wikipedia and Google news were the prominent recipients of searches for ‘jeff goldblum’.

The three events last week had an interesting flow on effect, highlighting the online behaviour of Australian Internet users. Twitter and Google News had their largest single day share of visits propelled by the day’s news events.

Google News experienced a single day increase on 26 June 2009 of 93% and Twitter increased 13% as the news and tributes for Michael Jackson and Farah Fawcett spread through the web and the hoax was uncovered.

Gambling - Opening the Search Engine Spigot

2009-06-30T13:09:09Z

It looks as though Congress may soon be voting on the Payments System Protection Act, which partially decriminalizes online gaming. The Act could have massive implications for online gaming and revenues for search engines, as it would allow search engines to sell sponsored listings to gambling companies.

Looking at Hitwise data, I was surprised to see that Gambling websites are already getting a large chunk of their traffic from search engines and some even from paid search listings.

Casino and Poker websites receive a larger share of their traffic from Search Engines than average. In May, Gambling websites received 27.24% of US Internet visits from Search Engines. Hitwise organizes the Gambling parent category into seven sub-categories. I'll focus on Casinos and Poker in this post, leaving aside Bingo, Sports Betting, Lotteries, Directories and Games for the moment. Casinos and Poker websites received 32.19% and 35.62% of visits from Search Engines respectively. This is above the average for All Categories of websites at 26.247%.

Of that search traffic, Casinos received 87.82% of their search traffic from organic listings in the four weeks to June 20th, 2009 and Poker websites 95.22%. To give you a benchmark, the average for All Categories was 92.63% organic and for Shopping & Classifieds 82.56%. Most of the paid traffic terms sending visits to Casino websites were searches for casino resorts, such as Foxwoods and Atlantis. This leaves huge opportunities for search engines to monetize all of that search traffic I mentioned earlier going to gambling websites.

Looking at the search terms sending visits to Gambling websites, one immediately notices the dominance of branded search terms. The top generic, or non-branded query, is "internet casinos" at #110 among search terms sending visits to Gambling websites in the week to 20th June. Next is "free sports picks" at #135, "free casino chip" at #231, "free bingo" at #238 and "free online slots no download" at #246.

In the UK in October, Google lifted a self-imposed ban on gambling related advertising in the UK. This offers an interesting opportunity for cross-market comparison. Comparing paid search traffic to Casinos and Poker websites year over year (i.e. since Google lifted its ban) we find a fairly marked increase in paid traffic. Casinos receive 20% of their search traffic from paid listings in the UK, up more than two-fold year over year. Poker websites receive 8% of their UK search traffic from paid listings, up more than three-fold year over year.

It will be interesting to see if the search engines decide to allow paid listings on gambling content if the Act passes. It will also be interesting to see how marketers respond in the US and whether we'll see intense competition on paid listings for branded terms. This could certainly help boost revenues for the search engines during a downturn.

What are Western Australian users doing online? Localising content

2009-06-29T11:26:49Z

Following on from an excellent post by Robin on local Internet data in the UK, I thought I would share an Australian example of our ability to create mini-panels based on users with specific characteristics - in this case users in Western Australia. Like the rest of the population, WA users had the highest volume of visits to Search Engines and Social Networking and Forums. It’s useful however to understand where WA users differ from the rest of the population, particularly for creating content serving the local community. The below table provides a top-line view of the industries that WA users are more likely to engage in compared to other Australians.

Sports categories featured prominently in the industries that WA users were most likely to visit, with Soccer attracting the highest index of 164 (100 is the online average), ahead of AFL – Football with an index of 149. Sporting codes that attracted low visits by WA users were Snow Sports (makes sense geographically) Athletics and Motorsport.

Regional targeting can be cross-tabbed with other metrics, such as Search terms and website visits. This can be useful for brands wishing to benchmark the local awareness of their services, or for advertisers looking for the most targeted websites to reach local audiences. The below table highlights leading search terms used by WA users. I have filtered the list to terms with an index higher than 120 so that you can get an idea of localised behaviour.

A quick glance shows that ‘myspace’ attracted high search volumes by WA users, and was 24% more likely to be used than in other Australian states. Classifieds brand, ‘Quokka’ notably stood out with an index of 803, while ‘perth now’ had an index of 666. The most popular generic term on the list was ‘perth weather’, surprising, as I always thought the answer to that was always “fine” :)

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Michael Jackson, Twitter and Misspellings

2009-06-29T23:05:37Z

It has been widely reported that Michael Jackson's untimely death caused a flurry of online activity last week, downing Twitter, Wikipedia and TMZ and even causing problems for Google News. Searches for "michael jackson" ranked 7th among all search terms last week, accounting for one in every 500 US Internet searches.

The top websites receiving traffic from searches for "michael jackson" were Wikipedia, Google News and Michael Jackson's own website. Taking a category level view, we see that News and Media sites were the biggest recipients of traffic at 18%, followed by Entertainment at 13%, Social Networks at 7% and Music at 6%.

The subject dominated conversations on Twitter, driving that site's traffic to reach a new daily high with share of US Internet visits to Twitter.com reaching 0.24% of all US Internet visits, equivalent to 1 in every 417 US Internet visits (see chart below). Note that we are measuring web visits only, so this excludes mobile access and desktop applications. My colleague across the pond similarly reported that UK visits to Twitter reached an all time high last week.

Charles Arthur of guardian.co.uk asks an interesting question - "which messaging service did you hear about Michael Jackson's death on? (Facebook, Twitter, Twitscoop...)" And contrast this to how you heard about Princess Diana's death or that the Twin Towers had been hit by airplanes. A good follow up might be, where did you turn after hearing about his death and how has that changed?

On a separate note, Hitwise search data reveals what every Michael already knows. People don't know how to spell "michael". The #3 search term that included the word "jackson" last week was "micheal jackson".

Michael Jackson Draws Record Traffic to TMZ

2009-06-29T17:04:10Z

TMZ was the first to break the news about Michael Jackson’s death last Thursday and scooped all of the major news outlets. As a result, traffic to TMZ reached a 3 year high, with visits increasing 5x in volume from the previous day. The market share of visits increased 18% above the previous high on February 20, 2009, which took place after TMZ published photos of a bruised Rihanna following the assault by Chris Brown. TMZ was 60th among all websites on Thursday when ranked by the market share of visits, up from 305th on Wednesday, June 24th. The story also caused a surge of new visitors to TMZ, with 61% of the visits coming from new (defined as having not visiting the website in the past 30 days) visitors on the day of Jackson's death, up from 19% the previous day.

While TMZ clearly had an advantage in being first to report the story, in comparison, the other news sources captured a higher share of visits than TMZ. On Thursday, the top 4 News & Media websites ranked by visits were Yahoo! News, CNN, MSNBC and Google News. MSNBC and CNN received the highest spike in visits from the previous day, increasing 67% and 64%, respectively.

Michael Jackson, Twitter and TMZ

2009-06-26T10:20:00Z

Following the tragic death of Michael Jackson last night, UK Internet visits to his homepage increased 17 fold. Yesterday www.michaeljackson.com was the 9th most visited Music website in the UK, and the highest ranked artist homepage.

TMZ, the website that originally broke the story, picked up 1 in every 1,100 UK Internet visits yesterday, making it the 73rd most visited website overall. Given that the site usually ranks somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 in the UK, this was a 20-fold increase in visits.

Of course, the subject is dominating conversations on Twitter and – as the chart below illustrates – the micro-blogging service had its busiest every day in the UK yesterday. That the spike wasn’t quite as huge as may be expected is probably due to the fact that news broke so late UK time. Given the time difference, my guess is that my US colleagues will have some more representative stats that show the true impact later today.

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Gas Pump Prices and Cost Sensitivity

2009-06-25T21:36:08Z

According to a survey fielded by AAA, 37.1 million Americans will be traveling over the July 4th holiday weekend. According to AAA if this prediction proves true, it will represent a 1.9% decrease from the same week in 2008.

As we've done in the past, I'll update our charts on actual gas prices and corresponding Internet activity. First, a chart showing U.S. Retail gas prices (regular grade, nationwide) charted with the volume of searches on "gas prices."

As we can see from this chart, even though gas prices have been steadily increasing over the last several weeks, searches for "gas prices" have remained well below their highs from last fall. Arguably, "gas price" searches represent cost sensitivity as Internet searchers are most likely looking for either news on gas prices or the lowest priced gas in their neighborhood.

To get closer to price sensitivity, the following chart, visits to a custom category of gas price websites, may be a more accurate reflection of our concerns over pump price:

Finally to the survey-based prediction from AAA, here's a chart of gas prices and visits to a custom category of leading roadside motel chain websites:

Roadside motel site visits appear to have peaked during the week ending 6/13/09 (most likely representing research and online bookings for this upcoming holiday week). Comparing visits data year-over-year, we find that visits are down 5.5% compared to the same week in 2008.

While it might be easy to blame a potential decrease in next week's holiday travel on rising pump prices, Internet behavior tells us that our price sensitivity is relatively low. Perhaps general economic concerns are the more likely culprit.

Time to Shop Around? Opportunities for Financial Comparison Sites

2009-06-25T04:20:05Z

The recent increase in mortgage interest rates by the majors has prompted financial commentators to encourage consumers to shop around for deals from a range of financial institutions. Searches for ‘home loans’ by Australian Internet users accordingly doubled during the week ending 20 June 2009, reaching the highest point in search volume since late April 2009. Given the importance of comparison shopping in the finance industry at this time, here is an update on the leading financial comparison websites, including websites dedicated to specific financial products.

Infochoice dominated financial comparison websites clearly with over 50% market share of visits for the week ending 20 June 2009. Infochoice significantly increased its market share in visits from 32.7% the previous week, due to a sharp increase in referrals from Yahoo!7 Finance. You’ll also notice that the top 15 websites feature a number of financial comparison websites dedicated to credit cards, with Credit Card Offers ranked at 10th position. This suggests there are opportunities for comparison websites focused on term deposits and home loans to increase their market share, especially in the current economic environment. The analysis below provides an indication of the types of websites that received the most traffic on product-related terms.

The pie charts illustrate that financial comparison websites were more likely to receive traffic on searches for ‘credit cards’ and ‘term deposits’ than 'personal loans' and 'home loans'. The leading website to receive traffic on searches for ‘credit cards’ was creditcards.com.au with 31.7% of clicks, while the leading website to receive traffic on searches for ‘term deposits’ was Rate City Australia, with 21.2% of clicks (4 weeks ending 20 June 2009).

Non-bank lenders and banks dominated search traffic from ‘home loans’, with financial comparison websites notably missing from the top 10. Given that consumers will be increasingly looking for ways to optimise paying their home loan off, financial comparison websites should be prioritising home loans content.

Twitter sending traffic to online media sites, but not online retailers

2009-06-24T13:20:00Z

Thanks to everyone that listened to today’s Twitter webinar - we managed to reach capacity with 200 people logged in!. If you missed it, we’ll be posting the recording soon and will email / blog / tweet the link. In the meantime, you can see what people were saying about it on Twitter here.

UK Internet traffic to Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service and social network, has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months. During May 2009 www.twitter.com ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network. Just one year ago, in May 2008, it was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network.

Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months, and certainly the most talked about. The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it – 93% in fact – has occurred during 2009. If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers could be even higher.

One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.

Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect. However, with one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which claims to generated $3m via Twitter), very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. During May, Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites than Twitter. Given that Twitter has yet to settle on a business model that will take advantage of its huge, loyal user base, this is an issue that needs to be addressed by the people that run the company if they are to make the service a financial as well as popular success.

The third party website that has benefited most from Twitter’s success is Twitpic, a service which allows users to upload photos and pictures to their Twitter profiles. The site was the biggest recipient of UK traffic from Twitter during May, picking up 1 in every 13 downstream visits from the social network. UK Internet visits to Twitpic have increased 250 fold over the last 12 months, and it is now the third most popular photo website in the UK behind Flickr and Photobucket.

Smaller blogs and technology sites were amongst the first to benefit from Twitter, but mainstream media websites in the UK were quick to follow their lead. Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to News and Media – Print websites in the UK during May, and all of the main newspaper websites now have multiple Twitter feeds.

The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.

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Twittering the Iran Election

2009-06-23T19:52:09Z

Following the elections that took place in Iran on June 12, Twitter has become one of the most popular mediums for distributing information about the protests. Daily visits to Twitter.com (excludes mobile & desktop applications) increased 13% on June 12th as compared to the previous Friday and traffic jumped 23% Wednesday, June 17th from news and photos of the massive rallies taking place in Iran.

Among all of the search terms driving traffic to Twitter.com in the US, ‘iran election’ ranked #13 out of 4,303 last week. Conversely, Twitter.com received the highest share of clicks from queries for ‘iran election’, one of the most common hashtags for the coverage, even ranking above Google News.

In addition to Twitter, YouTube has also become another outlet for news as video coverage of the protest activities have been uploaded. The popularity of both Twitter and YouTube showcase the ability to disseminate information when many major news outlets are unable.

Iran searches and Twitter

2009-06-23T12:25:00Z

Given the current political situation in the country, we were expecting to see a spike in searches for ‘iran’ last week. As the chart below illustrates, there were more searches for Iran during the week ending 20/06/09 than for Iraq, Dubai or Israel (generally the most searched for countries in the Middle East) at any point over the last three years.

Last week we tracked over 2,600 UK Internet searches containing the word ‘iran’. Here are the top 10:

1. iran (18.5% of searches for terms containing ‘iran’)
2. iran news (5.7%)
3. iran election (1.5%)
4. iran elections (1.3%)
5. iran tv (1.3%)
6. twitter iran (1.2%)
7. iran protests (1.1%)
8. bbc iran (0.9%)
9. iran elections 2009 (0.7%)
10. iran twitter (0.6%)

As you would expect, the top searches refer to the elections and subsequent protests. The presence of two Twitter-related terms nicely illustrates the amount of chatter related to the subject that is still taking place on the micro blogging service. However, as the table below illustrates, Twitter was not one of the top 10 sites receiving traffic from searches for ‘iran’ last week. Most of it went to more established news sites and Wikipedia.

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Digging Ads

2009-06-22T07:47:24Z

On June 3 Digg.com has announced an upcoming pilot of an advertising platform, Digg Ads, which allows users to ‘digg’ an advertisement. This will move the ad up the page and lower the cost per click price paid by the advertiser. The alternative is that irrelevant ads will be buried and priced out of the system.

It’s an interesting take and could be regarded as behavioral based or socially influenced advertising. Digg should be be given credit for making a concerted effort to develop an advertising platform specific to their users and at the same time has the potential to increase the engagement opportunity for advertisers.

The success or otherwise of the program will be the willingness of Digg’s audience to interact with advertising in a similar way as they do with content. To get some perspective of whom the Digg audience are the following table reviews the Mosaic profiles indexed against the Australian Online Population for the 4 weeks ending June 13 2009.

The most over indexed group is ‘Suburban Subsistence’ which contains a strong skew in some subsets of 20-34 years olds and this borne out when reviewing age demographic results that highlight the 18-24 age groups as being the prominent audience and highest indexing age group.

Key attributes within ‘Suburban Subsistence’ include their confidence with technology and a social outlook, living in outer metropolitan and major regional suburbs, with an orientation towards coastal areas.

After ‘Suburban Subsistence’ the other Mosaic groups that over-index against the online population are the more predictable inner suburban and tech savvy “Young Ambition” and the “Metro Multiculture” groups.

It will be interesting to watch for any noticeable impacts on Digg’s audience as the program is piloted and introduced later in the year.

You can read more about the program on Digg’s Blog.

Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

Searching to stay cool

Top Michael Jackson Song Searches

Are online discount vouchers on the decline?

The King, the Angel and the Hoax.

Gambling - Opening the Search Engine Spigot

What are Western Australian users doing online? Localising content

Michael Jackson, Twitter and Misspellings

Michael Jackson Draws Record Traffic to TMZ

Michael Jackson, Twitter and TMZ

Gas Pump Prices and Cost Sensitivity

Time to Shop Around? Opportunities for Financial Comparison Sites

Twitter sending traffic to online media sites, but not online retailers

Twittering the Iran Election

Iran searches and Twitter

Digging Ads