Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

Facebook Reaches Top Ranking in US

2010-03-15T16:24:08Z

Facebook reached an important milestone for the week ending March 13, 2010 and surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week. Facebook.com recently reached the #1 ranking on Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and New Year’s Day as well as the weekend of March 6th and 7th. The market share of visits to Facebook.com increased 185% last week as compared to the same week in 2009, while visits to Google.com increased 9% during the same time frame. Together Facebook.com and Google.com accounted for 14% of all US Internet visits last week.

1 Year Anniversary for Foursquare

2010-03-12T20:21:38Z

Location-based services have been a popular topic this week, as Twitter enabled geo-location features and Facebook announced the launch of a new location-based feature in April. Another location-based social network, Foursquare, marked their one year anniversary of their launch yesterday. While the primary use of the service is to ‘check-in’ with mobile devices at local businesses like bars, restaurants, stores or nearly any location - however, a visit to the website is needed for the initial sign-up for Foursquare. As the service has grown, the visits to Foursquare.com have increased since the official launch at the SXSW conference in Austin, TX last year and the volume of visits have increased 5x for the week ending March 6, 2010 as compared to the week ending September 19, 2009. Partnerships with major brands such as Bravo, Zagat, The New York Times and Lucky magazine have also helped drive traffic to the website, and thus new users.

The main source of traffic to Foursquare.com is Facebook, which accounted for 33% of the upstream visits last week. Google and Twitter followed with 22% and 8%, respectively, with these top 3 websites accounting for nearly 2/3 of all traffic. Users are able to link both Facebook and Twitter to include check-ins in updates and tweets.

Searches for a portfolio of Foursquare-related terms have also grown over the past 24 weeks, spiking the week of February 20, 2010 and have remained fairly consistent over the past 3 weeks.

Yesterday, Foursquare announced breaking their record for the most check-ins in one day, exceeding 275,000 and we can expect that trend to continue with the start of the SXSW conference today.

Is Fairtrade growing in popularity?

2010-03-12T09:00:19Z

Another guest blog by Jonny Steel, Insights Manager, mySupermarket-Insights.co.uk

Fairtrade Fortnight is an annual event which aims to raise the profile of fair and ethical trading values. The supermarkets have been keen to get on board for the past few years, highlighting their growing Fairtrade offering, introducing additional promotions and helping to educate their customers on the virtues of Fairtrade.

But have the millions of pounds poured into Fairtrade education resulted in increased interest and ultimately, sales? Are we spending more on Fairtrade than in previous years? While more British consumers than ever before are familiar with the concept of Fairtrade, and no doubt, if asked, would agree that it is a worthy cause, the question remains whether they’re willing to spend more on their groceries to ensure that a farmer on the other side of the world gets paid fairly. During a recession, when many consumers are concerned primarily with taking care of their own families, what has been the impact on Fairtrade search and purchasing trends?

As the graph shows, online interest in Fairtrade has dropped over the past year, probably as a result of the economic downturn. Similarly, mySupermarket.co.uk, the grocery shopping and comparison website, found that sales of Fairtrade products have fallen by 5% over the past year.

The major peak comes around Fairtrade Fortnight each year, as people respond to the increased publicity. Indeed, Fairtrade coffee sales on mySupermarket.co.uk increased by 57% during the fortnight, compared to the two weeks beforehand. The only other time of year that appears to see a significant uplift is in the period ahead of Christmas, potentially reflecting an uplift in searches for Christmas presents like Fairtrade clothes and bags.

In terms of weekly online internet shopping, Sainsbury’s and Ocado offer the most Fairtrade products, and not surprisingly see the highest weekly spend of all the supermarkets. In an average branch, Sainsbury’s shoppers will find about 157 Fairtrade products, while in Ocado (Waitrose) they’ll find 154. Tesco have 117 and ASDA 65. Ocado shoppers spend the most on Fairtrade (£1.18 per order), compared to Sainsbury’s (57p), Tesco (30p) and ASDA (16p).

Sainsbury’s have taken a strategic approach to Fairtrade, replacing many traditional lines with Fairtrade alternatives. For example, all Sainsbury’s bananas and most of their standard own label tea is now Fairtrade (Sainsbury’s loose bananas are now the country’s top-selling Fairtrade product). This approach smartly takes away the decision-making process from the customer, giving them no alternative to Fairtrade, and resulting in many shoppers buying these products without even realising it. Moreover, in a bid to remain competitive, these Fairtrade products are often priced identically to their equivalents elsewhere that are not Fairtrade. For example, Sainsbury’s bananas are currently priced at 97p/kilo, just as non-Fairtrade ones are in ASDA and Tesco.

During this year’s Fairtrade Fortnight approximately 25% of all Fairtrade products were on special offer at the supermarkets. Many of these offers bring down the prices so much that they’re priced closely to their non-Fairtrade equivalents, offering customers a great way to stock up on Fairtrade items without spending much more than the regular ones.

The top Search terms within the Fairtrade portfolio show that people don’t tend to search for specific Fairtrade products, but rather, are searching for general information. Within the top results, the only specific products to feature are flowers, chocolate and jewelry. This suggests that people still view Fairtrade as something that they might consider giving as a gift, but not something that they necessarily want as part of their own daily life.

Of the groceries, although chocolate is the top Fairtrade search term, there are actually more Fairtrade coffee products available at our supermarkets. Chocolate comes second, followed by tea and sugar. Fairtrade’s popularity at more premium retailers such as Ocado and the low online search for specific Fairtrade products suggests that it remains a niche area of interest. While the more value-oriented supermarkets may focus on it during Fairtrade Fortnight, this may be more as a way to highlight their “ethical credentials” rather than being targeted at meeting their customers’ demands.

The list of websites that receive the most traffic from this portfolio of search terms only includes one supermarket. This highlights once again that while there is general interest in Fairtrade, it doesn’t always convert into purchases. While the official Fairtrade Foundation website receives nearly 60% of the traffic in the period of the last 4 weeks, there is a major absence of the 4 online supermarkets, with only The Co-operative Food at number 13 on the list.

mySupermarket.co.uk is the shopping and comparison website which guarantees you the lowest price for your groceries at Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Ocado.

mySupermarket Insights is a real-time FMCG data solution for businesses, tracking daily prices, promotions and market share for all groceries at the main supermarkets.

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Housing Bubble Searches in Australia at all time high

2010-03-11T05:23:01Z

Housing affordability in Australia is currently a hot issue with a recent rise in interest rates, an end to the first home buyers’ grant, and subsequent slowed lending. Despite this, pressure on house prices remains high with a fast growing population and a shortfall in housing development.

There is potentially an element of desperation amongst home buyers and this is reflected in their search behaviour. Search traffic around the term ‘housing bubble’ was at its highest point during the week ending 6 March 2010:

Property websites have attracted strong growth in visits year-on-year from two very different Mosaic Lifestyle groups - “Community Disconnect” and “Privileged Prosperity”.

“Community Disconnect” households are best described as ‘Older blue-collar workers and retirees in country and coastal locations’. Much of the visit growth was from the Mosaic sub-segment “Fractured Families” - Disadvantaged singles living in inexpensive accommodation. Their strong interest in property websites could be reflecting pressures on finding rentals amidst stock shortages.

“Privileged Prosperity”, the wealthiest segment online, was the second highest household type to increase visits to Property websites over the year. The prominence of this group is indicative of property interest by the investor community.

I’d be keen to hear your thoughts on other changes to search behaviours we’re likely to see from Australian home buyers this year.

Coffee wars: Flat White vs. Cappuccino

2010-03-11T10:20:00Z

Hitwise was started in Australia, and there remains a strong Antipodean influence in our London office. The most recent manifestation of this is a fashion amongst my colleagues for flat whites – a style of coffee that, like the pavlova before it, originated in either Australia or New Zealand and, depending on your opinion, is either a less milky café latte or a weaker, colder café con leche (see this Wikipedia entry for an unintentionally amusing comparison between the drinks). And it’s not only Experian Hitwise employees that are falling victim to this latest coffee fashion: according to this article in the Evening Standard, the flat white is already challenging the cappuccino in some London coffee shops.

Our data also backs this up. As the chart below illustrates, Internet searches for “flat white” first started appearing in the UK towards the end of 2008, but have really taken off since both Starbucks and Costa launched the drink in December and January respectively, and are now neck and neck with “cappuccino”.

During the 12 weeks ending 06/03/2010, people in the UK searched for over 650 different terms containing the phrase “flat white”. Here are the top 10, which includes both Costa and Starbucks branded terms, as well as the two recipe-related terms:

1. flat white (13.58% of searches containing the term)
2. flat white coffee (6.30%)
3. costa flat white (2.23%)
4. flat white london (1.97%)
5. how to make a flat white (1.63%)
6. white flat screen tv (1.56%)
7. flat white starbucks (1.46%)
8. flat white coffee recipe (1.20%)
9. starbucks flat white (1.20%)
10. costa coffee flat white (1.03%)

Interestingly, searches for “flat white” are less prevalent in Australia and New Zealand than the UK. Presumably the reason for this is that our Aussie and Kiwi cousins are already familiar with the drink, so are less inclined to search out fo curiosity.

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The dotcom bubble: 10 years on

2010-03-10T15:45:00Z

Today is the tenth anniversary of the bursting of the dotcom bubble, so I though it would be interesting to see how the Internet landscape has changed over the last decade. Below is a list of the top 20 websites in the UK last week, with Google and Facebook topping the list. Back in the heyday of the dotcom bubble, Facebook wasn’t even a glint in Mark Zuckerberg’s eye, and Google was still in its infancy.

However, a number of the sites that were big back then remain so today: Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) and Yahoo! Mail still rank in the top 20, and both Microsoft and Yahoo! have other popular UK sites as well. eBay and Amazon remain the most visited retail websites in the UK, although they now face much stiffer competition from both online and multichannel retailers now.

But what about some of the names most closely associated with dotcom boom and bust?

Lastminute.com – one of the great survivors of the bubble; still a top 20 UK travel site.

Boo.com – given the success of fashion retailers like ASOS, which makes such good use of multimedia on its site, maybe the doomed clothing retailer was simply ahead of its time and would have survived in a broadband world?

Broadcast.com – the likes of Last.fm, Spotify, BBC iPlayer, Hulu and YouTube have proved that streaming media can be a success, but they all would have struggled over a dial up connection.

Which of today’s most popular sites do you think will still be widely used in ten years time, and which are likely to fall by the wayside?

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Thank You Mom campaign from Procter & Gamble

2010-03-09T22:50:52Z

During the 2010 Winter Olympic Games, P&G started a campaign called ‘Thank You Mom’ to help with the cost of travel and accommodations for the mom (or important supporter) of all of the Team USA athletes so they could see their children compete. The accompanying website, Thankyoumom.com provided content from blogs, videos and tweets from parents of the athletes along with coupons and links to other P&G products. The website experienced higher shares of visits on the weekends, beginning on Fridays during the Olympic Games. The peak day for the website was Friday, February 19, 2010, where Thankyoumom.com reached the top 1000 websites and ranked 989th out of all websites visited that day.

The most commonly visited website following a visit to Thankyoumom.com during the week ending February 20, 2010 was P&G Everyday Solutions, a promotional website that offers coupons and samples from P&G along with content on Health & Wellness. Visitors to Thankyoumom.com had a strong interest in coupons, with Adobe as the 7th ranked website in the downstream traffic, most likely to download Adobe Acrobat Reader to print the savings form in pdf format. Additionally, Facebook ranked 2nd in the downstream websites visited after Thankyoumom.com due to several fan pages on Facebook for P&G brands such as Secret and Vicks NyQuil to tie-in additional social campaigns.

Travel sites show improvement in the latest IMRG-HITWISE HOT SHOPS LIST

2010-03-03T09:42:16Z

Yesterday saw the release of the sixteenth quarterly edition of the IMRG-HITWISE HOT SHOPS LIST, which ranks by popularity, as indicated by visits, the top 50 UK e-retailers selling goods and services within the IMRG Index Classification.

Click here to see the press release and to download the full report

Experian Hitwise's Director of Research, Robin Goad, comments:
"With Christmas and sales shopping mostly out of the way and snow covering much of the country, during January British consumers turned their attention to planning and booking their summer holidays. Seven travel companies moved up the rankings, and easyJet re-entered the top 10. The big travel agencies did particularly well, with Thomas Cook moving 31 positions to 15th and Thomson Holidays 10 positions to 11th, one ahead of Expedia. There was minimal movement elsewhere in the top 10 and the top four remain unchanged. The big retailers that managed to extend their sales beyond the immediate post-Christmas week fared well, while LoveFilm also benefited from the poor weather; why go out in the cold when you can stay inside with a good DVD?"

Where in the UK are financial aggregator websites most popular?

2010-03-01T14:38:31Z

Another guest blog from Richard Seymour, Experian Hitwise Client Intelligence Analyst.

In the table below we can see where in the UK financial aggregators are most used. The representation shows the areas which over-index compared to the UK population. In this case we can see that residents of Sunderland are most over-represented in visits to financial aggregators compared to their general internet usage. Behind Sunderland, the North is well represented in the ten most over-indexed areas - particularly the North-West, with Liverpool, Bolton, Preston, Blackpool and Wigan all heavily over-represented in visits to financial aggregators.

However, financial aggregators are less used in London, as the bottom 10 shows above. All London postal areas are significantly underrepresented when it comes to visits to financial aggregators.

Interestingly, however, when compared to a custom category of insurance providers, London – WC appears as the 8th most over-indexed postal area. So, as a rule, those in London – WC do not use financial aggregators heavily, but they do use them more than using insurance providers’ sites directly.

When compared to visits to insurance providers, Sunderland again appears as the most over-indexed postal area, showing that users there would prefer to shop around and compare deals than go direct to insurance providers. In Sunderland financial aggregators are presumably doing a good job in filtering people towards the best deals or products that suit their situation in that area.

The opposite is true for Liverpool. Whilst Liverpudlians are the second-most over-indexed in visits to financial aggregators, they are the most under-indexed when compared to visits to insurance providers, showing that they prefer to go to insurance providers direct - or that they visit multiple insurance providers from the comparison sites.

The original version of this article appeared in the latest edition of the Experian Hitwise UK Financial Services Quarterly Review. To download a copy of the report, click here.

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Facebook Users Prefer Broadcast Media

2010-03-01T14:04:48Z

A couple of weeks ago, I posted an entry about Facebook becoming the largest news reader. Facebook does send more traffic to News and Media sites than Google News but looking more closely at the data, I noticed that the two sites send traffic to a very different list of News and Media websites. The following table starts to tell the story, showing the top 10 News and Media websites visited after Facebook and Google News last week.

These two lists are very different. In particular, notice the preponderance of print media brands among the top downstream sites from Google News.

A larger proportion of Facebook's News and Media traffic is directed toward Broadcast Media websites compared with Google News. The following chart illustrates this point nicely. The chart shows upstream visits to Broadcast Media websites from Facebook and Google News over the past year.

Compare that to Print Media websites where Google News, despite being a much smaller site overall, still sends almost as much traffic to Print Media websites as does Facebook.

Digging even deeper, let's look at a few individual websites. The Wall Street Journal last week received 10.37% of its US visits from Google News compared to only 1.41% from Facebook. The New York Times similarly received more traffic from Google News than from Facebook (5.21% compared to 2.96% of upstream visits). Fox News and CNN by contrast received more traffic from Facebook than Google News. Fox News received 5.50% from Facebook and 1.18% from Google News while CNN received 5.92% from Facebook and 1.77% from Google News.

But why the difference? Do Facebook users prefer Broadcast Media? I ran a correlation analysis to try to figure out if the amount of traffic Facebook sends a site is related to the number of fans a brand has on its Facebook page. I found no such correlation. (For the analysis, I used downstream visits from Facebook to 23 top News and Media websites excluding news aggregators and compared this to the number of fans on the associated Facebook page.)

A colleague pointed me to an article in the New York Times suggesting that social networks are creating a water cooler effect and actually boosting viewership of broadcast media. Is Facebook the new water cooler and if so, how can print media capitalize on this trend?

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Social networks displacing e-cards

2010-02-25T22:23:27Z

We’re often thinking about what people are doing on social networks and one of the most common uses is keeping in touch with friends and family, especially for birthday greetings and holiday messages. Once the domain of e-greetings, social networks have instead become the common place to send & post messages. While the traffic to social networks continues to climb, the market share of visits to websites in the E-Greetings has declined each month year-over-year each month from January 2009 through January 2010. During the two peak months for E-Greetings category, February and December, visits decreased 24% and 16%, respectively.

On specific holidays, the same trend occurred, with the market share of visits to E-Greetings websites down, while the Social Networking category has increased. The only exception is Mother’s Day, where both are down and more people may be spending the day with their mothers rather than using social networks. Key holidays for the E-Greetings category, Valentine’s Day and Christmas Day, were both down 29% and 27%, respectively. Holidays have historically been a popular day for using social networks and Facebook, for example, became the most visited website on both Christmas Day and New Year’s Day, surpassing Google.

While there are many activities taking place on social networking websites like Facebook and Twitter, birthday (easy to remember the dates when other friends post messages) and holiday greetings appear to be eroding traffic away from the E-Greetings category.

Bushfires 2010 Online: What did we learn from last time?

2010-02-22T22:09:07Z

Last year I wrote about the online response to the Victorian bushfires and how Australians used the Internet to find out important information about this devastating crisis. In this post, I want to explore if there has been any ‘learned behaviour’ in the community about being prepared for environmental disasters as reflected in their search patterns.

The below chart appears to indicate that online users were quick to react online to the event last year, but the volume of searches around ‘bushfires’ this year is relatively small in comparison.

It is encouraging however to see in the chart below, that the types of searches around bushfires that I covered last year, namely, Appeal, Education, General, Informational, Services have had various ebbs and flows - most likely in response to some of the offline campaigns that have been run by the various state authorities. There has been some prominence around ‘education’ related searches in the past few weeks, indicating some desire by users to be equipped with knowledge about bushfire safety.

Who is being strategic about online crisis management?

Our data can also illustrate the types of websites that are receiving traffic on bushfires, to help determine which organisations are being effective in getting online community traction. The NSW Rural Fire Service received the most traffic on ‘bushfires’ for the past 12 weeks, reflected in the table below:

Other government groups are using tactics such as pay-per-click to get traffic (accounting for 2.5% of clicks from ‘bushfires’ searches), resulting in their appearance amongst the top websites.

For government and community organisations, both short-term tactics should be used to meet immediate information needs (e.g. PPC and Display), while long-term campaigns (e.g. SEO and Social Media) should be used to mitigate complacency and instigate cultural change around bushfire awareness in Australia.

Super Bowl Ad Searches

2010-02-22T21:38:01Z

As a follow up to my blog post about the lift in traffic to websites advertised during the Super Bowl, I thought it would be interesting to see which advertisers were searched most often. Among the search queries that were related to Super Bowl ads during the week ending February 13, 2010, the top ten were mostly generic searches for ads & commercials. Two specific ads were mentioned in the top ten search terms - Doritos and Tim Tebow for ‘Focus on the Family’. Overall 7.5% of the traffic to the portfolio was from paid listings and 'super bowl commercials 2010' was the top paid term.

The top advertisers included among the search queries were Doritos, Focus on the Family and Snickers. For advertisers that used a celebrity in their advertisements, their names were also commonly being searched, with Tim Tebow and Betty White appearing most often.

YouTube received the highest share of traffic from the search terms in the portfolio ‘Super Bowl Ads 2010’ for the week ending February 13, 2010. The section for Super Bowl ads on the NFL Fanhouse website and SuperBowl Commercials followed, with the top 3 websites all offering the opportunity to view the commercials online.

Chatroulette: Sensation or fad?

2010-02-19T03:14:15Z

The water cooler talk on Monday morning was about a new site people had discovered called Chatroulette – a website that allows random strangers to talk face to face via webcam. Within days we had discovered articles in the Melbourne Age and Sydney Morning-Herald, the UK Guardian, the New York Times, and then yesterday my colleague, Robin Goad, in the UK ,beat me to the punch providing some statistical background of the web sites rise in prominence in the UK.

Online global sensations are far and few between and there is no guarantee whether Chatroulette is a flash in the pan novelty or whether it can be leveraged into a longer term idea of substance. This is a smart piece of hacking / mashing from a Russian teenager that makes use of Skype to connect people around the world, and as the name suggests, it is a bit of a roulette gamble on the strangers you’ll connect to via your webcam.

The chart below highlights the accelerated growth as the word started to spread, and a media driven peak on 16 February. Chatroulette currently stands as the 481th ranked website visited by Australian Internet users (17 February 2010), down from the peak of 356 the previous day and the number two webcam website behind Coastal Watch.

As reported in Robin’s blog, the UK profile of Chatroulette’s audience are wealthier and more sophisticated compared to the general visitor to the webcam industry. A similar trend has emerged in Australia with the three wealthier profiled Mosaic Groups being highly over indexed against the Australian online population – Privileged Prosperity (The most affluent families in the mist desirable locations), Academic Achiever (Wealthy areas of educated professional households) and Young Ambition (Educated and high-earning young singles and sharers in the inner suburbs).

Last week (week ending 13 February 2010) Search Engines and Social Networking and Forums were the main drivers of visits to Chatroulette, delivering 76.3% of upstream traffic (Search Engines 38.4% and Social Networking and Forums 37.9%) with Blogs and Personal Websites being the third highest upstream provider with 4.2%.

The novelty already may be wearing off for Chatroulette as average visit times have dropped from a peak of 14 minutes 25 seconds in the week ending 2 January 2010, to 6 minutes 38 seconds last week (although an increase on the previous week). The peak in January was more than likely driven by the holiday period, with users having more spare time to surf the web for entertainment whereas the lower average visit time experienced last week may be impacted by Australian time zones.

Whether Chatroulette will be a global sensation or a passing fad is sure to become clearer in the weeks ahead.

My School drives growth for My School Australia

2010-02-17T00:25:00Z

An inadvertent outcome from the launch of the Federal Government’s My School website was the huge traffic spurt to the social network, My School Australia.

The Federal Governments awaited education website, My School (www.myschool.edu.au) launched at the start of the school year, with much debate whether the website was simply a rankings table for schools limited value or if it serves a more substantial ongoing purpose.

My School publishes comparable results based on Australian schools with a statistically similar student population, versus being a straight ranking of schools from 1 to 9,000+.

As a parent I feel vindicated (perhaps a little smug) that my son’s school is performing well above statistically similar schools (and the alternate local schools). School children in years 3, 5, 7 and 9 are assessed by the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (www.naplan.edu.au), and the results are published annually on the My school website.

My School ranked as the 28th most visited website by Australian Internet users on 28 January across All Categories and the number three Education website by Australian internet users. Within five days it had fallen out of the top 100 websites (ranking 105th on 1 February) as the news and debate subsided, and has since fallen to 860th on 15 February.

The Computers and Internet - Search Engines industry delivered 61.4% of upstream traffic to My School in the week of its launch. Search terms containing a variation of My School (including misspellings), accounted for 87.9% of all upstream visits from Search Engines. The high level of branded search terms indicate the PR success / awareness of the My School website launch.

The top 20 upstream websites featured only five News and Media - Print websites, with Google.com.au and Google.com being the prominent referral websites. Social Networking and Forums were also prominent, with Facebook and the education specific network, My School Australia (myschoolaustralia.ning.com) capturing increased traffic and then referring visitors to the My School website.

The ranking of the social network, My School Australia, moved from 97,979 to 598 in week ending 30 January, an inadvertent by-product of the Governments My School launch. It has since dropped back to a ranking of 15,872 as of 15 January.

The debate will continue about the validity and value of the My School website, but there are 12,000+ happy social network members and one relieved father since the launch.

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