Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - US

Google: Does Search Data Indicate a Recession?

2008-02-26T18:42:48Z

The news is buzzing this morning, starting with a report from UBS that alleges that Google's paid clicks are down in January. Analysts from a number of firms have been speculating that this may be a sign that a slowing economy is affecting search.

Not so fast.

If a recession is in fact affecting search, we should see a drop in the amount of traffic going from Google to retail sites (our Shopping & Classifieds category). The following chart shows the percentage of traffic over the last three years actually increasing.

As you can see, Google traffic to retail, on a monthly basis, is on the increase compared to previous years. If we focus in on daily data (year-over-year comparison) we see that Google traffic to retail is also up on a daily basis when we compare January/February 2007 with 2008.

Microsoft and Yahoo!: Putting the Offer in Perspective

2008-02-01T17:47:07Z

Addendum: There was an error on the properties chart below, percentages for the maps category were transcribed improperly.

This morning, as reported by CNN, Microsoft made an unsolicited $44.6 billion stock and cash bid for Yahoo!. To put this potential deal in perspective, we've assembled some Hitwise statistics on MSN, Yahoo! and Google.

If we combine the top properties for the three companies, the combined market share of visits (U.S.) for Microsoft and Yahoo! would be 15.6% of all Internet visits, with Google at 7.7% for the week ending January 26, 2008.

But if we consider only search volume, the picture is very different. For the four weeks in January 2008, Google accounted for 65.98% of all executed searches in the U.S., while combining executed searches for Yahoo! Search and MSN Search would amount to 27.84% of executed searches for the same time period.

While the deal would have limited impact on Google's continued dominance of search, the combined content of Yahoo! and MSN properties yields an impressive list of top sites by industry category. In the table below, we've listed where Google, Yahoo! and MSN properties appear within the top five positions by industry category for U.S. Internet visits for the week ending January 26, 2008.

Florida Primary: What Internet Data Says

2008-01-29T18:19:51Z

Let me start by reiterating that an Internet visit does not equal a primary vote. That being said, there is still some very interesting insight to be gained by looking at visits to sites within the Hitwise Lifestyle - Politics category from Internet users in Florida.

The table below measures both the volume (who received the most visits from Internet users in Florida) and percentage (for their own site, regardless of that sites market share, who received the most visits from Florida Internet users as a percentage of their own site visits) for the official websites of Republican presidential candidates.

We know from past primaries that Ron Paul visitors tend to be hyper-internet active and should probably be discounted in terms of primary votes, that leaves Romney, Huckabee and McCain, in that order, as the front-runners in Internet visits.

The percent visit column highlights the challenge with Giuliani's strategy. On a percentage basis he has the largest portion of Florida visitors to his site compared with other state visitors, yet his lack of visibility in other states puts him down in the 66th position for overall Florida volume.

Most Depressing Day of the Year?

2008-01-21T06:38:57Z

A researcher from Cardiff University claims that the third Monday in January is the most depressing day of the year based on an equation that factors; weather, credit card debt from the holidays and failed New Year's resolutions. While I'm all in favor of a good formula, I was a little skeptical that our emotions could be reduced to these three variables. In this week's TIME column I discuss some interesting findings. The chart below didn't make it into the column.

You can see that spikes in searches on "depression" that happen in late November (we drew this chart limiting it to "depression" searches to the Health and Medical category to account for "great depression" searches). Visits to the official websites of leading anti-depressant medications show that they spike a few weeks in advance of "depression" searches, possibly a sign of pre-medication before the holidays? And the good news -- depression (based on searches and visits to drug sites) appears to be on the decline.

Starbucks v. McDonald's: The Battle Brewing

2008-01-14T14:29:43Z

My most recent column for TIME is posted here. After hearing about the looming face-off between McDonalds (they've decided to capitalize on the $4.00 coffee craze) and Starbucks (moving in the direction of breakfast sandwiches and drive-thru's) I decided to use Hitwise data to see how similar the web audiences are for the two brands.

Here are two charts that didn't make it into the column. First the swing in age-group between the two (read the chart as Starbucks swing above the line, Mcdonald's below).

And another chart for the difference in household income:

If the web audience mirrors the store clientele for the respective brands, McDonald's will have an uphill battle attracting a new demographic to their stores. But if the goal is to upsell their current customers on a very profitable product, the trending of Starbucks psychographic data over time tells us that its spreading its demographic through all segments of U.S. consumers (including McDonald's key segments). The prediction, Starbucks won't lose customers to McDonald's, but McDonald's will be able to upsell their existing customers on the McCafe concept.

Obama and Huckabee Capture New Hampshire Web Visits

2008-01-07T20:32:35Z

Last week our very own Heather Hopkins posted this data on the upcoming Iowa Caucus and New Hampshire Primary. By narrowing our data down to the state holding the primary, we can see which candidate's website is the most visited in each state. When Heather posted her table prior to the Iowa Caucus, she listed Barack Obama and Ron Paul as receiving the most visits from Iowa Internet users. If we factor Ron Paul's Internet sensation out of the equation, she had Huckabee with the next most visits for a Republican candidate.

Given how close Heather's table was to the outcome in Iowa, I've decided to update the New Hampshire data factoring this last week.

The big change when comparing this week's chart with last is how far Huckabee has risen, to now overtake John McCain as the Republican candidate with the most visits from New Hampshire residents. Noticeably missing from the Republican side are Rudy Giuliani and Fred Thompson.

While Huckabee's rise this week may be a result of curiosity given his win in Iowa, it will be interesting to see how closely Tuesday's New Hampshire results map to Internet visits.

Paid v. Organic Search Tool Launches

2007-12-06T07:23:13Z

This week, we're launching our Paid v. Organic Search and Fast Moving Search Terms. On top of an already massive set of search data on a site and industry level, we're able to provide paid v. organic search breakdown for sites as well as for individual terms sending traffic to a site.

To show off this new service, I took a look at the top five sites for six industry categories and calculated an paid v. organic percentage for each category.

The paid v. organic range within these categories can be vast. That may be the result of successful site optimization (more organic) or underutilization of paid search. With this new valuable data, online marketers no longer have to rely on gut instinct in executing search marketing programs.

OpenSocial - What a Difference a Day Makes

2007-11-01T23:42:33Z

Today Google made its official announcement (NYTimes coverage) of the networks that have joined their OpenSocial initiative. By adding sites not yet named in Tuesday's NYTimes piece, namely the addition of MySpace, we have a completely different picture of the combined OpenSocial sites compared to Facebook. By popular requests here's an updated chart:

OpenSocial - Can it Compete with Facebook?

2007-10-31T20:00:24Z

The New York Times reported yesterday that Google, working with an alliance of companies including; Linkedin, Plaxo, Friendster and Hi5 to write standards for social networking applications including Google's Orkut. The big question, can a collection of social networks tied together with a standard for application development challenge the fastest growing social network - Facebook?

To shed some light on the topic, I assembled a quick custom category of the sites mentioned in the article (Orkut, Hi5, Friendster, Plaxo, Linkedin and Ning, which appeared below the dectile). Here's how then stack-up against each other:

Now lets compare the combined group of OpenSocial sites against Facebook (market share of visits for the U.S., weekly data). Notice that currently Facebook is almost 10x the size of the combined OpenSocial group.

As far as the future, as we've learned in the 2.0 space category leadership can change in a matter of weeks. Facebook's clear defense is the entrenchment of users and the pain of switching. If Google's new group can build an app to port-over all my Facebook friends it would go along way towards breaking down barriers-to-entry.

Spice v. Cheetah: Dancing with the Stars Analysis

2007-10-29T18:31:57Z

It's that time of year again, Dancing with the Stars (Season 5) is in full swing, which means it's time to take a look at the latest search term data to gauge contestant popularity and viewer mindset. The first chart is a full two year historical chart of search term volume (by week) in the U.S. for the remaining contestants on the show.

That August 2006 spike for Marie Osmond is most likely due to ~~the announcement of her divorce~~ rumors surrounding her hospitilization, her spike this week was related to her fainting spell on camera. The most popular searches for Marie last week included "marie osmond faints," "marie osmond fainting" and of course "videos of marie osmond fainting." Here's a chart with a close-up for this fall season:

A little too early to call this season, but search term suggestion does give us some indication into what's on the mind of Dancing with the Star viewers:

Jennie Garth: most searchers looking for pictures or information on her husband

Jane Seymour: several searches about her age as well as concern if she was affected by the California wildfires

Helio Castroneves: searchers wondering if he's married or has a girlfriend

Finally, we'll be doing an analysis this year on the blog to determine if Dancing with the Stars provides a lift to the mindshare of its celebrity contestants. Here's the first installment, two contestants are members of the girl bands Cheetah Girls and Spice Girls, below is a chart of searches for the two groups.

More to follow, stay tuned.

Just Thought I'd Ask(.com)

2007-10-25T16:58:02Z

While watching television the other night I caught the new Ask.com television ad campaign. I've noticed over the last week that this commercial which demonstrates Ask.com's integrated results page compared to other plain vanilla SERPs, has been getting a lot of play during prime time.

I decided to revisit our search engine press release for this month, which shows Ask's share of executed searches in the U.S. growing 23.7% from 3.49% of all executed searches in August 2007 to 4.32% of executed searches in September 2007.

I also checked market share of visits to Ask.com to see if this lift was also reflected in their visits metric and was surprised to see the recent break-out.

I wonder when the TV spots began to air? Could they be partially responsible for the ASK.com lift?

Retail 100 Index - Fall Increases over Last Year

2007-10-23T23:33:46Z

Today we issued a release on the new 2007 Retail 100 Index, a collection of the top 100 retailers in our Shopping and Classifieds category (the category contains over 20,000 sites). Our analysis shows positive growth in visits to the retail category comparing this year to last year. In a blog exclusive, below is an analysis of the daily pattern of visits to the 2007 Retail 100 Index, which on a daily average is showing a 13.5% increase over last year.

While visits to the Index may not match online (or offline) retail sales, their should be some correlation between visits and online sales. I noticed in this report Coach's CEO Lew Frankfort warned of a weak holiday outlook, more conservative than Wall Street is expecting. Frankfort went on to say that the retail landscape was weakening across the board.

Below, I've created a chart showing the market share of visits to Coach's website compared to our Apparel and Accessories category. Coach, going into this month is weak compared to the apparel category, but our data (at least in terms of visits) seems to contradict a sector wide decline.

The Grinch that Stole -- Mrs. Fields' Cookies?

2007-10-23T19:51:01Z

Occassionly strange data crosses my desk (o.k. maybe not occassionly, regularly really). Luke McGuinness our VP of Sales on the West Coast popped his head in my office to ask if I knew why Mrs. Fields, suddenly, was getting almost all of her traffic from web based email services (such as Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc...). Here's the clickstream report that I pulled on the Mrs. Field's site for the day of the spike October 12, 2007.

But what caught my eye was what was on the other half of the clickstream report... where people go when they leave MrsFields.com. Over 73% were heading off to -- The American Family Association?

Whatever was happening between email services and the American Family Association was having a huge effect on visits to the MrsFields.com, increasing the marketshare of visit to over 3x its normal level.

A little Internet searching revealed the source of this mystery. Apparently, according to this story, a Michigan woman, called a Mrs. Fields to order Christmas cookies. The company representative gave her inaccurate information according to a later statement from Mrs. Fields that, the store was no longer carrying "Christmas" cookies. An email blast was issued from the AFA site. Mayhem ensued. Mystery solved.

This little diversion today highlights the value of daily Internet data as a source of information for what, at first, appears to be errant data, but later proved to be the negative impact of an email campaign.

Black Friday Comes Earlier

2007-10-22T19:34:32Z

Earlier this month I conducted a Hitwise client webinar with Anita Gandhi, our Client Intelligence Director. The topic of discussion was the growing popularity of Black Friday searches on the net. Anita pointed out during the presentation that the popularity of Black Friday ad sites (and the growing coverage in the media) has repurposed a term-of-art in the retail trade to a consumer search phrase.

This chart shows the growth in "Black Friday" searches in 2005 vs. 2006.

Another remarkable trend is how interest in Black Friday has been creeping earlier in the calendar now showing up as early as July, ramping by mid-September, show the growing consumer demand for information on sales the day after Thanksgiving.

Wal-Mart is bringing increasing interest to the sales date with a letter to Black Friday ad sites last week warning them not to post any leaked Black Friday sale material as their ads are copyrighted material. Ironically, the one brand associated with Black Friday Ads (based on search containing the term "black friday" for the four weeks ending 10/20/07) is Wal-Mart, the only brand that shows up in the top 20 terms. It shows up in position #10 "Walmart Black Friday ads," #13 "Walmart Black Friday," and #20 "Walmart Black Friday ad."

Global Warming: A Search Term Analysis

2007-10-19T13:15:29Z

This week's science of search column on TIME.com is up. In light of the Nobel Peace Prize award to Gore, we provided some data on Internet search patterns around global warming issues in the U.S.. Below is a table that I alluded to in the article, a search term analysis on the term "global warming" (where U.S. Internet users went after searching on the term).

The #1 site visited after searching on Global Warming is globalwarming.org, is a website from the Cooler Heads Coalition, an international non-profit that is "dedicated to smarter thinking on the subject of global warming and climate change." The big question is, are people clicking through to this site because the URL seems to be on-point for their search mission, or is this site's popularity from the term "global warming" an indication of the prevalence of global warming skepticism? Discuss...