Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

Facebook - The Most Searched On Brand in the U.S.

2010-04-01T20:14:28Z

As I've discussed before, examining search term data across all engines, while providing excellent tactical insight for search programs, also can provide invaluable insight for brand marketers. We're now able to provide a new search metric beyond volume (search volume for a specific term over all term volume) and breadth (# of search term variations over all search term variations), our new metric which I'll call breadth volume, sums the volume for all variations on a root term.

Here's a table for the top brand searches (U.S. for week ending 3/27/2010) by breadth volume:

So in this example we see that when we combine the volume of searches for all queries that contained the root "Facebook" over the last week (there were 10,673 unique terms), those searches accounted for 2.8% of all U.S. searches.

Exporting our data into Excel, we can chart the changes in a brands "breadth volume" over time, and in this case compared to a competitive brand.

Stay tuned for some other exciting ways we can leverage our new breadth volume metric.

Haiti Earthquake Relief - News Sites are Major Traffic Driver

2010-01-15T22:34:48Z

With the devastating earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday, you would expect that traffic to charitable websites would register an increase. The chart below shows daily visits to the top 325 sites in our Community - Humanitarian websites.

While search continues to be the #1 driver of traffic to charitable websites, news websites registered the greatest increase as a source of traffic.

And which news sites were the top contributors of traffic on the days following the tragedy; Drudge Report 3.6%, ABCnews.com 0.2% and MSNBC 0.14%.

Bing - Rising Success (rate)

2010-01-14T15:59:21Z

Yesterday we published our monthly search volume statistics, and as expected Google continues to dominate the space with 72.3% of all U.S. searches executed, while Yahoo! Search and Bing shares were at 14.8% and 8.9% respectively.

A far more interesting stat is the positive movement that we've seen in Bing's success rate. At Experian Hitwise, we measure success rate as the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain.

Here's a time series of success rates for Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing:

In October 2009, BIng's success rate was well below the competition with a success rate just north of 70%. That rate has been steadily increasing, and now Bing is showing a success rate over 75%. There is one caveat when reading these numbers; search success rate is often influenced by the complexity of the search. Traditionally, portal search engines tend to have more simple navigational and brand related queries in their top searches which are easier to resolve then searches for information.

When examining the top 100 search terms from Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing, we find that nearly all terms are brand and/or navigational in nature for each engine. When we look at the percentage of searches that these top 100 terms account for on each engine, we find that Google is at 9.5%, Yahoo! Search is 15.1% and Bing is at 16.5%.

If we take navigational percentages into account, Bing would probably still trail Yahoo! Search in success rate, however, given the rapid improvement in this metric over the last three months, future success rate trends should prove interesting.

Facebook Hits #1 on Christmas and New Year's Day

2010-01-04T18:45:54Z

The main Google page has been ranked the most visited site on a daily basis for U.S. Internet users. That statement has held true for 364 days of 2009. Google's dominance of "all category" visits was disrupted when Facebook visits surged on Christmas Day. Facebook was able, albeit by a slighter margin, to recapture the #1 position on Friday, New Year's Day. Here's a chart showing market share of visits (U.S.) to the Two domains over the last two months.

Its interesting to note that Facebook's two #1 days both occurred on major holidays. Is there something about holidays that might cause social networking to trump search as the most popular online activity? One possible explanation might be that being home for the holidays might also mean being physically separated from one's social group, leading to greater virtual contact.

Another Interesting stat to close out 2009 is the most searched on terms across all major search engines in the U.S. for the year. Here's the list:

Top 10 Search Terms (U.S.) for 2009:

1. Facebook
2. MySpace
3. Craigslist
4. Youtube
5. Yahoo Mail
6. Google
7. Yahoo
8. eBay
9. Facebook login
10. Myspace.com
Source: Experian Hitwise

Along with its surge in visits, "Facebook" captured the #1 spot for most searched on term. In 2008 "MySpace" held the top spot, with Facebook in the #10 position. I still get a kick out of seeing "Google" in the search term list. Over the last four weeks 64% of "Google" searches were executed on Yahoo! Search and Bing, while 29% were executed on Google itself. I often wonder why anyone would Google "Google" on Google. I'm interested to hear your hypothesis.

News Corp. - If You de-Index Will They Still Come?

2009-11-23T22:03:01Z

Two weeks ago we posted on Rupert Murdoch's threat to block Google from Indexing News Corp. content. While at first it seemed as though Murdoch was merely posturing with hypotheticals, reports continue to indicate that News Corp. is seriously considering choosing Bing as the exclusive "indexer" of their news content.

While our data hasn't changed substantially since the last post on this topic, given continuing talks I think we should dig a little deeper into our search data. For brevity's sake, I'll restrict this analysis to U.S. traffic to WSJ.com and leave the analysis of other News Corp. properties and markets for another post.

As of last week, WSJ.com's referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively. Analyzing Google search terms driving traffic to the Journal, the top 100 terms accounted for over 21.6% of all Google search traffic to WSJ.com. Of that 21.6%, 13.4% were navigational or brand searches (e.g. "Wall Street Journal," "WSJ," "WSJ.com" etc...). Even if Murdoch decides to block Google, these navigational search queries will most likely remain intact.

Of the remaining 8.2%, the majority of searches were for stock quotes, and general business related searches. Most specific news related searches fill-out the long tail of search queries. While the Journal may lose traffic if it ceases to cooperate with Google the loss may be less then anticipated.

The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com's traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%. As we see in the table below, the Journal is receiving more than double the traffic from Google News than newspaper sites overall (a custom category including national and regional papers). Bing, a potential News Corp. suitor for search exclusivity provides less than half of Google News' volume as of last week.

As newspapers continue to search for a way out of the search rip current, its hard not to root for Murdoch's maverick de-index strategy, that being said, the numbers bring us back to reality. As print continues to hemorrhage readership, could blocking your most significant traffic source be a wise choice?

News Corp. Google-less?

2009-11-10T00:04:36Z

Rupert Murdoch made an interesting statement in a Sky News interview today, when asked about news content available through search engines such as Google, Murdoch says he would consider blocking Google from indexing News Corp.'s news websites such as the Wall Street Journal. Of course it would naturally follow that I would immediately chart the amount of traffic that Google drives to Murdoch's flagship news site.

Here's the same chart from Google News to WSJ.com

In fact, on a weekly basis Google and Google news are the top traffic providers for WSJ.com account for over 25% of WSJ.com's traffic. Even more telling. According to Experian Hitwise data, over 44% of WSJ.com visitors coming from Google are "new" users who haven't visited the domain in the last 30 days.

While Mr. Murdoch makes some strong points in his Sky News interview regarding the plight of the news industry and the perils of making all content free, as clickstream data demonstrates - blocking Google could isolate the Journal from potential new online subscribers.

Thanks to Cheyne Winterton for the data hat-tip.

Twitter Revisited - in More than 140 Characters

2009-10-29T17:29:11Z

A quick update from my Twitter post from last month. I had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent conferences this week, iMedia Breakthrough and Digital Media West. During the Q&A of my talk at Digital Media, I was asked about my views of Twitter's staying power versus competition from Facebook.

I think this charts sums up the competitive threat that Twitter may pose to Facebook's astounding 6% of all U.S. Internet visits (read: no threat).

Facebook's dominance minimizes the detail and recent decline in visits to Twitter's domain. This chart gives a clearer picture of Twitter's decline over the last few months. As I noted in last months entry, this chart only portrays web visits to Twitter versus application traffic.

At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per twitter user over the life of their twitter account is 1!

I Believe this figure confirms our original hypothesis of Twitter-stall due to a drop in new users. As Facebook continues to grow, its user-base across Mosaic types shows that its user-base is becoming ubiquitous. Twitter by contrast was showing greater coverage amongst types earlier in its growth phase. Since Twitter's decline in July, the number of over-indexing has narrowed significantly, indicating that early growth may have been the result of significant trail behavior leading up to this summer.

That being said, I still plan to tweet this entry.

Twittered Out?

2009-09-25T16:42:35Z

On the heels of yesterday's rumor that Twitter is close to securing an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company's valuation in the $1 billion range, I decided to take a quick look at Twitter's market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic.

It should be noted that the above chart indicates visits to Twitter's website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption.

Another angle on measuring new user adoption is to track the volume of searches on "Twitter." As we can see in both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.

To explore the hypothesis that slowing and now decreasing market share of visits may be attributable to the drop in new users, we can turn to our Experian Hitwise Clickstream report that shows new versus returning users from the top Twitter traffic sources. Here's a table for those traffic sources in April 2009:

You can see the drop-off in new users if we examine the same report as of last week:

Temporary set-back or user-saturation, what are your thoughts?

Free Shipping - Vendor and Consumer Perspectives

2009-09-15T22:37:09Z

Our sister company Experian CheetahMail released an insightful white paper on the topic of free shipping email offers (download the paper here). Among several interesting findings, the paper provides some seasonality data on the percentage of clients that sent free shipping offers by quarter. "As expected, the sharpest increase occurred at the end of the year for the holiday shopping season." The paper also notes that free shipping offers were at equal to higher levels when comparing Q1 2008 to Q1 2009.

Leveraging Experian Hitwise data, we can visualize free shipping demand using search terms as a proxy for interest.

A couple of interesting observations:

- "Free shipping" search breadth has been accelerating earlier each year, with 2008 holiday season searches beginning in mid-October (in 2007 "free shipping" searches began ramping early November)

- The actual peak for "free shipping" searches each year is the first week of the New Year, as online buyers look for post-holiday sale items

- "Free shipping" searches have increased 75% comparing the first week of 2008 versus 2009, which given CheetahMail's data might indicate a gap between vendor offers and consumer interest.

By utilizing our Search Intelligence tools, we can also see that during the height of "free shipping" searches, the most common search phrases contain a brand name + "free shipping" as well as the word "code" or "codes".

Swine Flue, Gripe Suina and Hitwise Brazil

2009-09-01T18:02:45Z

Greetings from Sao Paulo. I'm in town this week to attend today's launch of Hitwise Brazil, a new offering from Serasa Experian Marketing Services. In preparation for this event, I've been immersed in studying how Brazilian Internet behavior is similar and different from the other markets that we serve.

While I've written before about bird flu and swine flu in the past. Today, using our new Brazilian data is the first time we've analyzed search queries from a non-English speaking region. The chart below compares searches for "gripe suina" (Portugese for "swine flu") against the scientific term "H1N1" and the medical term "Influenza A."

The initial spike in volume on "gripe suina" occurs when the first cases of swine flu are reported in Mexico and the United States. As we noticed years ago with bird flu, there are different patterns to popular search (swine flu) scientific interest (H1N1) and medical interest (Influenza A). Those differences show-up very clearly in the chart above.

By examining search term variations and where people click when searching on "gripe suina" we can see the shift in user intent from general interest queries in May 2009 that continued to reference and news sites, to August 2009 where there are increased instances of symptom related searches that result in visits to health and medical sites.

Bing + Yahoo! Now Equals 26% of Search Market

2009-07-29T22:31:19Z

Two weeks ago we posted about the potential deal between Microsoft and Yahoo! . Now that the deal is official, the latest search numbers tell us that Google has 70.6% of all U.S. query volume while the combined Bing and Yahoo! Search now comprise 26% of all U.S. searches, leaving only 3.4% for the other 54 engines that we track in search share (1,465 search engines that we track in market share of visits). More data to follow tomorrow.

Bing, Yahoo! Search and Ad Sales Efficiencies

2009-07-17T19:08:27Z

We've been following the Microsoft, Yahoo! Search dance for some time now. Yesterday, Kara Swisher posted that we might finally be close to an advertising deal between the #2 (Yahoo!) and #3 (Bing) players in search.

While given previous false alarms on this topic, I'm not holding my breath. However, I thought it would be interesting to analyze this deal from the perspective of advertising efficiency. In the past, the three major engines had very different demographic make-ups. The screen-shot below is an age comparison of visitors to MSN Search compared with visitors to Yahoo! Search one year ago (four weeks ending 7/12/08).

You can see the clear age difference between the two, with Yahoo! skewing towards the younger searcher, and MSN Search - older. Demographic distance between the two properties could be an important factor in understanding how well Yahoo! Search ad inventory would sell on MSN Search (now Bing). Fast forward to current data as of last week:

When comparing Bing to Yahoo! Search their appears to be a closer demographic fit which should yield more search advertising sales efficiencies. Finally, the homogeneity of search behavior is becoming evident in where searchers click-off to when executing a search. In the past, searches on the different engines showed very different downstream industries. The table below indicates that search behavior now looks strikingly similar between the two:

If Swisher is right and we're close to Microsoft and Yahoo! joining forces, the similarity in demographics and behavior should bode well for the relationship.

MySpace - Returning to Entertainment?

2009-07-14T21:25:55Z

I was living vicariously through WSJ's Julia Angwin's Mogul-fest tweets last week (ironically throughout the week she tweeted that several moguls didn't see the future in Twitter).

While in Sun Valley, Angwin reported a brief interchange with Murdoch regarding the future direction of MySpace. Murdoch stated that MySpace needed to be re-focused "as an entertainment portal."

Having followed MySpace via Hitwise over the last five years, I was interested to see what user behavior revealed regarding MySpace's positioning in the online entertainment space. Clickstream (or what sites were visited immediately prior to and after a subject site or industry) provides an interesting angle on that question.

At one point in its history MySpace was the most significant contributor of traffic to Entertainment - Mutlimedia sites (YouTube remains the #1 site in that category) providing over 35% of traffic to the category. As the chart below illustrates, that percentage now hovers below 10%.

As I wrote in Click (and Angwin goes into much greater depth in her book), MySpace's initial growth focused on community and music. Here's a chart of MySpace's contribution of traffic to the Music - Bands & Artists category.

As a top 5 site with 3.45% of all U.S. Internet visits, MySpace remains a massive force to be reckoned with. However, as the two charts above illustrate, the site has become increasingly removed from Entertainment and Music traffic.

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.

Movie Tickets - Reconciling Web Visits with Box Office Dollars

2009-06-16T18:34:51Z

As we discovered in yesterday's post, the demographics of web visitors by site and industry are constantly changing. I ran into this same phenomenon this morning when analyzing visits to the top movie ticket sites (e.g. Fandango and Moviefone).

According to IMDb's Box Office Mojo, year-to-date box office revenue for 2009 at $4.6 billion, puts this year ahead of last by 10.7%. Based on the chart below I was expecting box office numbers this year to show a steep decline.

So why the discrepancy between visits to movie ticket sites and actual ticket sales which should show some correlation? I checked the demographics of visitors to these sites for the four weeks ending June 13, 2009 to the same week in 2008.

The change in movie ticket site demographics could indicate that this year's movie-goers are less likely to check online movie ticket sites versus a year ago. Closer examination of the demographic change shows that higher income visitors are declining in year-over-year visits while lower income visitors are increasing. We know from previous analysis that affluent Internet users exhibit more cost-savings behavior then their less affluent counterparts. Could that be the cause of divergence between visits and dollars?