Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

Analyzing the Maclaren Stroller Recall

2009-11-19T00:24:59Z

Last week parents were horrified to learn about a recall on Maclaren umbrella strollers due to multiple cases of children’s fingers being amputated. The volume of traffic to the Maclaren website jumped 9x in volume on Monday, Nov. 9, 2009 as the recall hit the news and initially overloaded the website.

While the recall was only for products within the US, concerns also caused the volume of visits to surge 12x in the UK for the British stroller company.

Search was the top driver of traffic to the Maclaren website on Nov. 9th and referred 42% of the visits that day, 97% which were new visitors that had not been to the website in the past 30 days. The Maclaren website received the highest share of clicks from a portfolio of search terms related to the recall last week, which allowed the manufacturer to communicate directly with the owners of the strollers and help control the message. The top news websites to receive traffic from Maclaren recall searches were MSNBC and Google News.

Despite the bad situation, the upside for Maclaren is that only one law firm appeared in the downstream search results at #33 last week, but quick queries on the search engines show display more than one starting to pop up. Several law firms have started to buy the recall-related search terms, which may start to attract visitors looking to file a case.

Hunt is on for Retailer Promo Codes

2009-11-12T04:35:20Z

Almost everyone loves a bargain and during the cost conscious holiday shopping season last year, discounts were more popular than ever. This year looks to be no exception for the discount hungry consumer with searches up 19% last week as compared to 2008. Searches on a portfolio of search terms around coupons and promotions from specific retailers (e.g ‘target coupons’, ‘target coupon codes’ and ‘target free shipping code’) peaked during the week of Cyber Monday, up 76% from the same week in 2007. Post holiday, the week ending Dec. 27, 2009 followed with the second highest share of traffic from the portfolio of coupon terms and increased 66% compared to the previous year.

The majority of the searches result in a visit to the Rewards & Directories category, which includes websites that aggregate retailer promotions and coupon offers. Other searches do result in a visit directly to the retailer and multi-category department stores, followed by apparel and electronics retailers received the highest share of clicks during the peak week of Cyber Monday last year.

Curious about who is searching for the specific coupons to help retailers and coupon websites identify who to target, we looked at the demographics for the portfolio through custom analysis during the 8 weeks ending Dec. 27, 2008 to cover the majority of the holiday gift buying season. The split is even for male & female searchers in terms of gender. The household income data is interesting because while the greatest share of searches are from those making between $30k-$60k and $60k-$100k, when compared to the online population, the searchers tend to be more affluent and over-index for those making between $60k-$100k and $100k-$150k.

Just over half of the searchers were between the ages of 25 to 44 last year and the younger searchers aged 25 to 34 were more likely to search for retailer coupons than the rest of the online population.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Predictions

2009-11-02T23:11:09Z

Holiday projections are out and many are predicting a gloomy holiday season for retailers. The NRF forecasts a 1% decline growth in total retail sales for the 2009 holiday season, totaling $437.6 billion. The online channel is poised to fare somewhat better, with Forrester Research projecting an increase of 8% to $44.7 billion. The official shopping season usually gets underway during the Thanksgiving holiday with heavy promotional activity taking place around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However this year, fearful of weak sales, retailers are already starting to release Black Friday promotions and discounts. What else can we expect to see as the holiday season gets going? To delve into potential trends, we pulled together data from across Experian Marketing Services to predict what may happen around Black Friday this year.

Search will continue to play a strong role for Black Friday

Shoppers have been starting their searches for Black Friday sales earlier and earlier each year, with queries beginning in August, when speculation begins about which products may have the biggest discounts during the kickoff to the holiday season. In 2006, the searches took place over a 9 week period leading up to Thanksgiving & Black Friday, growing to 14 weeks in 2007, and 16 weeks in 2008. The number of variations including the term ‘black friday’ have increased significantly as well, increasing 41% year-over-year to reach 7,822 different combinations for the week ending Nov. 29, 2008. The number of websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘Black friday’ during the four weeks leading up to and including the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday increased to from 416 in 2007 to 473 in 2008 – an increase of 14%.

Every year, more consumers flock to Black Friday websites looking for information about sales & promotions both online and off. In 2008, visits to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites grew over the previous holiday season overall – with a 21% increase in visits to this category during the week of Thanksgiving. During that peak week, 53% of the traffic was driven by search referrals.

Source: Experian Hitwise

Overall email volumes will be higher, but will increase at a lower or equal rate

The volume of email sent by Experian CheetahMail on Black Friday increased 64% from 2007 to 2008 and 40% on Cyber Monday from 2007 to 2008. Analysis of the most current email data suggests an expected 30 percent increase in volume on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as compared to 2008, particularly if sales are low towards the end of November. In that case, there is a large chance that marketers will react by increasing volume to an even higher capacity. Mentions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also expected to be more prevalent in email campaigns earlier in the year.

Source: Experian CheetahMail

Expect consumers to start shopping online early

With Thanksgiving falling late again in 2009, consumers are expected to start shopping online a few weeks prior to the official start of the shopping season – Black Friday. In 2007, online purchases peaked during the week ending Monday, November 26 (Cyber Monday) when fully a quarter of all adults bought something online. Online purchases remained high for several weeks after Thanksgiving before falling to 17% the week of Christmas. In comparison, when Thanksgiving fell a bit later in the month last year, online purchase activity occurred earlier – several weeks prior to Black Friday. In fact, between the weeks ending November 3 and November 10, the share of adults who made an online purchase more than doubled – increasing from 11% to 23%.

Source: Experian Simmons

Please join us on Wednesday, Nov. 11th for a webinar on 'Crafting Black Friday Strategies' - register here.

Google’s rumored Music service launch today

2009-10-28T20:54:46Z

Google is expected to launch their music service this afternoon, so we decided to look at some of Google’s history with the Music category. Of course we all know that the majority of people start with Google for search - last month, 71% of all searches took place on Google. Out of the top 1000 search terms that took place on Google last week, 6% were music-related (includes bands, music services and content). Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits, 95% of the downstream traffic to Music websites were returning visitors (that had visited Google in the past 30 days).

Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30% of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace.

Last week, 15% of the clicks from the search term portfolio of Music that includes the names of over 900 band & artist names resulted in a visit to a Google property, especially YouTube, among the Top 10 websites to receive traffic.

Now we can just wait and see what Google Music will look like and what overall impact the service will have on the category.

Balloon boy floats into popular searches

2009-10-21T19:09:05Z

Americans are fascinated with the story of the ‘balloon boy’ as facts unfold in the highly unusual tale of a boy floating away in a mylar balloon - only to be discovered in the attic three days later. Searches jumped last week for ‘balloon boy’ related news, with ‘balloon boy’, ‘boy in the balloon’ and ‘balloon boy hoax’ leading the search term variations in terms of overall volume.

Among the search term variations for ‘balloon boy’, there were several mentions of the coverage from several television outlets, including the “Today Show’, ‘Good Morning America’. This could be a good opportunity to drive traffic to their websites although a big driver around many of the searches were due to the vomiting incidents that took place during the interviews.

Apparently vomiting may make good TV and online video viewing because many of the searches from ‘balloon boy’ were going to YouTube last week. The top recipient from searches was Google News followed by CNN.com and Yahoo! News. All of the traffic to the top 10 websites was purely organic, so there could be some opportunities to steal visitors via paid search if the fascination with the balloon boy continues.

Experian Hitwise

2009-09-10T14:52:22Z

You may notice a new identity to Hitwise today that reflects the integration of our brand with that of our parent, Experian. While the look and feel of our brand may change – the values, commitment and quality that have made Hitwise a market leader will not.

Learn More.

Facebook pushed past MySpace with Connect

2009-09-09T17:36:05Z

Social networking has continued to be one of the most activities online with online users, second only to search (and likely to surpass soon). The Social Networking category has experienced a resurgence of growth as websites like Facebook and Twitter have increased in popularity. Visits to a custom category of 155 Social Networking websites increased 53% during the week ending Sept 5, 2009 when compared to the same week the previous year. During the past 5 weeks, visits to the category reached the highest levels of the past three years. The previous peak occurred during the week ending June 23, 2007 when visits to MySpace reached their highest point.

Two major players continue to dominate the Social Networking custom category, Facebook and MySpace. During the week ending May 30, 2009, Facebook displaced MySpace as the top social network ranked by visits and has since also become the second ranked website overall behind Google. For the week ending September 5, 2009, Facebook captured nearly 58% of visits in the Social Networking custom category, followed by MySpace with 31%.

There are several drivers that have helped the growth of Facebook – such as a cleaner layout and mobile applications on the iPhone and BlackBerry to access Facebook anywhere. Another is certainly the Facebook Connect program, which allows users to share stories in their news feed and make comments on websites and blogs. The program launched in beta during July of last year, then officially launched to developers in early December. The number of websites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 websites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others. And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook because there is a clear uptick in the growth rate following the launch of Facebook Connect.

A clear benefit of Facebook Connect is the ability of the user to use a single portable identity – and most importantly, one password, rather than logging into multiple accounts across the network of websites. Facebook’s recent purchase of FriendFeed will also help to aggregate this single portable identity across the Internet. Participation from websites in Facebook Connect also has strong implications to appear more often in the search results executed on Facebook resulting from member postings as search becomes a more prevalent activity within this large audience.

For more about the social networking landscape, watch the archive of our webinar, 'As the World Tweets: Trends in the Social Media Landscape.'

Cash for Clunkers comes to an end

2009-08-28T22:51:28Z

The wildly successful ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program ended on Monday and is already being credited with helping to push automotive sales up in August after nearly 700,000 cars were replaced. Last week, the search term ‘cash for clunkers’ ranked 3rd for driving traffic to the Automotive category behind ‘ebay motors’ and ‘kelley blue book’. The top websites to receive traffic from the term ‘cash for clunkers’ last week was the government website Cars Allowance Rebate System, General Motors, and Cash for Clunkers Bill. Not surprisingly, the automotive manufacturers were among the top paid search advertisers when comparing the ratio of paid to organic traffic for each of the websites.

We all know the program was popular, especially after running short of funds early on, but where were the auto shoppers located? The Top DMAs (designated market area) to visit the Cars Allowance Rebate System website by overall share of traffic were Los Angeles, CA, New York, NY and Chicago, Il, but those cities tend to always be on top due to size. When we index the DMAs against the online population, the top DMAs were Utica, NY and Biloxi-Gulfport, MS, which gives a view of the cities where the online car shoppers that were trying to take advantage of the program are likely to be found.

The highest share of visits to the Cars Allowance Rebate System website and the websites of the top 5 automotive manufacturers (in terms of sales through the program as reported by the Department of Transportation), were from those with a HH income of $30k to $99.9k for the 4 weeks ending August 22, 2009. Together, these two HH income brackets represented more than half of the visits to each of the websites and those making $30k to $59.9k represented the largest share across all of the websites.

Resurgence of layaway programs continues

2009-08-20T20:33:23Z

With many consumers remaining cautious with spending, retailers are turning to layaway programs again this holiday season to offer shoppers a payment plan to buy gifts. In 2008, layaway programs made a comeback as retailers hoped to encourage shoppers to spend during the recession. Searches for the term ‘layaway’ jumped as consumer awareness increased about the offerings. The layaway programs were effective to drive early purchases with the peaks for search term variations that included ‘layaway’ taking place last year during the 5 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Kmart.com and Sears.com both launched holiday pages featuring layaway payment options on their websites in July to start capturing spending.

The top twenty variations of ‘layaway’ for the 4 weeks ending August 15, 2009 include both Sears and Kmart in the search queries as well as Wal-Mart, TJ Maxx and Meijer. Other popular search queries are by consumers who are looking for which stores offer layaway – a good opportunity for retailers to reach potential shoppers. When comparing variations of search queries that include ‘layway’ for the last twelve weeks to the previous holiday season, we’re already seeing increased share for search terms like ‘layaway online’, ‘layaway electronics’ and ‘stores that do layaway’.

Bing Shopping takes off

2009-08-14T16:37:34Z

Microsoft recently announced a promotion to receive Double Cashback when consumers use Bing Shopping for searches and online purchases. Back in October of last year, I wrote about the initial success of the Cashback program to capture visits, so this particular promotion (especially as consumers continue to curb spending) made me curious as to how Bing Shopping has performed since launch.

Within a custom category of 12 Comparison Shopping Tools, visits to Bing Shopping increased 169% when comparing the week ending June 6th to the week ending August 8th. Bing Shopping entered the category with an 8th place ranking and 4% of the visits within the category, jumping to 4th place and capturing nearly 11% of visits last week. As a result, there was a decline in visits to many of the comparison shopping tools.

Nearly 30% of the traffic to Bing Shopping was referred from Bing (18.32%) and MSN (11.34%) last week. Of the visitors to Bing Shopping referred from Bing, 66.81% were new visitors to the website (have not visited in the past 30 days) and 49.88% from MSN were new. Additionally, 5.86% of visitors were from Google (75.01% new) and another 3.54% were from Yahoo! Search (68.41% new).

Amazon.com, eBay, and Buy.com were the most visited retailers following a visit to Bing Shopping. Among all of the retailers, Bing Shopping is sending a significant share of new visitors to the websites, highlighting good customer acquisition opportunities for back to school shopping and the upcoming holiday season.

]]> Yes, this includes all referrals - paid, organic, and direct. Last week, 31.60% of the visits to Bing Shopping were referred from search engine and 52.50% of the search traffic was from paid listings.

Amazon acquires Zappos.com

2009-07-22T23:51:07Z

Amazon announced a deal today to acquire apparel and footwear retailer Zappos.com. The popular online retailer ranked 3rd last week among online retailers within the Apparel and Accessories category behind Victoria’s Secret and Old Navy. Both Amazon and Zappos.com are well-known for the breadth of product offerings, so it is not surprising that they share much of their audiences. For example, last week, Zappos.com was the top visited Apparel & Accessories website following a visit to Amazon and of those visitors, 79% had visited Amazon within the past 30 days. The chart below is filtered to include only websites from the Apparel & Accessories category.

Amazon delivered more traffic to Zappos.com than one of its own properties, Endless.com, which also sells footwear & accessories (with very little tying it to Amazon until an actual purchase), which has been the case for the majority of weeks over the past year.

The shared traffic combined with the size and reach of both websites also results in a similar audience composition, particularly by age and household income. The chart below displays the top 5 retailers, filtered to include only the Apparel & Accessories category, ranked by the similarity of their demographic profiles to Amazon. The closer the score is to 1, the more alike the demo profile.

Age is a good example where the audiences are very similar, but subtle differences do exist. Amazon attracted a higher share of visitors between the ages of 18 and 34 than Zappos.com over the past 4 weeks. Conversely, visitors to Zappos.com were slightly older, so there could be growth opportunities for both of the websites.

For now, it looks like business as usual for Zappos.com, so customers may not even realize that ownership has changed hands.

Roller skating babies hit the Internet

2009-07-10T16:55:14Z

What’s the latest Internet viral marketing craze? An online video from Evian featuring roller skating babies. On YouTube, the US version of the video has already had over 3 million views since being posted on July 2, 2009. Traffic to Evian’s website, evianliveyoung.com, has also grown and the market share of visits increased 700% on Wednesday, July 8th from the previous day.

YouTube was the top referring website to evianliveyoung.com on Wednesday and accounted for 54% of the traffic. Facebook also referred nearly 14% of the traffic as users shared the video across their networks of friends. Clearly video and social media websites helped to push the video and website to popularity, but email also still played a key role. Overall email services referred 16% of the traffic to evianliveyoung.com as fans emailed links to the video to friends and family.

Searching for Healthy Snacks

2009-07-09T23:33:10Z

Back to School has been a popular topic these days, so we have done some analysis around one of everyone’s favorite classes – lunch. We created a portfolio of 284 search terms related to kids healthy eating (e.g. lunches, treats and snacks) to monitor the demand around content and products for kid healthy eating. The most commonly searched query was ‘healthy snacks’ over the past 12 weeks. But the searchers are not always finding what they were looking for. Searches on ‘healthy snacks’ had a success rate of 67.88%, the percentage of searches that resulted in a user visiting a website. This suggests that there are still opportunities to capture those potential visitors through better content and results with via improved optimization or revised paid search copy. The 2nd ranked search term ‘healthy snacks for kids’ achieved a higher success rate, likely due to the addition of ‘kids’ to help better qualify the results. There are also opportunities with longer queries such as ‘fun healthy snacks for kids’, which had one of the lowest success rates, but clearly has demand.

Many of the searches are landing somewhere and the top websites to receive traffic from the Kids Healthy Eating portfolio was KidsHealth, dietblog and Self Magazine. When looking at the top ten websites that received traffic from the portfolio, only one, The Alliance for a Healthier Generation, was employing paid search to attract traffic. When looking at the entire list of websites to receive any traffic, paid or organic, there was a surprising lack of brands and food manufacturers – could be a missed opportunity to suggest healthy lunch & snack items.

Also check out our guest blog post in the Google CPG blog!

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.