Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - US

Presidential candidates - are states red and blue online?

2008-08-27T20:59:01Z

During the primaries we took a look at the visitation to the websites of presidential candidate hopefuls to predict the winners by state. Now that the nominations have been decided and the DNC is underway with the RNC not far behind, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this analysis. Below is an electoral map from NYTimes.com which summarizes how each of the states have voted in the past 5 elections for quick visualization.

For both of the presidential candidate websites, I categorized the states by the same breakdown above. Each state includes the share of traffic from that particular state and the representational index (a method of comparing two groups or audience, and expressing the different between the two as an index, in this case, is the candidate’s website and the overall online population) which summarizes the likelihood (over 100 means more likely, below 100 means less likely) of online users in that state to visit the website. Below are the top 10 sites ranked by traffic share for each candidate.

The top 10 states to BarackObama.com represent 60% of the total traffic to the website over the past 4 weeks ending August 23, 2008. Among the top 10 are 4 states that are categorized as ‘Strong Obama’, which represent 31% of total traffic. The top 5 states that index highest for visits to BarackObama.com are Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, and DC. Colorado is likely to appear due to this week’s DNC in Denver, but Obama’s website has been a key component for communicating with voters, so visitation from the tossup states of Colorado and New Mexico gives a chance to communicate key messages.

For McCain’s website, 55% of the traffic came from the top 10 states, but only 8% of the traffic is from a historically Republican and 'Solid McCain' state – Texas. The abundance of visitors from historically Democratic states implies that many voters are gathering information (and may have been Hillary Clinton supporters). When the states are ranked by representational index, 4 out of 5 are in the western part of the US – Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado, with Louisiana rounding out the top 5. But more importantly for McCain, only Wyoming is considered a ‘Solid McCain’ state, so the others may provide an opportunity to sway undecided voters.

As we have said many times, a visit does not equal a vote, but insight into who is visiting the websites of the candidates helps to identify the best mediums to reach potential voters. The flip side of this analysis is all of the stares that are not visiting either website, highlighting the need to reach them somewhere else online or away from the computer entirely.

One final note and wildcard to consider - what is the predictability based upon past elections? There are new voters that have registered in the last year which might make that map look much different in November - or not at all.

Biden VP pick and DNC invigorates candidate site traffic

2008-08-26T19:36:59Z

Last week, the forthcoming Democratic National Convention and Vice-President selection drove the 2nd highest share of visits to each of the websites of the presidential candidates in the past year. The only week with a higher share of visits included the Super Tuesday primaries. The market share of visits to BarackObama.com jumped 53% and 46% to JohnMcCain.com from the previous week.

While both websites are experiencing greater traffic volume, the increase in visitors is driving down the average visit time from earlier this year. These shorter visits provide a more limited opportunity to distribute desired information across the audience, emphasizing ease of use in the design & layout to help visitors quickly find what they are looking for on the websites.

In the weeks leading up to the DNC, Barack Obama started a mobile campaign to text his followers to become the first to know about his running mate selection. While many have critiqued the timing of the actual text being received after many news outlets reported the VP pick, at Hitwise we found that plenty of searchers were seeking information about the texts. Among the top 350 search terms that drove traffic to Barackobama.com last week, 28% were related to the VP selection, with 12% of those specifically referring to the texts. Searches that broadly included Obama’s name commanded the largest share of the search terms at 33%. Other searches related to facts about Obama's birth certificate, local campaign volunteering activities, and specific issues.

The fast moving search terms for a custom category of the two websites of the presidential candidates were also dominated by curious searchers seeking info about the texts and the VP pick. Next week should also deliver plenty of search activity around Politics as the DNC wraps up, McCain selects a VP, and the and the Republican National Convention is set to begin.

Online shopping traffic remains strong

2008-08-18T14:28:22Z

One sector that we continually monitor here at Hitwise for insight into consumer behavior is traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Given the current economic climate, price sensitivity is driving more visits to the websites of online retailers, coupons, and comparison shopping tools as shoppers increasingly research potential purchases online. Overall, the market share of visits increased 19% in July 2008 as compared to the previous year.

Consumers are turning to websites like Craigslist to sell items to augment their income and also seek save money by purchasing used goods, driving significant growth in the Classifieds category. The category of Classifieds websites experienced the highest traffic growth in July 2008, increasing 88% over the previous year. Grocery websites ranked 2nd in terms of year over year growth with a 40% increase, with much of the growth in this category can be attributed to shoppers collecting coupons and information on weekly specials. House & Garden followed with 30% growth with home owners avoiding the weakened real estate market and opting to turn to retailers like The Home Depot and Lowe's for DIY home improvement options instead of moving. The Rewards & Directories category, which includes comparison shopping tools (e.g. Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber.com) also received higher traffic in July as compared to the previous year.

Overall, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 25% of traffic referred from search. While the number may seem low, keep in mind that many of the product categories received a higher share of traffic from search while the Auctions & Classifieds are less reliant upon search (15% and 14%) but represent nearly 35% of the visits within the Shopping & Classifieds category.

Our current Search Intelligence offerings at Hitwise offer insights into the share of Paid & Organic search traffic for individual websites and in the coming weeks, we’ll be upgrading the tools to include even more detail into the search landscape. One new feature will be the ratio of Paid & Organic search traffic by industry. As an example, below is a paid search quadrant with the majority of the product categories tracked in the Shopping & Classifieds. Along the x-axis is the share of upstream traffic to the product category from search, the product categories that are on the right side of quadrant received the highest share of search referrals (both paid & organic combined). Among the product categories, House & Garden and Sport & Fitness received the most traffic from search, 38% and 35%, respectively. Along the y-axis is the share of paid search traffic, so the product categories in the top right corner are buying the highest share of search traffic. As an example, 40% of the search traffic to the Office Supplies was from paid search.

In addition to offering benchmarking data, these varying ratios can point to the reliance of a product category or industry in driving traffic through organic search results, highlighting the imperative for optimizing a web site vs. the faster testing grounds of paid search copy.

Google’s share of US searches hits 70%

2008-08-11T20:11:36Z

Each month at Hitwise we release the share of searches by each of the major search engines to measure the impact upon the search landscape. The report tends to tell a similar story each month in terms of the ranking by share of searches, but for July (the four weeks ending July 26, 2008); Google reached a new milestone and accounted for 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches. Google’s share of searches increased 10% over the same month last year and 2% over the previous month. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search (including Live.com), and Ask followed with 18.65%, 5.36%, and 3.53% share of searches, respectively.

At least some of the growth in searches can be attributed to the growing share of visits to Google. Looking back over the past 13 months, in addition to the growing share of searches, traffic to Google has continued to increase. The market share of visits to Google in July increased 25% over July 2007 and has grown each month since January in 2008. Retention of this increased traffic is also coming into play as Google has maintained a consistent returning visitor rate (visitors who have visited the website within a 30 day period) of 95% each month since October 2007 (when Hitwise began tracking this metric).

Next week I’ll be speaking on 2 panels at SES San Jose with some great folks so please join us if you are attending the conference - the 1st panel is Monday morning, the Search Industry Update (where I am sure this topic will come up) and the 2nd panel is Tuesday afternoon, Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers. I encourage everyone to check out the agenda – more than 80% of the panels and content are new so everyone should be walking away with some useful information.

LA and NYC Top DMA® Markets Visiting NBCOlympics.com

2008-08-07T20:16:06Z

Hitwise recently added DMA® (Designated Market Area) reporting to our demographics data and with 2008 Beijing Olympics underway we wanted to see which markets have visited the NBCOlympics.com website the most in the past four weeks.

In television industry network execs hope that the big markets tune in for special events and that has been the case online for the NBCOlympics.com website as Los Angeles and New York were the two top DMA markets visiting the website for the 4 weeks ending August 9, 2008. The markets rank as the #2 and #1 DMA markets overall among the 210 DMA markets based on market share of U.S. visits.

Check back to the blog as we will be posting Olympic trends from three markets during the games.

Montauk Monster gains notoriety online

2008-08-04T17:12:18Z

As a frequent visitor to Montauk, I was fascinated by the story on Gawker last week about the ‘Montauk Monster’. After checking it out, I assumed that this would be a mostly local tale for New Yorkers that head out to the beach during the summer and the full-time residents of Long Island. Instead, the Montauk Monster has received national media attention as everyone tries to figure out what on earth this thing is (viral marketing stunt? product of animal experimentation?). The monster appears twice in our Fast Moving Search Terms for the week ending August 2, 2008 – ‘montauk monster’ came in at #5 (right behind earthquake) and ‘monster of montauk’ was #12.

For the week ending August 2, 2008, Fox News received the most traffic as a result of searches for ‘montauk monster’ followed by Gawker. Among the top 10 to receive traffic from the searches was one Long Island publication, the East Hampton Star as well as New York magazine who also posted continuing coverage along with Gawker. The story even reached British shores with coverage from the Telegraph.

Search queries for the Montauk Monster are a mixture of discussion topics around the mystery animal ranging from its authenticity, theories around what type of animal it could be, and of course, photos to see what it looks like. So far, raccoon and turtle are the top animals being named but recent stories are also bringing the pig into the mix.

Montauk Monster theories were all the rage this weekend on the beach and Twitter this weekend – what do you think is? I am still kicking around an X-Files viral marketing stunt theory while others point to Cloverfield 2. What I am really hoping is to never swim next to it!

Pimp My iPhone

2008-07-24T20:14:08Z

The new iPhone 3G is nearly 2 weeks old now and the high demand & enthusiasm for the new device has yet to die down. I’ll openly admit waiting in line waiting 3 hours and 20 minutes on the first day which seemed crazy until I heard reports of those waiting over 5 hours to get their hands on one. So far that wait has been worth every minute; especially with the addition of the application store (I personally heart Urbanspoon). I have been curious to see which applications are the most popular, so I have been checking the lists in the iTunes store and search behavior within our Hitwise Search Intelligence.

I ran a search term suggestions report for the phrase ‘iPhone app’ to get a sense of which applications consumers were searching for outside of the iTunes interface. Last week, social networking, instant messaging, and radio applications were very popular along with the game Super Monkey Ball, which has been prominently featured in the application store and receives many favorable reviews. Other applications that work with Twitter were also being searched along with the NYTimes application. A few brands are also coming up frequently in search that do not as of yet have official applications (although the services can be accessed through other applications) are for the two popular photo-sharing websites Flickr and Picasa, as well as Internet phone service provider Skype.

The non-branded iPhone applications being searched include video recording and photo/mms texting topped the list as well as utilities like turn by turn driving directions, account number management, budgeting, and calendar syncing.

Since their launch, the applications have been receiving lots of attention – and rightly so, but iPhone users are also seeking ways to personalize their iPhones with ringtones (free is particularly popular of course) and wallpapers.

Do you have a favorite application yet? i am dying to try Super Monkey Ball & GoSkyWatch Planetarium.

Geographic divide of social networks

2008-07-23T21:10:02Z

Today is Facebook’s F8 conference is taking place in San Francisco, helping to keep the spotlight omnipresent upon the social networking category. In the US, MySpace continues to be the largest social network and the market share of visits was 3.5x that of Facebook for the week ending July 19, 2008. However, in terms of growth, traffic to Facebook increased 23% when compared to the same week last year while MySpace was down 29%.

Now size is one difference between the websites and where the users are located is another. We have recently launched a tool at Hitwise where our clients can access DMA® level data for both websites and categories to understand the share of traffic from local regions. As an example, here are the top 10 DMAs by size for both MySpace and Facebook for the 4 weeks ending July 19, 2008. The top DMA for MySpace is LA while the top DMA for Facebook is NYC- which is not surprising considering that these two cities are the 2 largest DMAs in overall size and tend to be significant for most national websites.

When comparing the DMAs of the 2 websites to one another, an interesting trend pops out – MySpace visitors are more likely to be located on the west coast while Facebook has heavier representation on the East Coast (the coasts where each company was started). The 20 DMAs with the highest representation index for for MySpace when compared to Facebook, meaning the likelihood of the visitor to go to MySpace vs. Facebook (over 100 increases the likelihood, below 100 decreases the likelihood) are all located on the west coast. The trend is also illustrated below when looking at the top 10 DMAs for MySpace, where the West Coast DMAs dominate.

When the situation is reversed to compare Facebook to MySpace, the East Coast and Midwest becomes more prevalent. This trend is a good one for advertisers that are considering placing geo-targeted ads on social networks where each of the 2 major players are exhibiting strengths in particular areas.

Could the younger audience of MySpace potentially create geographical boundaries or is the starting point for each company simply continuing to dominate through networks of friends based upon proximity? Since Facebook is somewhat more widely distributed geographically, one random theory could be that Facebook attracts a higher share of users aged 25 and up that are more likely to be finished with college (particularly due to Facebook’s initial start with college students) and/or have relocated away from their hometowns, creating a wider group of geographically disbursed colleagues.

Summer of the FitFlop

2008-07-23T16:46:27Z

As an avid NYC walker I am fascinated by shoes that are designed to help you exercise – shoes that turn an ordinary walk into a ‘workout’. One of the first ones I learned about was the ‘MBT’ walking shoe, thanks to the Bliss catalog and now this summer the Fit Flop has become the latest craze. Recent reports cite that over a million pairs have been sold and traffic to the website has grown steadily for the summer season.

Increased searches for ‘fit flops’ and ‘fitflops’ also highlight the fact that consumers have become far more aware of the FitFlops this season and are seeking out information and where to purchase the shoes.

The most common destination from the searches is the official FitFlops website – which is informational only and refers visitors to online & offline retail outlets. Retail websites then followed as the next beneficiaries from the searches, most likely due to paid search campaigns. For Victoria’s Secret, ‘fit flops’ ranked 22nd among keywords driving traffic to the website for the 4 weeks ending July 12, 2008.

And for fun, here is more evidence of purchase intent for the FitFlops – the downstream traffic report for June from the FitFlop website is dominated by retail web sites where the shoes are sold with Macy’s, Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret receiving the highest volume of referrals.

The wisdom of crowds seems to be flip flop sales and possibly better toned legs!

Twitter growth continues despite outages

2008-07-08T19:58:53Z

Twitter has been a hot topic again over the past couple of days with speculation circulating that the company may purchase Summize. Although much of the activity on Twitter takes place via mobile, the traffic to the website has continued to grow substantially – the weekly market share of visits was up 500% for the week ending July 5, 2008 compared to the same week last year. Despite user complains about outages, Twitter has remained the most popular among the micro-blogging services. Last week, the traffic for Twitter was 12x higher than the total traffic for Plurk and 24x higher than FriendFeed (technically more than a micro-blogging service, but this is where some users have migrated during Twitter outages).

The outages also haven’t stopped many visitors from coming back to the website. The share of returning traffic (defined as those who have visited the website during the past 30 days) has averaged 53% over the past four months and traffic referred from social networks has generated even more repeat visitors.

Will the network effect (and the countless applications) keep Twitter users there instead of checking out some of the newer entrants?

The Dark Knight Excitement Builds

2008-07-02T20:22:37Z

Viral marketing campaigns and a strong early review from Rolling Stone magazine for The Dark Knight have helped to generate increased enthusiasm for the highly anticipated next installment of the Batman film series. As the US premiere approaches, both the searches for The Dark Knight (based on a portfolio of 37 related terms) and the weekly market share of visits to the official website have doubled for the week ending June 28, 2008 as compared to the previous week. The movie gathered significant mainstream interest when the first trailer was shown in December with I Am Legend and following the tragic death of Heath Ledger in January, which drove the first two large spikes in traffic and searches.

MySpace has been playing an important role for traffic referrals for the new movie, showcasing its strength to help drive buzz for movie releases (and ultimately as a successful advertising medium). Beginning on June 18th, MySpace featured the movie on the homepage with new content and a sweepstakes to win a trip to Six Flags to ride the new The Dark Knight Coaster. The results drove significant traffic to the official website - 30% of the traffic was referred from MySpace on June 18th and 64% of the traffic on June 22nd.

Are you planning to see The Dark Knight in the opening weeks? The opening night midnight screenings are already selling out with some theaters adding on screenings at 3am! I would imagine some die hard fans may not make it into the office the next day...

Mid-year Presidential Candidate Check

2008-07-01T21:36:39Z

Now that we are halfway through 2008, I figured that it is time to check on the two Presidential candidates and see who is visiting their websites. To make things interesting, I turned to our Mosaic Lifestyle segments to see which US Internet users identify as a supporter of the Democratic or Republican parties, or consider themselves an Independent voter. I classified each of the Mosaic segments by the highest representation index for the Political Affiliation attribute (combinations are used for similar index scores).

The chart below compares the visitors to John McCain and Barack Obama’s websites during the 4 weeks ending June 28, 2008. Visits by MOSAIC Group to JohnMcCain.com are plotted on the y-axis and to BarackObama.com on the x-axis. For example, the top left hand quadrant indicates unique strengths for John McCain’s website, in that they are groups that are over-indexed relative to the online population on JohnMcCain.com but under-indexed on BarackObama.com. The bubble size represents the size of the online segment and the colors denote the political affiliation.

One interesting point is that two of the segments that tend to favor the Democratic Party are visiting the websites of both Barack Obama and John McCain (upper right hand quadrant) – which may be to simply gather information and learn more about both of the candidates, but are certainly segments to watch as the election approaches. Each of the candidates also attracted specific segments that tend to be Independent or are comprised of multiple affiliations – Metro Fringe & Small Town Contentment for John McCain and Affluent Suburbia & Urban Essence for Barack Obama which may result in voter opportunities. An additional open opportunity for both candidates could also be to target is the large group of Independents in the Upscale America segment.

Summary of Mosaic Segments

The Mosaic Groups used in the analysis are created by Experian (which acquired Hitwise last year) to describe American consumers. It is a household-based segmentation system that classifies all U.S. households and neighborhoods into 60 unique Mosaic types and 12 groupings that share similar demographic and socioeconomic characteristics.

The result is a classification that paints a rich picture of U.S. consumers in terms of their sociodemographics, lifestyles, behaviors and culture to provide you with the most accurate and comprehensive view of your customers, prospects and markets. (You can read a description of how they collect the data here.

The following is a brief description of Mosaic segments to elaborate on the titles in my chart.

Affluent Suburbia: The wealthiest households in the U.S. living in exclusive suburban neighborhoods enjoying the best of everything that life has to offer.
Upscale America: College-educated couples and families living in the metropolitan sprawl earning upscale incomes providing them with large homes and very comfortable and active lifestyles.
Small-town Contentment: Middle-aged, upper-middle-class families living in small towns and satellite cities with moderate educations employed in white-collar, blue-collar and service professions.
Blue-collar Backbone: Budget-conscious, young and old blue-collar households living in older towns working in manufacturing, construction and retail trades.
American Diversity: A diverse group of ethnically mixed singles and couples, middle-aged and retired with middle-class incomes from blue-collar and service industry jobs.
Metro Fringe: Racially mixed, lower-middle-class clusters in older single-family homes, semi-detached houses and low-rise apartments in satellite cities.
Remote America: A mix of farming and small industrial rural communities with outdoor oriented lifestyles living primarily in America’s heartland.
Aspiring Contemporaries: Young, mostly single, ethnically diverse, online active households living in new homes or apartments with discretionary income to spend on themselves.
Rural Villages and Farms: Rural, middle-class married families and couples of varied ages, living and working in agricultural and mining communities.
Struggling Societies: Young minorities, students and single parents trying to raise families on low-level jobs in manufacturing, health care and food services.
Urban Essence: Young, single and single-parent minorities living in older apartments working at entry-level jobs in service industries.
Varying Lifestyles: Residents who primarily live in group quarters including students, military personnel and institution populations.

'I’m Voting Republican' video: Politics go viral

2008-06-27T20:42:01Z

A satirical website featuring a video called 'I’m Voting Republican’ is the latest viral video to make the rounds on the Internet over the past 2 weeks. The market share of visits to the website jumped 243% for the week ending June 21, 2008 and was ranked #17 among 659 websites in the Hitwise Politics category. Email has been a huge driver of traffic for 'I’m Voting Republican', sending 70% of the traffic last week – with the bulk coming from Yahoo! Mail (33%) and Windows Live Mail (29%).

As of today, the video has been viewed over 2.6 million times according to the stats on YouTube and 16% of the traffic to I’m Voting Republican visit YouTube immediately after a visit. The website features a register to vote button on the website which sends visitors to Rockthevote.org and has resulted in 5.5% of the traffic visiting afterwards. The MySpace page was also a popular destination after viewing the video.

Ironically, this week the ‘I’m Voting Republican’ captured a higher market share of visits than John McCain’s website.

Shopping traffic up – but is it the tax rebates?

2008-06-12T19:54:53Z

Today the US Commerce Department reported a gain in retail sales for May 2008, attributing the increase in consumer spending (at least partially) to the tax stimulus checks that were sent out during the month. We have also been theorizing quite a bit around what the impact of the rebate checks would be and if traffic to Shopping & Classifieds would increase as a result. It is very likely that some consumers did turn around and spend the rebate, but so far in 2008, visits to the category have been up every month, signaling that the shoppers have always been out there. In May 2008, the monthly market share of US visits for the Shopping & Classifieds category was 9.37%, an increase of 26% over May of last year. Some or all of this activity may be research, but consumers are still showing a lot of interest in shopping despite the current economic climate.

This isn’t to say that consumers are not price conscious – we just issued a press release yesterday discussing the rise in traffic to coupon websites, which have increased 56% for the week ending June 6, 2008, as compared to the same week last year. One interesting point is that consumers know what they are looking for when they seek out coupons online. Among the top 250 search terms driving traffic to the coupon websites for the 4 weeks ending June 6, 2008, 60% of the search queries include a specific retailer brand or branded product as opposed to only 20% of the search terms which were broad, generic terms like ‘grocery coupons or car rental coupons’.

Shoppers seem to be spending on home & self-improvement in May - the House & Garden and Health & Beauty categories were among the top growing product categories in May 2008 as compared to last year.

What do you think? Are people running out or logging on to spend their checks?

School's out! Social networks on the rise

2008-06-10T14:58:32Z

Today I am speaking at the Internet Retailer conference at a session called 'New Frontiers: Marketing and Merchandising on Social Media'. Since the discussion could never be complete without a look at the traffic on social networks, I checked to see how everyone's favorite category is doing (c'mon you love it or hate it). When traffic levels began to decline in January & February, many naysayers were the first to jump on the 'social networks are dying' bandwagon (or something like that). Good news for those who were not so quick to knock them - school is out for the summer & the traffic is on the rise.

The weekly market share of visits for a custom category of Social Networking websites reached 6.82% for the week ending June 6, 2008. This is still lower than the traffic peak in June of last year, but is the highest level since the Christmas holidays.

Since this is a retail conference & all, let's also see what the direct impact of social networks is on various product categories:

Overall, the share of upstream traffic coming from social networks to each of the product categories is small, but it does show that people are visiting retail websites afterwards. Its no surprise that online music & ticketing stores are the most frequently visited since entertainment is one of the most popular character traits & profile mentions on social networks. Apparel is also a great example as many people also view their personal style as an important component of their personalities - highlighting a great opportunity for the coming back to school selling season. It should also be noted that these categories tend to be more active with social networks in terms of applications and fan groups.

Is your category at the bottom? What can be done to change that???