Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America

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.

Twittering the Iran Election

2009-06-23T19:52:09Z

Following the elections that took place in Iran on June 12, Twitter has become one of the most popular mediums for distributing information about the protests. Daily visits to Twitter.com (excludes mobile & desktop applications) increased 13% on June 12th as compared to the previous Friday and traffic jumped 23% Wednesday, June 17th from news and photos of the massive rallies taking place in Iran.

Among all of the search terms driving traffic to Twitter.com in the US, ‘iran election’ ranked #13 out of 4,303 last week. Conversely, Twitter.com received the highest share of clicks from queries for ‘iran election’, one of the most common hashtags for the coverage, even ranking above Google News.

In addition to Twitter, YouTube has also become another outlet for news as video coverage of the protest activities have been uploaded. The popularity of both Twitter and YouTube showcase the ability to disseminate information when many major news outlets are unable.

Back to School Season Starts Soon

2009-06-18T17:05:41Z

School is barely out for the summer, but the Back to School season is right around the corner again. Search queries that include the phrase ‘back to school’ begin to ramp up during the month of July, peak in early August, and end in mid-September. Last year, the Back to School season was negatively impacted by consumers pulling back on spending, after suffering through high gas prices during the summer and the imminent economic downturn.

Last year’s peak of searches containing ‘back to school’ occurred during the week ending August 16, 2008. The three dominant themes within the top ten search terms were fashion & hairstyles, activity & craft ideas and sweepstakes. The success rates (meaning the % of the searches that resulted in a visit to a website) for the sweepstakes related searches highlight the awareness of the promotions and ease with which consumers were able to seek out the sweepstakes online with meaningful results. The share of traffic being driven by paid clicks was only 4%, suggesting that there are many opportunities to employ a paid search campaign for marketers looking to target this audience.

Please join us next Wednesday, June 24th for a webinar with more analysis focused on Back to School Planning.

Online Sample Sales

2009-06-12T21:43:25Z

Far safer than in the physical world where one can be easily bludgeoned by an elbow or shoe, online sample sales have continued to grow in popularity over the past year. Despite the poor economy, shoppers are flocking to the websites of online sample sales like Gilt Groupe, Hautelook, and Rue La La to find designer bargains, creating an additional set of competitors to many apparel retailers. Exclusive memberships by invitation and a race against the clock for limited quantities of high-end merchandise have proven to be a successful (and somewhat addictive) retailing format. Last week, the market share of visits to the custom category increased 600% or 7x the volume of the same week one year ago. Gilt.com and Hautelook captured the highest share of visits within the custom category of online sample sales with 36% and 33%, respectively.

Email continues to be the largest source of traffic to the websites, 34% last week, as members receive emails with alerts of the start times for sales. Cross-shopping on other retail websites – most likely to compare prices and availability and social networks followed as the major drivers of traffic. Apparel retailers are sending 11% of the traffic to the online sample sales emphasizing the potential competitive threat of capturing apparel spending.

The websites are attracting an enviable audience online. Among the visitors to online sample sales, 59% were women for the four weeks ending June 6, 2009, but males are also getting in on the fun and represented 41% of visits. The audience is somewhat younger and somewhat affluent with 68% of visits coming from those under the age of 35 and 62% have a household income that ranges from $60-$150k. Oddly enough, those making over $150k have yet to embrace this new category, despite the availability of many luxury goods.

The greatest share of visits to the online sample sales are coming from major markets like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York. However other markets like Green Bay, WI are also among the top 10 DMAs ranked by share of visits, so shoppers are also coming from areas where the products are less accessible offline.

Initial Bing Stats for US and Canada

2009-06-10T21:34:40Z

Last week, Microsoft launched the new version of its search engine, Bing and initial interest has been high due to a major advertising campaign to drive awareness, extensive media coverage, and of course, curiosity.

In the US, Bing ranked 17th among all websites out of over 450,000 websites, up from 5120 the week before the official launch when the website was merely a placeholder. Within the Search Engines category, Bing ranked 4th out of the search engines tracked by Hitwise and Bing Image Search ranked 15th for the week ending June 6, 2009.

In Canada, Bing hit the top 10 among all websites during the first week of launch and captured 1% of all Canadian Internet visits last week. Bing also ranked 3rd last week in terms of the market share of visits within the Search Engines category behind Google Canada and Google.

For both the US and Canadian markets, MSN was the leading website for referrals to Bing and represented 36% and 37% of upstream traffic, respectively. In terms of where Bing was sending traffic, in the US, the highest share of traffic visited websites in the Shopping & Classifieds category followed by Entertainment and Business & Finance. In Canada, the highest share of visits after Bing went to the Entertainment category, followed by Social Networking, then Shopping & Classifieds.

There are several similarities across both markets among the top 10 search terms that were searched for on Bing last week, with ‘facebook’ ranking #1 in both the US and Canada. For both lists 9 out of 10 of the search terms were navigational searches for specific websites like Facebook, Yahoo, and YouTube.

CircuitCity.com Returns

2009-06-03T15:41:52Z

After shutting down operations in January, CircuitCity.com is back after Systemax purchased the brand and domain at bankruptcy auction for $14 million. Systemax also owns TigerDirect.com and acquired CompUSA last year. CircuitCity.com was quickly relaunched last week to capitalize on the remaining brand strength and traffic to the website. The relaunch caused an immediate spike in traffic and the weekly market share of visits to CircuitCity.com increased 230% last week as compared to the previous week. Among the retailers in the Appliances and Electronics category, CircuitCity.com jumped from being ranked at #26 for the week ending May 23, 2009 to #10 last week.

Last week, 84% of the visitors to CircuitCity.com were new, or had not visited in the past 30 days. Much of the surge in traffic can be attributed to an email campaign to reach out to potential CircuitCity.com customers since nearly 33% of the upstream traffic was referred by web-based email services. The campaign was successful in driving visitors to the website that hopefully were previous customers that wish to re-engage with the brand.

Even when the website was not operational, there were still visits and searches on the brand taking place, which displays ongoing interest in CircuitCity.com despite a tough environment for capturing consumer spending.

Search Referrals and Organic Traffic Rising

2009-05-15T17:19:05Z

As a companion piece to the post by my colleague Heather Hopkins, I thought it would be interesting to take a step back and look at the overall impact of search upon specific industries. For the majority of categories measured at Hitwise, search is the top source of traffic referrals and the share has increased year-over-year. Overall, search is increasing as a traffic driver. Among the parent categories that received less than 25% of traffic from search in April 2008, all except News & Media received a higher share of search referrals last month. This data suggests that the best growth opportunities for search are among the laggard categories where adoption has been slower as a referral tool.

Overall, visits to search engines increased 8% on April 2009 as compared to the previous year, implying that those visits will result in the searcher going somewhere afterwards. In order to translate the impact of search referrals upon traffic, I also took the size of the category into account and calculated the market share of visits that were search driven for the same year-over-year comparison. In this analysis, when translated into visits, the largest categories received more visits from search, regardless if overall traffic was up or down.

As Heather pointed out, the ratio of clicks from paid search has declined within some categories due to reduced spending by marketers in the current economic climate. There is nothing like a recession to encourage marketers to become more creative with budgets. The increased share of organic clicks also implies that companies are getting smarter about optimizing their websites to take advantage of organic search results and these SEO efforts are working. Additionally, the increased popularity of social media such as Facebook and Twitter, along with blogs and video, are sites & pages that index quickly within search engines and result in higher organic results.

The Oprah Effect on Free Chicken

2009-05-08T15:39:01Z

Everyone loves a freebie and when a coupon for the new grilled chicken at Kentucky Fried Chicken was posted on Oprah.com, the impact was immediate. The volume of visits to Oprah.com increased 46x on Tuesday, May 5th as compared to the previous day and increased another 36% on Wednesday, May 6th. The promotion was very successful at driving visits to KFC’s Unthink website, which is promoting the new grilled chicken offering. The visits to unthinkfc.com jumped 178% on May 6th as compared to the previous day. On Wednesday, 79% of the traffic to Oprah.com visited unthinkfc.com immediately after.

The promotion was certainly successful at driving visits and coupon downloads, but has also sparked insanely long lines as KFC struggles to meet demand. The company has announced offering rain checks to customers that have been unable to redeem the coupon amid the frenzy.

Michelle Obama’s Impact on Fashion

2009-05-07T18:04:15Z

Ever since First Lady Michelle Obama hit the press circuit, there has been a fascination with her clothing choices. Mrs. Obama’s selections from retailers like J Crew, White House Black Market and Talbots, that are affordable and obtainable by many Americans has caused lots of interest in mimicking her fashion choices. Yesterday, Time even asked the question “Can Michelle Obama Save Fashion Retailing?”

This is a topic that I was also curious about, so I ran a search term suggestion report on the query ‘michelle obama’ and found that ‘michelle obama fashion’ was ranked #2 among the terms over the past 12 weeks. Queries including style also hit the top 10 search terms and among the top 100 there are additional searches about sneakers, dresses, attire and wardrobe.

The destinations from the queries for ‘michelle obama fashion’ also help to reinforce the interest and potential impact that Mrs. Obama may have on apparel sales. The website for J Crew received 5.96% of the clicks from the searches, thanks in part to the retailer taking advantage of the press to run a paid search campaign.

Twitter Switches Up Shorter URLs

2009-05-06T23:23:34Z

Websites that shorten URLs have become a hot category over the past few weeks, mostly due to the increasing popularity of Twitter and their use to fit URLs in tweets without going over the 140 character limit. One website, TinyURL has dominated this category and was the default URL shortening service for Twitter, until today when many noticed that TinyURL has been replaced by bit.ly. This switch is likely to have a strong and immediate impact upon the category where TinyURL was consistently the leader and captured 5.5x the volume of visits of bit.ly in April 2009.

The 2nd and 3rd ranked URL shortening services bit.ly and ow.ly both experienced significant growth in visits during April, with an increase of 200% for both websites as compared to the previous month. Visits to TinyURL also increased 6% during the same time frame. The reduced growth rate may be partly attributed to the fact that only half of TinyURL’s traffic was from new visitors (those who haven’t visited in the past 30 days) in April 2009, down from 65% in March 2009.

Overall it will be difficult to measure the impact of the new Twitter and bit.ly partnership due to the use of plug-ins within browsers and desktop applications, thus eliminating the need to visit the bit.ly website. However, Twitter is typically the top driver of traffic for the top URL shortening websites, so the new partnership is likely to reduce the share of referrals for several of the players. For example, ow.ly received 57% of their traffic d from Twitter in April 2009, which may need a workaround in the future to maintain growth.

Will Swine Flu Wipe Out Mexico Vacations?

2009-05-01T21:51:11Z

The current economic conditions has impacted the travel industry and according to PhoCusWright, revenues are projected to decline 3% to reach $93 billion for the online leisure/unmanaged business travel market in 2009 (the first decline since tracking began in 1998). While the economy is hitting the travel industry and forcing cutbacks in spending, there has also been an increasing trend for consumers to seek out all-inclusive vacation packages for easier budgeting - one price for everything. Searches on a portfolio of terms related to all-inclusive travel increased 18% for the week ending April 18, 2009 as compared to the same time frame last year. All inclusive vacations have the same seasonality as most travel categories, with peaks in the summer and planning for spring break. In the past 2 years, the peak for all inclusive travel searches occurred during the week ending August 2, 2008 followed by the week ending Feb 21, 2009. Throughout early 2009, there have been a higher share of searches than previous years.

Last August, the top destination among a portfolio of search terms related to All-Inclusive Vacations was Mexico, which captured 35% of the searches that included a destination. The most popular destinations within Mexico included Cancun, Cabo San Lucas and Puerto Vallarta. The United States (dominated by Florida and Hawaii) and the Caribbean (Jamaica and Dominican Republic) followed with 30% and 23%, respectively. Unfortunately, the recent outbreak of H1N1 flu (swine flu) which originated in Mexico may have a negative impact upon the tourism this summer.

Below is a word cloud of the destinations searches to depict the most popular within the All-Inclusive Vacations portfolio.

There has already been an immediate drop off in searches including the term ‘mexico’ driving traffic to the Travel category, instead visiting News & Media websites to read about the recent outbreak.

The immediate association with the swine flu is also having an impact upon searches that include ‘mexico’, ‘mexico swine flu’ ranked 6th for the week ending April 25, 2009. There were 70 mentions of ‘flu’ in the 2,111 search terms containing ‘mexico’. Once the pandemic ends, the challenge for the Mexican tourism industry will be to communicate safety & well-being to help rebound.

Last Minute Mother’s Day Planning

2009-04-30T20:06:24Z

The countdown is on for retailers looking to capture Mother’s Day spending with 10 shopping days left (11 if you are the same-day delivery type, if so – buy online, pick-up in-store is for you). According to the National Retail Federation, spending on Mother’s Day gifts is expected to be lower this year due to the economy, however, there are still dollars out there for retailers to capture. Similar to Valentine’s Day, Mother’s Day is also a gift-giving event well-suited for procrastinators thanks to the ease and speed of ordering flowers. The smaller lead time needed to place an order for flowers helps to drive the peak of visits to a custom category of Mother’s Day gift retailers (includes flowers, gifts, and jewelry) to occur during the week immediately before Mother’s Day. Last year, there was a lift in visits of 39% during the peak as compared to the previous week. The peak day was Thursday, May 8th and for the last 3 years, the majority of the visits have taken place on the Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday leading up to Mother’s Day.

During the peak week of Mother’s Day gift shopping last year, web-based email and search were the top drivers of traffic to the custom category of retailers. Together these sources referred nearly half of the traffic, reinforcing their importance for retailers trying to capture Mother’s Day sales. With email, for retailers that do not have an established relationship via email with potential customers may want to explore advertising options within the pages of email properties to broadcast a message around the email messages.

Looking back at search activity for Mother’s Day last year, 18% of the traffic to a portfolio of search terms related to Mother’s Day during the week ending May 10, 2008 was from paid listings. The search query with the highest share of clicks is ‘mother’s day poems’, followed by 2 variations of mothers day gifts. The version of ‘mothers day gifts’ without the apostrophe receives more clicks along with increased paid search competition.

Following a visit to one of the retailers in the custom category, the highest share of visits among Shopping & Classifieds websites was to freeshipping.com, a favorite promotion of nearly every shopper and may be necessary to attract restricted budgets.