Hitwise Intelligence - Insider

Understanding the Credit Segment of Website Visitors

2010-08-26T19:52:03Z

Experian Hitwise clients will soon be able to gain a better understanding of the financial composition of a website or industry audience through the integration of VantageScore. This anonymized and aggregate credit data uses a common score range of 501-990, with the highest score indicating the segment with the least risk and represented by A, B, C, D and F grade intervals in addition to the numerical range.

The VantageScore data used by Experian Hitwise is summarized and averaged data that is not tied to specific individuals. Rather, the data provides an average VantageScore by geographic area which is then mapped to geographic, aggregated users within the Experian Hitwise sample. No personally identifiable information is used in the mapping of the VantageScore data to the Hitwise online sample.

Below, Research Director Heather Dougherty illustrates the use of VantageScore within Hitwise by analyzing the differences in the credit segments of online mortgage and home rental shoppers:

Credit Segments of Online Mortgage and Home Rental Sites

The Commerce Department recently announced that the sales of US homes dropped to a record low in July. Similarly, the market share of visits to a custom category of 16 Mortgage rate information & comparison websites has declined 18% for the week ending August 21, 2010 as compared to the same week 2 years ago.

Following the subprime mortgage crisis and with foreclosures on the rise, lenders and underwriters have increasingly implemented stricter criteria to secure a home loan. To understand the credit ranges of the visitors to sites within this category we used a new report within the Hitwise tool that provides VantageScore segment of visitors to a given website or industry. As a result of tougher loan requirements, the custom category Mortgage rate information & comparison websites tend to attract a greater share of visitors with a VantageScore profile in the higher ranges. For the 4 weeks ending August 21, 2010, 55% of the visitors are in the range of 801-901 (B & A) or higher and over-indexed for visitation when compared against the overall Internet population. Not surprisingly, those in the 601-501 (D & F) ranges are less likely to visit.

For those unable to buy a home, renting becomes the most viable option. Among the visitors to a custom category of 32 Home & Apt Rental websites, the groups that fall within the 501-601 (D and F) ranges make up both the largest share of visitors and over- index compared to the online population.

More information on VantageScore can be found here.

Building on Powerful Demographics with Rank by Audience

2010-08-11T23:11:20Z

Unlike Prince, who recently proclaimed the internet as “over”, Harriet Hitwise believes the internet is alive and thriving. Harriet has created a series of successful, yet niche, online content platforms - most recently one that includes a lifestyle blog for young adults in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. In order to understand her particular audience, Harriet’s been leveraging Hitwise’s Demographic Find By tool to locate websites that align with her preferred online audience. Unmatched in its breadth and data depth, Harriet is able to filter a 10+ million online sample based on Age, Gender, State, DMA, Household Income and even MOSAIC Type.

Despite the combination of data depth and demographic information, Harriet was looking for additional methods to understand her target audience. In particular, Harriet needed to grasp the competitive landscape and market share of sites within her selected audience segments (age: 18-24 and DMA: St. Paul). Access to this data would help frame other marketing decisions while benchmarking performance.

Thankfully, Hitwise’s new Rank by Audience product leverages its demographic data and incorporates market share of websites’ into Rankings, so Harriet now knows that of the visitors to the Blogs & Personal Websites Category that are aged 18-24, 3.14% of them visit www.popeater.com, a popular blog within her audience segment. Additional sorting options further allow Harriet to analyze long-tail sites that match her competitive set, allowing her to target sites that have a lower volume of traffic, but higher concentration of her preferred audience segment.

The power of Rank by Audience is its flexibility to apply any type of demographic variable, including New versus Returning visitors, to better understand the market power of websites influencing her core audience. Harriet could even compare these results relative to all visitors to the Category. See our blog post "Targeting College Students for Back to School" for an example that utilizes the compare feature in Rank by Audience.

As expected, Rank by Audience can be found within the Rankings tab and enabled by selecting an Industry and the preferred Segment.

This creates a new “bucket” of users – those from the selected demographic variable that visited the selected Category. Now Harriet can understand the impact of websites given this newly defined market and clearly view how websites perform based on market share of visits:

Beginning today, Rank by Audience and New versus Returning visitor data will be offered as part of our commitment to providing best-in-class online intelligence tools.

Stay tuned to the Insider Blog for upcoming product announcements, including several new initiatives around Search Marketing.

The Second Long Tail: Internal Search Terms

2009-12-16T15:42:42Z

From Tim Keelan, Senior Account Manager at Hitwise:

Our savvy clients use Hitwise Search Intelligence to expand on their keyword lists using their competitors search term traffic. Each week they examine the long tail of searches and make sure every term is captured for SEM/SEO. Despite their best efforts, they must take for granted that search terms as they are typed in search engines make up only a portion of all searches that are important to a site.

Why is that? Well, for one, not everyone uses a search engine to get to a website. In fact, for the month of November, about 73% of retailer traffic came from non-search engine sources, including brand-loyal users who navigate directly to their favorite sites. On top of that, when they do come through search engines, many times they arrive by searching for branded terms. While knowing your competitor is getting branded traffic might be interesting, it doesn’t help you to expand on your keywords. To find what I call the second long tail of search, we need to look at internal search term traffic.

Hitwise's Custom Internal Search Reports allow us to see the internal searches within a website. These searches are agnostic to the origin of the visitor. Using the data we are able to see the product search patterns of visitors, regardless of the source – branded external search, bookmarks, and e-mail to name just a few. Because so many visitors come in from brand searches and direct navigation, the internal search data is often broader and deeper than external search. Let’s take a look at Target.com.

Target.com Search Term Breakout

When looking at Target.com’s internal search data I’m first struck by not only the depth of the data, but also the fact that few of the terms are shared with external paid and organic search (only 979 terms). Here we are seeing the true long tail of search terms in the internal data. In the internal search list, there are barely any Target related searches, just products that people want to find and buy.

The differences between the product choices of internal vs. external are also stark. Below you’ll find the top 10 internal product searches for the week ending November 28th and in parenthesis where those terms rank in the external search list.

Top 10 Internal Product Searches (External Search Rank)
1. Wii (116)
2. zhu zhu (No External Search Traffic)
3. cartoons network games (12)
4. ipod touch (15)
5. ipod (34)
6. psp (1822)
7. math games for kids (1444)
8. wii games (228)
9. tv (No External Search Traffic)
10. brain fun (13221)

While the iPod touch may be important driver of external search, Target.com visitors are more interested in Wii consoles and games. Oh and the lovely “Zhu Zhu” is the #2 internal search but doesn’t appear in that form externally (“Zhu Zhu Pets” does drive substantial external traffic though).

You can read a lot into the contrast between the two types of searches. Did a circular promotion drive internal searches for “Brain Fun”? Was the term “Zhu Zhu” too expensive for Target to bid on? Should Target.com be featuring Wii since it’s obvious that’s what many of their visitors are looking for? All these are important questions, but the value of this data is clear – you now have 17,770 terms you didn’t know were important to your competitor. Ask your account manager about how you can get these reports on your own competitors.

Lastly, do you know which Target.com internal search term was more popular than Wii in the first week of November? “Target Job Application”. I expect that term to return to the top of the list as soon as everyone gets their holiday credit card bills.

Welcome to Experian Hitwise!

2009-09-09T22:55:37Z

We couldn’t be more pleased about the launch of Experian Hitwise, our new brand that incorporates the identity of our parent, Experian. This is the exciting culmination of a process that began a little over two years ago with the acquisition of Hitwise by Experian. Since then, we’ve found innumerable opportunities that would not have been available to Hitwise as an independent entity.

Experian is the global leader in providing information, analytical and marketing services to organizations and consumers to help manage the risk and reward of commercial and financial decisions. Experian Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service, measuring the largest worldwide sample (25 million internet users) and reporting on the most online businesses (over 1 million).

For clients, this integration brings several benefits:

Global reach. Employing 15,000 people in 40 countries, the Experian global network provides local knowledge and resources to support expansion into new markets - as with recent Hitwise launches in Canada and Brazil.

Data and analytical expertise. More than 100,000 clients worldwide tap into Experian’s expertise across Credit and Marketing Services, Decision Analytics and Consumer Interactive offerings. This expertise is leveraged in ongoing enhancements to Hitwise products and processes.

Financial strength. As one of the top performing stocks on the FTSE 100 with revenue of nearly US$4 billion, Experian has the resources to reinvest in the people, data and technology that drive product innovation and greater client value.

Product synergy. Combining complementary Experian Marketing Services products such as CheetahMail, Simmons, MOSAIC, INSOURCE, QAS, FootFall and others leads to offerings that help our customers improve their marketing and grow and protect their market share.

We are looking forward to working with clients, partners, industry bodies and Experian colleagues to expand on the strength of Experian Hitwise. We hope you will join us.

Marc Johnson
Chief Marketing Officer
Experian Hitwise

Use Mosaic to Understand the U.S. Hispanic Online Audience

2009-08-28T15:24:53Z

As the largest ethnic minority in the U.S. and the fastest growing segment of the population, it is becoming essential that companies understand the U.S. Hispanic community and how best to market to them.

Subscribers to the Mosaic Lifestyle segmentation tool in Hitwise have a head-start. It's as simple as this:

Step 1: Navigate to ‘Find’ ‘Websites by Mosaic USA Characteristics’.

Step 2: Identify the ‘Hispanic Race’ segments you wish to target.

Step 3: Check off the Mosaic USA Types with the greatest relative strength for your audience.

Results: A list of sites that have the highest percentage of visits from the heavily-Hispanic Mosaic Types you chose. These sites can be great advertising partners, affiliates, or guides for great content.

Advanced: Scroll to the bottom of the results page and choose to only look at sites in certain categories (i.e. categories where you might want to place advertising, like the "Entertainment" category). Or switch from "by percentage" to "by volume" to find bigger sites.

Want more? Listen to our recent webinar on the subject: Online Trends in the U.S. Hispanic Community

Find the Most Relevant Social Networks and Blogs

2009-08-21T16:58:27Z

With the multitude of Social Networks, Forums and Blogs available to web-users, you can find sites devoted to almost any possible interest and activity.

This is great news for marketers, whether you’re building a media plan, looking for a promotional partner, or trying to find link partners for SEO. These sites offer the epitome of contextual relevance. However, the sheer abundance of these sites makes it difficult to identify the ones that are the best fit for your business. Hitwise can help you cut through the clutter.

Step 1: Navigate to the Rankings Report.

Step 2: Select the Industry Rankings Report.

Step 3: Select the Industry most relevant to your audience (e.g. Health and Medical, or Lifestyle – Pets and Animals).

Step 4: Click on ‘Filters’.

Step 5: Within ‘Include Industry’ select Computers and Internet – Social Networking and Forums and/ or Lifestyle – Blogs and Personal Websites. Click on ‘Generate Report’.

Results: A list of Social Networks, Forums and Blogs that are focused on your audience, products and issues. These sites can be great places to target your audience effectively and efficiently.

What Traffic Sources Are You Missing?

2009-08-18T14:15:50Z

There are many useful things you can do with Hitwise's new "compare" feature. High on the list is uncovering successful traffic sources that your competitors have found.

The compare feature gives you the ability to see what sites your competitors are getting traffic from that you are missing out on. It is as easy as this:

Step 1: Navigate to the Clickstream report.

Step 2: Select the "Upstream Websites" report.

Step 3: Enter your site's URL.

Step 4: Click on "Compare" to open the compare parameters. Enter your competitor's URL. Choose to view sites that drove traffic to only your competitor.

Step 5: Filter to only include sites in categories where you would be interested in advertising.

Results: Now you have a list of sites that are driving traffic to your competitor's site, but not to your own. This is your "hit list" for investigating potential new partnerships.

Experian Reveals The Changing Face Of UK Society

2009-07-28T13:37:22Z

Below is a section of a press release issue by our parent company Experian about the update to their consumer classification - Mosaic UK, which Hitwise UK has had integrated into the Hitwise UK product for a number of years. This press release explains some of the interesting changes that have occurred in British Society since 2003. Hitwise contributed to Mosaic UK 2009 by providing insight into which consumers are using the internet for shopping, sourcing information and social networking allowing Mosaic UK to describe the new "network society".

MOSAIC UK 2009:

EXPERIAN REVEALS THE CHANGING FACE OF UK SOCIETY

Experian’s market leading consumer classification – Mosaic UK – has now been comprehensively rebuilt and updated to reflect important demographic and social changes that have occurred in contemporary British society since 2003. The new classification has been re-built with a range of additional data sources to encompass a more detailed understanding of the ageing population, recent changes in household composition, the growth in ethnic diversity and the impact of the Internet in the new network society.

Mosaic is Experian’s market leading people classification and is used by thousands of commercial and not-for-profit organisations to gain insight into local consumer markets, behaviours and lifestyles. Mosaic is used in the commercial sector to map, analyse and target markets at person, household and postcode level. It is used as a key tool in targeted marketing e.g. customer communication, prospect recruitment, local marketing and branch network planning.

Mosaic UK 2009 draws on over 440 separate pieces of compliant public and proprietary sourced information for each of the UK’s 48 million adults – a total of 21 billion individual data items to create a rich and detailed picture of modern British society. Following the re-build, the classification now incorporates 15 lifestyle groups, 67 lifestyle types and 141 person types. The re-built classification will be updated every six months to provide a continuously contemporary view of UK consumers at person, household and postcode level.

Mosaic UK 2009 includes a number of new consumer groups such as Alpha Territory, Active Retirement, Small Town Diversity and Terraced Melting Pot. Some of the more significant social trends identified in the new version of Mosaic are:

• Ageing Society. It is estimated there will be three million more people over 55 by 2019 but Mosaic makes a distinction between the active and less active phases of retirement. The new classification recognises the increasingly active nature of early retirement years (with the commercial opportunities this presents) and the latter phases which require more health and social care. Mosaic also identifies a move away from the traditional south coast retirement towns with many more affluent retirees - ‘Country Loving Elders’ - moving inland to historical and cultural towns while others - ‘Beachcombers’ - seek more exclusive seaside villages and expensive holiday destinations.

• Mosaic UK 2009 has identified a small but an exceptionally wealthy section of British Society. Representing some 3 per cent of the UK population, ‘Alpha Territory’ includes people that have received substantial injections of capital over and above their already high incomes, such as from bonuses, share options or the sale of businesses. This elite includes individuals from the public as well as commercial sector.

• Change in household composition. The last ten years have seen a massive rise in single person households. This has created a mismatch between housing supply (typically three bedroom houses built for families) and actual housing needs. Mosaic UK 2009 recognises the growth in all types of single occupancy, including ‘Crash Pad Professionals’ living in flats on brown field sites, ‘Side Street Singles’, ‘Small Block Singles’ and ‘Bright Young Things’. A significant trend, identified by Mosaic, has been the growth in concentrated student populations which has fuelled an increase in multi-occupancy households dominated by single people.

• The network society. The UK has grown from 10 per cent to almost 70 per cent broadband coverage since 2003. This massive transformation has brought a range of new social behaviours as people develop online social networks to keep in touch with family and friends, recommend products, services and experiences and transact business. It has also become a showcase for one’s own personal social capital. Mosaic has identified how different social types use the Internet for a range of new purposes. Mosaic UK 2009 uses Hitwise’s online intelligence to provide the latest insight into which consumers are using the internet for shopping, sourcing information and social networking.

• Impact of recession. By linking Experian’s economic forecasting capabilities to Mosaic UK, Experian identifies the degrees to which different types of people are affected by the current recession. Those most affected include the group ‘Active Retirement’ who have seen their savings and investments seriously eroded, the ‘Professional Rewards’ type which is having to support grown-up children financially and ‘New Homemakers’ who, having bought brand new properties in the last few years, now find themselves in serious negative equity.

The Full Press Release can be read here

Sims 3 and the dangers of torrent searches

2009-06-04T16:58:58Z

Here at Hitwise we like to follow the releases of new products and see their impact online. The launch of The Sims 3, which was released on 2nd June 2009, has been no exception. The game was first showcased in March 2008 for a February 2009 launch date, only for it to be delayed for a further 4 months

Even though interest in the game started building before Christmas 2008, searches for the title didn’t reach March 2008 levels until February this year. As the chart below illustrates, search terms such as ‘sims 3 release date’, ‘the sims 3 release date’ and ‘when is the sims 3 coming out’ were amongst the most searched for terms back in March 2008, showing Sims fans eagerness to find out when the game would be released.

In February 2009 after the delay announcement, - another 200 terms had been added to the list, including ‘sims 3 release’, but also ‘sims 3 torrent’ and ‘sims3 delayed’ (all of which appeared in the top 10).

The search volume for The Sims 3 terms dropped off rapidly after the announcement that the game was to be delayed and hovered around pre-Christmas levels. That was until the week ending 23rd May when there was 142% surge in searches as The Sims 3 became the most searched for Video Game in Hitwise UK’s Hot Consumer Electronics List. This surge was mainly due to the rumours flooding the internet about the game being leaked to Torrent sites. Approximately 1 in 12 The Sims 3 searches during this week related to the leaked game, including ‘sims 3 leaked’, ‘the sims 3 torrent’, ‘sims 3 download’, ‘sims 3 leak’, ‘the sims 3 leaked’, and ‘the sims 3 download’.

A further 31% increase in searches during the week ending 30th May ensured that interest in the game in the week before launch was nearly 3 times that of its previous peaks in March 2008 and February 2009. The top 20 searches last week continue to include 4 references to downloading the game - ‘sims 3 torrent’. ‘sims 3 download’, ‘the sims 3 torrent’ and ‘download sims 3’ – but only 2 for the upcoming release date.

NEW! Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List

2009-05-07T15:30:00Z

Introducing the Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List: a dynamic Excel-based report which leverages our weekly search term data to produce an on-the-pulse view of the Consumer Electronics sector in the UK.

Created by our Client Intelligence Analysts and maintained by our research team on a weekly basis, this report showcases the top brands, product types and product models searched for by UK consumers every week.

Based on a custom category of 450 websites in the consumer electronics sector, the Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List is divided into 5 key product areas: Computing, Mobile Phones, Gaming, Home Appliances and Entertainment, helping marketers to:

- Maximise PPC investment - understand consumer mindset to ensure better targeting and less wastage
- Assess and adjust search strategy to increase profits - analyse who is getting the most traffic from top searches
- Maximise content appeal - select which products to push online
- Manage supply chain effectively - identify the next 'hot' product
- Improve campaign scheduling - understand shifts in brand engagement to inform campaign planning

A screenshot from our most recent Hot Consumer Electronics List can be viewed here, and for a more detailed background, a webinar can be viewed here.

Please contact support.uk@hitwise.com for more details.

'Click' goes global

2009-02-23T12:48:20Z

'Click, What Millions of People Are Doing Online and Why it Matters’ written by Hitwise GM of Global Research Bill Tancer, was published by Hyperion in the US and Canada this past September and made the New York Times Bestseller list.

It is now available in the UK, Australia and New Zealand via Harper Collins and will be out in the following markets soon:

Mainland China from Grand Publishing in March
Japan from East Press in April
Taiwan from Business Weekly in July
Korea from Book 21 in November

Keep current with data dashboards

2009-02-23T12:38:49Z

Dashboards are customizable modules that keep Hitwise clients alerted to threats and opportunities in their industry, search, or competitor performance data. Modified versions of this early warning system are now available to non-clients here.