Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Sherlock sets new record for BBC iPlayer

2012-01-06T08:05:14Z

As always over the festive season there was a feast of TV delights to keep us entertained when speaking to family members grew tiresome. With so much choice over the Christmas period we were expecting Video on Demand (VOD) to increase online as consumers caught up with their favourite programmes.

At the beginning of December we predicted the UK would spend 12 million hours on BBC iPlayer with the top draws being the Eastenders and Dr Who Christmas specials. In fact there were 13.8 million hours spent on iPlayer in December with over half a million hours spent on Boxing Day alone – the day after the Eastenders and Dr Who specials were first aired. However you can see from the graph below that iPlayer received its biggest ever day of Internet traffic on 2 January 2012.

New Year’s Day saw the much anticipated return of Benedict Cumberbatch reprising his role as Sherlock Holmes in the first episode of the second season of Sherlock. Looking at the total visits to iPlayer on 2 January there were 4.3 million visits from UK Internet users, a new record for iPlayer.

Although the official BARB figures show that Downton Abbey was the most watched programme on Christmas Day, online visits indicate that it was much less popular online. The BARB figures take into account viewings on the day as well as viewings from recordings and on catch up services like ITV+1 – which show Downton with 11.6 million viewers and Eastenders with 11.3 million for Christmas Day. However, in terms of online VOD watching, our data shows that ITV Player received just 723 thousand visits on Boxing Day, compared to iPlayer’s 4.2 million - both of which were outstripped on 2 January.

Of course, these figures include all visits for content watched on the online channels, so it is not as simple as saying Sherlock was more popular than Dr Who or indeed Downton Abbey online. However, the BBC’s online video content was certainly more watched than ITV’s and 2 January 2012 marks a new milestone for iPlayer total visits which coincides with when people were able to watch the new episode of Sherlock for the first time.

We are hosting our final Christmas webinar today at noon reviewing the Christmas season in its entirety. The webinar is free to join, you can register here or follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.

Travel relying less on seasonal peaks

2011-12-23T11:23:51Z

Travel has always been a very seasonal industry online. Each year summer and winter holidays produce two clear and defined periods of online activity which we’ve been observing for years here at Hitwise.

You can see from the graph below that each year the two online peaks in traffic occur in January and July. The January peak represents bookings for winter sun and ski holidays along with some early bookings for summer holidays whilst the July peak is for last minute summer holiday bookings.

If we look at this same data in a different format we can see that the seasonal peaks in travel are slowly being eroded year-on-year. The bar chart below groups visits to the travel industry by month over the last three years.

If you look at the peak months of January, July and August, the green bar for the 2010/11 season is lower than in previous years, which means that travel is gradually accounting for less visits of overall Internet usage. However, observing the months in the run-up to these peak months: November, December, May and June the green bar is increasing year-on-year.

In essence what is happening is that the travel industry is gradually becoming less reliant on its peak months and seasonality is starting to broaden over a series of months rather than focusing on two key points in the year. If this trend continues then we will see January and July become less significant for travel traffic but more visits to travel websites come in the surrounding months. Travel brands are going to have to adapt their digital strategies to accommodate these shifting trends, with more focus on capturing customers in December, May and June especially. As always, Hitwise is here to help, and there are loads of insights we can show you from optimising your search campaigns to attracting more of your core audience to your website.

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Product Update: Clickstream Reliance and Departure

2011-12-07T10:47:37Z

I mentioned in one of my last blogs that we have some exciting product developments in the pipeline here at Hitwise. Hot on the heels of the official launch of Dashboards 2.0 is the release of two new additions to the clickstream tool: click reliance and click departure.

Our clickstream data shows the user journey through the web with upstream visits (where did a user come from before visiting a website) and downstream visits (where did a user go to after visiting a website). Click reliance and click departure help to bring a more complete clickstream picture together in one easy to use report.

We’ve put together a short YouTube video tutorial on how to use the new clickstream metrics but I thought I would go through one of the examples in the blog as well to demonstrate the usefulness of this new report.

A lot of our clients are interested in Facebook and how they can engage with the UK’s largest social network to drive traffic to their website, so I’ve chosen Facebook to demonstrate click reliance in action. Looking at a highly competitive industry like online fashion retail we can see how the top retailers compare for the volume of traffic they receive from Facebook using the downstream tool.

What this shows is that of all the visits leaving Facebook, Topshop is the biggest recipient from the Apparel and Accessoreis category. What this also shows is that there are four fashion retailers closely grouped together – Topshop, ASOS, Next and New Look – which receive roughly the same amount of traffic from Facebook. But which of these retailers is most reliant on Facebook as an online channel?

By clicking on the “Metric” dropdown in the Hitwise tool you can now highlight “Clicks and Click Reliance” which will generate a new clickstream report.

This click reliance report shows how the different fashion retailers depend on traffic from Facebook. What’s interesting here is that although Next and New Look get almost exactly the same volume of traffic from Facebook, New Look is much more reliant on that traffic as a proportion of its total visits than Next. The traffic that Next receives from Facebook accounts for just over 5% of the total visits coming to Next, whereas for New Look, nearly 10% of its traffic comes directly from Facebook. What this shows is that Facebook is an important channel for Next, but not nearly as important as it is for New Look.

Click departure works in a similar way to click reliance but starts with the upstream data and then adds the downstream data to the overall view. In the example below I have started with the upstream websites visited before the Insurance category filtered by a custom category of financial aggregators.

What this example shows is that although MoneySupermarket is the biggest financial aggregator sending traffic to the insurance websites, with 1.56% of all visits to the Insurance category in October 2011 coming from MoneySupermarket. However, looking at the click departure metric we can see that MoneySupermarket sends just over 12% of its total traffic to insurance websites whereas GoCompare is much more focused on this industry with nearly 30% of all visits leaving GoCompare going straight to an insurance website.

We have more cool stuff coming in the next few months so keep tuned to the blog for the latest product updates and data insights. We're also introducing more tutorials on how to use Hitwise on our YouTube channel which is a great way to demonstrate the power of the tool.

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12 Insights of Christmas

2011-12-01T08:29:52Z

It’s December and as people crack open the first windows on their Advent calendars we thought we would make some predictions for Christmas 2011. In true festive fashion we’ve plumped for the 12 Insights of Christmas, and not a gold ring or partridge in sight.

The 12 Insights of Christmas 2011

1. This December 350 million hours will be spent shopping online by the UK Internet population. This translates to an average of 8 hours and 45 minutes spent per person on shopping websites over the course of the month.

2. 2.1 billion visits will go to online retail sites in December with new record peaks in traffic both pre and post-Christmas.

3. Lego will be the most searched for toy this Christmas, in particular Lego Star Wars games and sets.

4. Cyber Monday (5 December) will be the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day online with 85 million visits to retail websites from UK Internet users.

5. Monday 19 December will be the biggest day of December for online Grocery visits as people do some last minute food shopping but also check store opening times across the Christmas period.

6. iPhones will be a third more popular online than iPads this Christmas. If search intent was reflected in sales, for every 3 iPads Apple sold this Christmas they would sell 4 iPhones.

7. Facebook will see a new peak in UK Internet visits as friends share messages of good will with one another. 25 million hours will be spent on Facebook on Christmas Day alone.

8. Searches for the post-Christmas sales will start earlier than ever this year, with eager shoppers starting to do their research online as early as Christmas Eve.

9. Friday 23 December will be the biggest day of December for retailers receiving traffic from email as the multi-channel retailers prepare their customers for the post-Christmas sales.

10. The fashion sector will be the most reliant on Facebook traffic this Christmas, with TopShop, River Island and ASOS among the biggest recipients of Facebook traffic.

11. 12 million hours will be spent watching video clips on BBC iPlayer this Christmas with the biggest driver of traffic being the Dr Who Christmas special.

12. Hull will be the online shopping capital of Britain of December 2011, with proportionally more people doing their Christmas shopping online than any other city in the UK.

Follow Hitwise on Twitter for more data insights over the Christmas period.

Product Update: Dashboards 2.0 Launch

2011-11-24T11:37:12Z

We’re quite excited here in the Hitwise office and not just because it’s nearly Christmas. We’re always looking to improve our core product and make the data we supply accessible and easy to understand. We have some really exciting developments in the pipeline which are going to change the look and feel of Hitwise dramatically, but today I wanted to introduce our new Dashboards 2.0 product.

The Dashboards platform is a one-stop shop for insight which can be used to bring together different reports within Hitwise into a single page. Dashboards 2.0 is the next evolution of this product and we’ve included a whole raft of additional functionality allowing users to annotate, edit and share dashboards for the first time.

My colleague Rob Redman, Head of Client Services has put together this YouTube video which highlights the key changes to Dashboards 2.0.

One of the coolest things about Dashboards 2.0 is that you can edit data on the fly and still maintain that holistic view of the data on display. In our Power of Facebook dashboard which we have put together as a template for all current clients we can see lots of data about how influential Facebook is online.

If we focus on the Top Hotel sites receiving traffic from Facebook you can see here that the top five sites for October 2011 were TripAdvisor, Booking.com, Travelodge, LateRooms.com and Time Out.

However, if we decided to have a look at another part of the travel industry we could easily edit the dashboard and select Travel> Cruises for example.

This makes Dashboards 2.0 a lot more flexible than it was before, and the ability to share insights with colleagues, affiliates or agency partners means that more people can benefit from the insight of the dashboards you create.

If you want to find out more about Dashboards 2.0 please get in touch. You can also follow Hitwise on Twitter for the latest data trends and future product updates.

Can Netflix make an impact in the UK?

2011-10-25T14:40:43Z

Yesterday US video streaming and DVD rental site Netflix announced that it was going to have a second crack at conquering the UK market. The company has decided to focus solely on online video streaming this time around, in a move which will see it go head-to-head with LoveFilm.

Our online video report was also released yesterday, which shows the UK is increasing its consumption of video content online. 785 million visits a month go to online video websites, a year-on-year increase of 36% since September 2010. With more people watching video content online (over 240 million hours a month in the UK) is there a place for Netflix to make its mark against LoveFilm and other streaming sites?

Currently Netflix isn’t on the same radar as LoveFilm, with LoveFilm receiving 600 times more traffic on a monthly basis than Netflix in the UK.

However, Netflix is huge in the US, and was the 28th most visited website in the States in September 2011, receiving more visits than ESPN, Walmart and MapQuest. 1 in every 400 visits online went to Netflix in the US in September 2011. To put that into context, 1 in every 2500 visits online went to LoveFilm in the UK. If Netflix can capture the imagination of the online population here in the UK as it has in the US, then certainly there is room for another video streaming site in our market. One of the findings from the video report is that a high proportion of consumers watch video content on multiple websites each month.

The diagram above shows the cumulative frequency of visits to online video websites from the UK Internet population. 86% of the population visit at least 1 video website a month, but almost half of the population (46%) watch video on at least 3 different video sites a month. 1 in 5 people visit 5 or more different video websites in a month, showing the propensity for consumers to watch video on multiple video sites. With users watching video on such a variety of websites, there is definitely an opportunity for Netflix to capitalise on the growing UK market.

You can download our online video report for free from the website. Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter.

Barclays advert boosts offset mortgage searches 120%

2011-10-04T13:12:08Z

Searches for finance products tend to be a very seasonal affair and to a large extent can be predicted by looking at previous online trends. Products such as loans, savings and insurance are all pretty mature online, so it is therefore quite unusual to observe a big spike in searches outside of a seasonal trend.

However, during September we saw just such a spike in searches for offset mortgages (a flexible mortgage where customers have the ability to reduce the interest charged by offsetting a credit balance against the mortgage debt). Searches were up year-on-year by 40% during September and there was a 120% increase in searches in the two week window between the 3 September and 17 September. You can see from the chart below that this was by far the biggest spike in searches for offset mortgages this year, and goes against the seasonal trend of spikes in November and January.

Offset mortgages are certainly not a new product – Virgin and First Direct have been offering products for years – but something caused the dramatic spike in searches during September. Part of the answer lies in the table below listing the downstream recipients of searches for offset mortgages during the four weeks ending 24 September.

You can see that Barclays received over 23% of all search clicks for offset mortgages, almost twice the volume of the next biggest recipient. Barclays has had a number of TV adverts voiced by comedian Stephen Merchant one of which focuses directly on its offset mortgage product.

Through its offline advertising Barclays has reinvigorated the offset mortgage market online. What’s interesting though is that although Barclays created a wave of online buzz around offset mortgages, a lot of the benefit of that online activity has gone to other financial service providers. If we look at the percentage of search clicks that Barclays was receiving from all offset mortgage terms, there was a peak on the week ending 10 September (indicated by the blue circle in the graph below) when Barclays was receiving 1 in 3 search clicks for all offset mortgages.

However, we can see from the first chart in today’s blog that the peak in offset mortgage searches was during the following week (17 September). During this week (indicated by the pink circle) Barclays was being squeezed by other financial institutions that were vying for traffic, and hence only received 21% of clicks.

It was the financial aggregators that were quickest to react to this new opportunity in the market rather than other banks and mortgage providers. MoneySupermarket, Knowyourmoney and This Is Money in particular received a lot of traffic for searches for offset mortgages during the peak time. This is a great example of how even in a mature and fairly predictable market, opportunities can arise which brands need to be aware of in order to maximise their online traffic.

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Are you attracting the right type of Facebook fans?

2011-09-13T13:26:23Z

Back in June I wrote a blog highlighting our research showing that each new Facebook fan generates on average 20 additional visits to a retailer’s website. However, as every retailer knows, not all website visits are equal. Most eCommerce sites will have an idea of the average conversion rate from a visit to a sale, but in reality the likelihood that a visit will result in a sale depends on a number of factors - from whether the visitor is a regular customer or not, to how far they are down the purchase funnel.

Another key factor is the type of person visiting the site: a rich banker is probably more likely to make a purchase at a high end electronics store than teenager making an aspirational search for the latest expensive gadget. Even mass market retailers that attract customers from across the socio-demographic spectrum have core customers that are more likely to purchase. John Lewis is one such retailer: a major name on the British high street and consistently ranked in the top 10 of the IMRG-Experian Hitwise Hot Shops List, but “middle England’s favourite department store” is also a company with a distinctive core customer base.

Over the last few months, John Lewis has been making a concerted effort to attract fans to its Facebook page, which at the time of writing has almost 180,000 “Likes”. We now have the ability to track visitors to companies’ Facebook pages using Hitwise, and the chart below shows that www.facebook.com/JohnLewisRetail has been picking up an increasing number of visitors over the last few months.

But the question remains: who are these visitors? We are able to overlay visits to an organisation’s Facebook page with Experian Mosaic socio-demographic data, and the chart below illustrates the segmentation of visitors to John Lewis’s Facebook page for the 4 weeks ending 10th September 2011.

The largest group of visitors to John Lewis’s Facebook page come from the Suburban Mindsets Mosaic group (defined as “ maturing families on mid-range incomes living a moderate lifestyle in suburban semis”) – so far, so John Lewis. However, the second biggest group of visitors to www.facebook.com/JohnLewisRetail is a little less expected; Ex-Council Community are defined as “residents with low levels of education but sufficient incomes who live in the better right-to-buy council houses” and account for 11.5% of visitors. To understand a bit more about this audience, it is instructive to compare the Mosaic profile of visitors to John Lewis’s Facebook page with that of visitors to johnlewis.com, the company’s homepage and transactional website.

As the chart above illustrates, the Ex-Council Community Mosaic group is indeed over-represented on the john Lewis Facebook page when compared with visitors to the retailer’s homepage. It is a similar situation for other less affluent groups, including Claimant Cultures, Industrial Heritage and Terraced Melting Pot. On the other hand, while Suburban Mindsets accounts for a similar proportion of visitors to both the homepage and Facebook page, other core groups of visitors to John Lewis homepage -such as Professional Rewards (essentially the more affluent members of the middle class), Liberal Opinions (young professionals) and Alpha Territory (the richest people in Britain) - are significantly under-represented as visitors to the department store’s Facebook fan page. This is despite all of these groups being well represented on the social network, and presumably as John Lewis customers.

Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK and provides brands with a fantastic opportunity to engage with a huge audience, there is no doubt that certain fans will be worth more than others. This example nicely illustrates that simply playing the numbers game may not necessarily deliver the best results on Facebook – as with other marketing channels, quality often provides a better return on investment (ROI) than quality.

Combining Experian’s vast range of data assets with social media expertise (via Techlightenment), we are uniquely positioned to help brands drive ROI from their Facebook and other social media investments. If you would like to find out more about our Facebook Fan Acquisition or customer segmentation services, please email us.

Fire sale sends HP Touchpad searches past iPad online

2011-09-02T15:52:42Z

It has been a rollercoaster few weeks for HP, which followed the news that it was purchasing British software vendor Autonomy with an announcement that it is considering moving out of the PC business. The company also announced on 18 August that it was abandoning its webOS devices completely including tablets and smartphones.

After this dramatic turnaround in events, HP then started a fire sale of TouchPads for the ludicrously cheap price of $100 a unit, which prompted a 28% increase in visits to the HP website between the week ending 20 August and the week ending 27 August.

Such was the demand in search for TouchPads that HP saw a ten-fold increase in its market share of UK searches for tablets. Apple lost its position as the number one tablet manufacturer for the first time ever, as HP accounted for 66% of all tablet searches during the week ending 27 August 2011. Apple dropped from 71% of all tablet searches in the previous week, to just 25% of all tablet searches.

Looking at a word cloud of the top TouchPad searches in the last 12 weeks, you can see that a lot of the searches are related to retailers which sell the TouchPad, and stock levels in the UK, hence ‘hp touchpad in stock’ and ‘hp touchpad uk stock’ being among the most popular search terms.

Clearly this is just a blip for Apple and the iPad will return to the top of the tablet tree very soon. But for a short time at least, HP was the most searched for tablet manufacturer online.

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Sharm el Sheikh breaks back into top 50 destinations list

2011-08-31T14:25:46Z

With the latest travel quarterly report out today it’s time to look again at the top 50 destinations online that consumers want to fly to. Sharm-el-Sheikh emerged as the fastest moving destination this quarter, breaking back into the top 50 list after a nine month absence from the list.

New York was once again the most popular destination this quarter accounting for over 5% of all flight searches between May and July 2011. Four of the top 10 destinations were in Spain this quarter, with Tenerife, Malaga, Alicante and Barcelona leading the charge for the Spanish resorts.

There were nearly 2 billion visits to the travel industry this quarter, making it one of the busiest ever three month periods for the sector. As well as New York’s success, Chicago, Las Vegas and Orlando were all among the fastest moving destinations this quarter, highlighting a surge in interest for destinations in the States. Chicago climbed 22 places since the April quarter, making it the second fastest climber after Sharm-el-Sheikh, which was up 25 places since April.

Of course, Sharm has been hit by two major threats to its tourist trade with the shark attack which occurred in December 2010 and the political unrest in January and February. The indications are though that the coastal resort is recovering well and saw a 21% increase in searches for flights and holidays this quarter, taking the destination to 39th in our list.

You can find out more about Sharm and the other fast moving destinations this quarter by downloading the travel report which is available totally free. We are also running a travel webinar on Friday 16 September 2011 at noon which will tap into the latest travel trends as well as how you can make the most of Olympics next year. Otherwise, you can follow us on Twitter for all the latest data updates.

Retail recommendations for Christmas 2011

2011-08-23T16:18:51Z

Last week we ran a retail webinar as a pre-Christmas planning session, talking about the top trends from last year’s seasonal peaks and what retailers could expect from Christmas 2011.

For those of you that missed the session on Friday, the webinar slides are now available to download; and if you are a Hitwise client you can rewatch the webinar at your leisure through the Hitwise University. I thought I would summarise some of the key takeaways from the webinar in today’s blog, along with our predictions for Christmas 2011.

As the word cloud below highlights nicely, Christmas 2010 was a good year for the electronics industry with Amazon, Play, Apple, Currys, Comet and PC World among the top 100 most visited retailers in the UK.

January 2011 saw the introduction of a VAT rise, which prompted consumers to buy a lot of their big ticket items like laptops and TVs before the new tax came into effect. 2010 was also a big year for 3D TVs, but with year-on-year searches for 3D TVs down by 28% between August 2010 and August 2011, the indications are that the electronics retailers will have a tougher time selling big ticket items this Christmas. Electronic gadgets on the other hand continue to grow in popularity and, as last week’s blog showed, the Amazon Kindle and Apple iPad will be two of the leading products consumers are eager to purchase this year.

Looking at the way the dates fall this Christmas gives an indication as to which days are going to be the biggest for online retail traffic. Last year there was a lot of disruption to retail deliveries because of the heavy December snowfall; tThis Christmas consumers are likely to be a bit more organised and want to make their online orders earlier in December. Conveniently, Cyber Sunday and Cyber Monday will fall on the 4th and 5th of December this year, earlier than last year which should lead to new record breaking traffic figures on these two days.

In our data analysis of visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category for December 2010, the days when retailers received the most amount of traffic from email was always on a Wednesday. In particular Wednesday 14th and 21st of December this year will be the most successful for email traffic and a great opportunity for retailers to target their customers.

One of the trends that we’ve observed over the years is that ‘January sales’ are starting earlier and earlier, and this year Christmas Day and Boxing Day are likely to be even bigger for the retail category than ever before. Conversely, this could cannibalise retail traffic in late December and early January as consumers spend their Christmas money earlier.

We’ll be running more webinars between now and Christmas and of course you can follow us on Twitter for the latest data updates.

Where will readers go with no News of the World?

2011-07-08T11:00:13Z

The revelations of the phone hacking scandal at the News of the World have attracted many headlines in the media this week. Online there was a 9% increase in UK Internet visits to our News and Media category between 30 June and 7 July as people searched for news of the unfolding events.

You can see from the graph above that the spike in visits to the News and Media category that the News of the World scandal is the biggest news story to drive visits to the category in the last three months. Whilst not as big as the April spike during the Royal Wedding, this is nevertheless a very significant news story attracting attention online.

This Sunday (10 July) will be the last issue of the News of the World and the indications are that online this will be the biggest Sunday ever for traffic to the NOTW website. In the build up to Sunday, visits have already increased 10-fold and if this trend continues, NOTW could go out with a bang.

Once the News of the World has gone, the next question is where will the readership go to get their news? The expectation is that News International will create a “Sun on Sunday” to fill the void left by the News of the World. You can see that daily traffic to The Sun dips every Sunday which also corresponds to the peak in traffic to the NOTW website. The Sun would be a natural choice to benefit from ex-NOTW readers.

However, rumours about the launch of a “Sun on Sunday” are just that – rumours. Even if they turn out to be true, it will take a while for a new title to be launched leaving a short term gap in the market on Sundays. Our data suggests that the Daily Mail is the newspaper most likely to pick up the News of the World’s readership. The websites of the two newspapers already have a close affinity as the Daily Mail is the number one website in the downstream traffic visited after NOTW. In June, 5.25% of all visits leaving the NOTW site went straight to the Daily Mail, compared to 4.76% which went to The Sun and 2.11% to the Mirror.

Interestingly, when using Mosaic to profile the audiences that visit the websites of the News of the World, The Sun, the Daily Mail and the Mirror, the online audiences of the NOTW and The Sun are most closely aligned, whereas the NOTW and Daily Mail audiences are quite different. Daily Mail readers for example skew to the more affluent Alpha Territory and Professional Rewards groups, whereas NOTW readers skew more towards young families in New Homemakers and Terraced Melting Pot.

Based on this audience segmentation analysis, the natural conclusion would be that a “Sun on Sunday” would be most likely to acquire the NOTW readership. However, the Daily Mail and The Mirror can also expect to see increases in traffic in the short term as audiences look for new outlets to find their Sunday news online.

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Picture is clear for Skype video calls on Facebook

2011-07-08T08:37:11Z

The big story that has grabbed people’s attentions in the digital world this week is Facebook’s announcement of a new video calling feature which will be powered by Skype.

Looking at the Mosaic groups which visit Facebook and the Skype website we can see the new audience opportunities this partnership offers both parties.

For Skype, the attraction of partnering with Facebook is that their video calls will start being used by some of the less affluent but prolific Internet users such as Claimant Cultures, Ex-Council Community and Industrial Heritage. These groups are all over indexed with Facebook but are currently not using Skype as much as the average Internet user. Facebook on the other hand will get to tap into the multi-ethnic audiences that Skype already attracts in Upper Floor Living and Terraced Melting Pot as well as the more affluent Liberal Opinions and Alpha Territory users.

The integration of video calling into Facebook should help the social network extend its dominance in the market, and will give people another moment to pause for thought before pursuing the new Google+ project. We will keep a close eye on Facebook over the next few weeks; it will be interesting to see if as a result of video calling, average visit time on Facebook goes up past the 27 minutes it currently boasts. The other factor to monitor will be to see if in the long term the audience profile of Facebook and Skype become closer as people use both services more.

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Shrek the Musical fails to usurp Lion King’s reign

2011-06-24T08:58:09Z

With a number of new musicals coming to the West End, visits to the ticketing category have risen by 13.5% in the last four weeks.

Clearly not all of the growth throughout June has been driven by searches for musicals as the Ticketing category also attracts traffic across multiple verticals for music gigs, festivals, sporting events and theatre.

However, the prominence of the musical terms within all searches driving traffic to the ticketing websites indicates that a significant proportion of this growth is attributable to musicals rather than other events.

The hottest new show in town is definitely Shrek the Musical, with an eleven-fold increase in search traffic in the first week of June alone.

Looking at all of the search terms relating to Shrek typed into search engines so far in June, 65% of those have contained the word ‘musical’ and 8% of them have also contained the word ‘tickets’. Despite the success and prominence of searches for Shrek the Musical though, what’s interesting is that the loveable green ogre wasn’t able to topple the equally loveable lion Symba from the top of the musical tree.

You can see from the table above that the most searched for musical in the four weeks ending 18 June 2011 was indeed the Lion King, narrowly beating Shrek in the total search volume driving traffic to the Ticketing category.

Whilst Shrek might well have aspirations to be king of the musicals, for now at least, the Lion King still reigns supreme with UK Internet users.

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1 Facebook fan = 20 additional visits to your website

2011-06-23T08:40:01Z

We’ve been talking at Hitwise for a very long time about the benefits of social media and how Facebook in particular is becoming critical to the success of multi-channel marketing. We are constantly asked: “What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?”and until now that has always been a difficult question to qualify precisely. Leveraging our unique data sets we now have an answer: for retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year.

I’ve blogged on many occasions on just how massive Facebook is online but it is always worth reiterating some of the big “wow-factor” stats which highlight Facebook’s reach and influence online. Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google and is now the second biggest source of traffic to other websites as well. 1 in every 6 page views from UK Internet users goes to a Facebook page, and 20 million hours are spent on the website every day from UK users alone.

With this in mind we’ve decided to launch a new service today in partnership with social media experts Techlightenment which allows brands to acquire thousands of new Facebook fans and then analyse other behaviours these fans exhibit online. We’ve very sensibly decided to call this our Facebook Fan Acquisition and Analysis service.

Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month. However, by utilising this new service, brands can more rapidly build a fan base within Facebook and therefore drive more traffic to their website. Within retail each new fan acquired will drive an additional 20 visits to a retailer’s websites, which in turn will generate extra sales both online and offline.

The figure of 1 fan = 20 extra visits to a website uses a unique methodology that combines Hitwise data with data from Techlightenment. We took the top 100 retailers ranked in the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category and benchmarked visits to those websites against the number of fans those brands had on their Facebook page. We then also looked at the propensity for people to search for those retail brands after a visit to Facebook using our Search Sequence tool.

We’ve used a similar methodology before in a previous blog to find the retail brands that were leveraging the marketing potential of Facebook. Looking at the data for the 12 weeks ending 18 June 2011, we can see that fashion brands once again are utilising Facebook the most, with a much higher proportion of searches after a visit to Facebook than in normal search.

The table above is an updated Index of the top retailers that were searched for after a visit to Facebook. Topshop, Boohoo and Jack Wills lead the pack, with consumers being 54% more likely to search for the ‘topshop’ brand after a visit to Facebook than they would in a normal everyday search in Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Out of the top 10 brands above, WHSmith was the notable exception to the collection, as the only non-fashion retailer in the top 10.

If you want to find out more about our Facebook Fan Acquisition and Analysis service you can send an email to press.uk@hitwise.com. In the meantime you can follow us on Twitter for the latest updates and online statistics.