Hitwise Intelligence - UK

10 things you need to know about Facebook

2012-02-02T13:22:02Z

With the Facebook IPO announced yesterday interest has surged in the world’s most popular social network. Here are the top 10 things you need to know about Facebook:

1. There are over 1.3 billion visits to Facebook a month from the UK Internet population – making Facebook the second most visited website in the UK after Google.

2. 1 in every 6 page views in the UK is to a Facebook page. The social network accounted for 15% of all UK Internet page views in December 2011.

3. 500 million hours are spent on Facebook in the UK every month. The average session time for a user visiting Facebook is 22 minutes.

4. Facebook is the most popular social network in the UK, accounting for over 50% of all visits to social networks. Facebook is twice the size of YouTube and 17 times bigger than Twitter in terms of visits from UK Internet users.

5. Facebook receives an average of 40 million UK Internet visits every single day.

6. Facebook is the most searched for website in UK. The term ‘facebook’ is the most popular search term typed into all search engines including Google, Yahoo! and Bing and three of the top 10 most popular search terms online are Facebook related (‘facebook’, ‘facebook login’ and ‘fb’).

7. Facebook is the second biggest source of traffic in the UK after Google. 7.5% of all visits to a website came from Facebook in December 2011.

8. 1 Facebook fan = 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year. Using the top 100 retail websites as a sample group, Hitwise data shows that for each additional fan acquired on a branded Facebook page companies can expect to see 20 extra visits coming to their main website over a 12 month period.

9. 25% of all visits leaving Facebook go straight to an Entertainment website, showing the close affinity between Facebook and people’s interest in movies, TV, music and games.

10. Manchester is the new Facebook capital of the UK with Internet users from Manchester 9% more likely than the average person to visit Facebook in a given month.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

Wikipedia Blackout sends info junkies to mobile website

2012-01-19T12:03:10Z

On Wednesday 18 January visitors to Wikipedia in search of answers were greeted with darkness.

In protest against the two congressional proposals in the States which are intended to halt online piracy, Wikipedia and other sites including Reddit went dark claiming the bills will infringe on freedom of speech. With people unable to easily access Wikipedia through their laptop or PC, info junkies turned to their mobile devices where access to the Wikipedia Mobile site was unhindered. 1 in every 7 visits to Wikipedia came from a smartphone or tablet yesterday, a 14% increase in mobile visits from the previous day.

In total there were 5.8 million visits to Wikipedia on 18 January and an additional million visits to the mobile website. Despite expectations that visits would decrease as a result of the blackout, visits to the main Wikipedia site actually increased by 4.1% compared to 17 January, although they didn’t reach the heights of 2 January when the new episode of Sherlock aired on iPlayer. Among the top search terms driving traffic to Wikipedia on that day were ‘irene adler’, ‘lara pulver’, ‘sherlock’ and ‘benedict cumberbatch’.

One of the negative effects of the blackout is that average visit time to Wikipedia halved from 8 minutes to 4 minutes on 18 January as people went to other websites to retrieve the information they sought. So where did people go without Wikipedia if they didn’t have a mobile device? Using the downstream data n Hitwise we can see those websites which saw the greatest increase in traffic after a visit to Wikipedia between 17 and 18 January.

As the only part of the site to be affected by the blackout was the English verison multi-lingual Internet users went to the French and Spanish versions. News sites including BBC News, Fox, Daily Mail and CNN also increased their downstream clicks from Wikipedia, but the biggest growth was for IMDB. Historically, entertainment has always been one of the biggest drivers of traffic to Wikipedia (as witnessed in the Sherlock example above) so it is not that surprising that without Wikipedia traffic increased to IMDB – one of the biggest online authorities on movies and TV. IMDB saw a 12% increase in visits yesterday with 3.4% of all visits leaving Wikipedia going straight to the website.

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iPad demand creates new market in insurance

2012-01-12T11:18:35Z

One of the continuing trends witnessed this Christmas was the demand for Apple products. iPods, iPads and iPhones were sold in their millions in the UK and because the items themselves are highly sought after and quite valuable, a new market has effectively been created in the insurance of Apple gadgets.

Mobile phone insurance is by no means a new thing, but people are certainly more conscious about getting their mobiles insured now than ever before, and in particular it is the Apple iPhones that generate the most mobile insurance search queries online. You can see from the graph below how mobile insurance searches spiked dramatically in the first week of October last year, which coincided with the launch of the iPhone 4S.

No other handset can affect mobile insurance search behaviour as the iPhone can; in the 12 weeks ending 31 December 2011 an astonishing 28% of all mobile phone insurance searches included the word ‘iphone’. This Christmas the iPad was the most searched for Apple product online, which in turn saw demand for iPad insurance increase. In the last week of December searches for iPad insurance doubled, with the majority of clicks coming from organic links.

Over the course of December, the most popular iPad insurance term was ‘ipad insurance’ (which accounted for 35% of searches and attracted a paid rate of 26%). As with lots of niche products, iPad insurance presents plenty of opportunity for aspiring PPC campaigns. For example the term ‘i pad insurance’ (with a space in between the ‘i’ and the ‘pad’) had a much lower search volume than ‘ipad insurance’ but none of the clicks came from paid links, which represents a quick win for companies wanting to bid and rank for that term.

Currently none of the big insurance providers are jumping on this growing trend of insuring gadgets. Just looking at the downstream traffic from all searches for iPad insurance in the four weeks ending 31 December 2011 the biggest recipient was www.ipadinsuranceuk.co.uk, followed by Protect your Bubble, a specialist gadget insurer. This represents a huge opportunity for insurers in a rapidly growing niche market.

Interestingly the iPad’s main market competitor, the Amazon Kindle hasn’t attracted nearly the same kind of demand for insurance search terms. In terms of search volume, iPad insurance receives more than five times as many clicks as Kindle insurance. This may be due to the different price points of the two gadgets – the iPad 2 retails from £399 whereas the cheapest Kindle is now just £89. However, this could equally be a product of the Apple consumer. A lot of people who buy Apple products become huge brand evangelists, and as such it is understandable that they would want to protect their valuable possessions against theft or damage.

Follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

YouTube accounts for 1 in 4 visits to social networks

2012-01-11T12:16:30Z

YouTube had its biggest ever month of traffic as 606 million UK Internet visits went to the website in December 2011. YouTube now accounts for 1 in every 4 visits to a social network in the UK and 1 in every 30 visits online.

December was a big month for video sites with over 936 million visits to websites like YouTube and BBC iPlayer. Last week we blogged about the big Christmas hits on catch-up TV but YouTube was very much at the forefront of online video in December accounting for 65% of all visits to video websites that month.

Over the last 12 months YouTube has seen some pretty phenomenal growth. In our Search and Social analysis YouTube was consistently one of the fastest moving websites within the Experian Hitwise Social Networking and Forums category and had six consecutive months as the fastest growing social site in the UK. Total visits to YouTube increased by 45% between December 2010 and December 2011 going up from 417 million visits to 606 million visits.

In the latest December statistics YouTube accounted for 25% of all visits to social networks, up from 23.61% in November. Year-on-year YouTube’s growth of total visits has meant that its market share of visits to social networks has increased by 7 percentage points from nearly 18% to 25%.

In the search market Google was dominant again with nearly 92% of all UK Internet searches conducted in December. This year retailers were relying more on search traffic than last December, with 43% of all visits going to retail websites coming from a search engine.

You can find out more about the latest Search and Social data by reading our press release. We will also be publishing our Christmas 2011 Review later this week so look out for that. In the meantime you can follow Hitwise UK on Twitter for the latest data updates.

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.

2011 Online: the year in review

2011-12-30T13:00:38Z

Another year has flown by and in time-honoured Hitwise tradition it falls to me to review the highlights of 2011. This year we have seen an astonishing 228 billion UK Internet visits to websites and 28 billion hours spent online. So, here’s my pick of the blog posts from 2011.

January
After the gorging excesses of Christmas the UK made its resolutions to get fit and give up smoking. We started the year with a look at visits to dieting websites as well as the changing search behaviours around quitting smoking. Online fashion retailer ASOS announced it was going to launch a Facebook store, one of the first of its kind and Amazon revealed that it sells more ebooks than paperbacks, prompting us to look at the most popular ebooks searched for online.

February
February was the month of revolution and we looked at how the protests in Egypt were affecting the Egyptian tourism industry. In sport Fernando Torres made his ill-fated move to Chelsea and the Super Bowl became bigger than the Six Nations online. Sky launched Sky Atlantic and we also wrote a blog about leveraging the marketing power of Facebook.

March
2011 was a big year for rewards websites and in particular social shopping sites like Groupon and Living Social. Social media continued to grow online and became the most visited online category whilst Rebecca Black’s song Friday went viral on YouTube. March also saw the first budget announcements from new Chancellor George Osborne as well as the 2011 Census.

April
April saw the launch of the Angry Birds shop online which rocketed to the top of the toy retailers list. We wrote a follow up blog on the changing facets of social shopping and in travel First Choice switched its strategy to only sell all-inclusive holidays. The Royal Wedding prompted a flurry of searches for wedding cakes and tickets went on sale for the London 2012 Olympics which caused Ticketmaster to go into meltdown.

May
In May the online population voted YES to AV although the actual vote resulted in a resounding rejection of the alternative vote system. Twitter had its biggest ever day of traffic as rumours started spreading around the celebrities involved with super-injunctions and we launched the first issue of our Automotive Quarterly report. Fresh eruptions from Icelandic volcanoes also sent the Aviation industry in to panic as flights were grounded.

June
In June we celebrated Father’s Day with a look at how people were increasingly turning to personalised homemade gifts. Wimbledon served up an opportunity for retailers to sell 3D TVs as the BBC decided to broadcast the final from SW19 in 3D for the first time. We also did some analysis on the value of a Facebook fan coming to the conclusion that 1 fan = 20 additional visits to a typical retailer’s website over the course of a year.

July
July spelled the end of the road for the News of the World after the revelations of the phone hacking scandal were unearthed. This didn’t stop the British population cooing over pictures of Harper Seven Beckham however, as the new Beckham baby become the most searched for celebrity online and surprisingly also causing a spike in searches for ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ from which the name Harper originated. We correctly predicted that Tom would win series 7 of The Apprentice and Google+ was launched so we did some top line analysis on Google’s latest social project.

August
In August YouTube firmly established itself as the third biggest website in the UK after Google and Facebook accounting for 1 in every 35 visits online. The London riots caused another massive spike in visits to Twitter as well as sending people online searching for home insurance. We also made our first predictions for Christmas retail including a look at the Apple iPad and Amazon Kindle.

September
As summer began to fade into September we took a look at Back to School searches and we created some pretty travel infographics inspired by the great David McCandless and his book Information is Beautiful. We ran some analysis on how the UK spends its time online with social media emerging as the UK’s favourite online pastime. We also did some demographics analysis on attracting the right kind of fans on Facebook.

October
October brought the sad news of Steve Jobs’ death as the Apple co-founder succumbed to pancreatic cancer. We produced a white paper on online video and utilised our new YouTube Channel with a video that highlighted the top 10 online video facts. In property, Zoopla and Digital Property Group merged to tackle market leader Rightmove.

November
In November we started making our predictions for the top toys for Christmas which included the LeapPad Explorer. We added the Dashboards 2.0 function to our Competitive Intelligence tool and Apple became the second biggest retailer online. Delia Smith also emerged as the top celebrity chef for Christmas recipe searches.

December
December was very retail focused as we looked to Christmas shopping online. We kick-started the month with our 12 Insights of Christmas which proved very popular as we predicted what was going to happen over the festive period. Most importantly we correctly predicted that Cyber Monday would be the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day online, and that Boxing Day would be the biggest post-Christmas shopping day online. Outside of retail, MySpace dropped out of the top 10 social networks rankings for the first time ever and we made our predictions for what would happen in 2012.

Thanks for reading the blog this year and please keep coming back for the latest data updates. To all our Twitter followers thank you for your comments and sharing our content online. Have a cracking New Year and here’s to a great 2012!

Biggest Boxing Day ever as UK spends 13 million hours shopping online

2011-12-27T10:16:32Z

UK Internet users broke online records yesterday as 13 million hours were spent shopping online on Boxing Day. Online retail websites received an astonishing 96 million UK Internet visits yesterday, 19.5% more than on Boxing Day last year (80.5 million visits).

The record-breaking 96.2 million visits to the online retail category makes 26 December 2011 the single biggest shopping day in the UK ever. This success is in part due to the increased interest in shopping on Christmas Day which I blogged about yesterday. The gathering momentum since Christmas Eve has led to the biggest online shopping day ever witnessed in the UK.

Another contributing factor to the record-breaking figures was that Boxing Day fell on a Monday this year. Looking at the graph above you can see that online traffic to shopping websites peaks each week on a Monday including Cyber Monday which was the biggest pre-Christmas shopping day of the year. With that in mind we predicted that Boxing Day would be the biggest shopping day ever, but it even surpassed our own estimates of 95 million UK Internet visits.

The top 20 retailers receiving traffic yesterday from UK Internet users was much more focussed on fashion stores than electrical stores compared to Christmas Day, with River Island and New Look noticeably rising up the rankings. Department stores M&S, Debenhams and House of Fraser also rose in the rankings thanks to their promoted post-Christmas sales.

Tesco and Tesco Direct jumped from 24th and 25th place respectively to 14th and 15th between Christmas Day and Boxing Day perhaps as consumers wanted to spend Christmas money on gifts but also to take advantage of special offers on food and alcohol ahead of New Year’s Eve.

Looking at the split of visits to multi-channel and online only retailers, you can see that multi-channel took the lion’s share of the traffic over December, particularly on Boxing Day when there were nearly twice as many visits to multi-channel brands than there were to the online only retailers.

However, in comparison to last year, the gap between multi-channel and online only retail has narrowed considerably. As we predicted, the online only retailers are making inroads to multi-channel’s dominance of Christmas shopping. Last year the gap between the two was 2.81% of all UK Internet visits on Boxing Day, whereas this year that difference has fallen to 2.41%. As the online retailers like eBay, Amazon and Play.com start to compete with the multi-channel brands in the post-Christmas sales, that gap is only going to narrow further in years to come.

We will be discussing Boxing Day and all of the post-Christmas shopping season in our final Christmas webinar on 6 January 2012 at noon. It’s free to sign up for and will be packed full of insight on Christmas this year, and how to prepare for Christmas next year. You can also follow us on Twitter for all the latest festive stats.

EDITED UPDATE: When we published this blog on 27 December we quoted the Boxing Day 2010 figures as 68 million UK Internet visits and not 80.5 million which was the actual number. As a result the increase in visits was actually 19.5% not 40% between Boxing Day 2010 and 2011. We apologise for the error which has now been corrected. JM

Christmas Day 2011 warms up shoppers for Boxing Day

2011-12-26T12:47:30Z

Christmas Day 2011 was another bumper day for shopping online as 62.8 million UK Internet visits went to online retail websites. 1 in every 8 visits online in the UK yesterday went to a retail website, a new record for Christmas Day shopping online.

We’ve already seen new records set for Cyber Monday this year, and although the Christmas Day figures are not nearly as high as those for Cyber Monday, 25 December is certainly emerging as an important online shopping day in its own right. On Christmas Eve there were 45.5 million visits to online retailers, whereas Christmas Day saw 62.8 million – a 38% increase in a single day.

Traditionally, Boxing Day has always been the biggest online retail day of the year, and we’re still expecting that to be the case this year, with 95 million UK Internet visits predicted to go to retail websites on 26 December. However, in the last two years, Christmas Day has become more significant as a shopping day. Last year 11% of all UK Internet visits on Christmas Day went to a retail website, whereas this year 12.2% of all visits went to retailers. You can see from the chart below the key categories which have seen an increase in visits year-on-year, including Entertainment, Search Engines and Shopping.

More visits are going to Entertainment websites than last year, and that is a product of the growth of online video. Websites like YouTube, MSN Video and BBC iPlayer are more popular this Christmas as people search for video content to entertain them on Christmas Day. In the retail sector the top websites visited yesterday were a mixture of department stores, electronics retailers and fashion outlets.

Looking specifically at the fastest moving shopping websites between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day you can see that Amazon and Apple iPod & iTunes are the top two fastest moving websites. Much like last Christmas, Apple was very prominent in the list as new owners of iPhones, iPods and iPads went online to download their first content. Similarly, new owners of a Kindle went to Amazon to download their first eBooks.

Big ticket items like laptops, flatscreen TVs and white goods were also attracting the UK population yesterday with Currys and PC World among the fastest movers on Christmas Day. Once again people were also researching ahead of the post-Christmas sales with increased visits to Next, Debenhams and John Lewis. These were the top three most searched for retailers with the word ‘sale’ after the brand name on Christmas Day.

We will be posting a blog tomorrow with the Boxing Day results. Don’t forget you can also sign up for our Christmas round-up webinar which is taking place on 6 January 2012 at noon. You can also follow us on Twitter for all the latest Christmas stats and information.

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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Boxing Day set to be biggest ever day for online retail

2011-12-23T09:51:10Z

Following on from the success of our predictions around Cyber Monday a couple of weeks ago we are predicting a record breaking 95 million UK Internet visits to online retailers on Boxing Day (26 December) this year.

Historically Boxing Day has always been the single biggest day of the year for online retailers as consumers want to spend their Christmas money, exchange unwanted presents and browse ahead of the post-Christmas sales. Last year there were 80.5 million visits to online retailers on Boxing Day but this year we are expecting 95 million visits, an 18% uplift year-on-year.

Boxing Day falls on a Monday this year which is significant because Mondays have consistently been the biggest day of the week for online traffic to retail websites in the run up to Christmas this year. By contrast Saturdays have consistently been the lowest point of each week for total visits. Benchmarking Hitwise data against Experian Footfall data we can see that Saturday also corresponds to the biggest day of the week for offline high street shopping.

We are often asked if online shopping is having a negative effect on high street retail. However, our data suggests that far from cannibalising high street retail figures, online compliments the high street. Multi-channel retailers who can blend their online and offline marketing are more likely to see traffic on their website and Footfall in their stores.

One of the predictions we made in our 12 Insights of Christmas blog was that people would start searching for sales earlier than ever before and certainly looking at last year’s figures we can see that searches for all ‘sales’ terms start to increase in the week ending 18 December.

At the peak of searches last year, 0.9% of all searches conducted in the UK included the word ‘sale’ or ‘sales’. The word cloud below indicates the top sales search term variations.

As you can see the stand-out sales are for department stores Next, Debenhams, M&S and John Lewis, but there is also significant search volumes for generic terms like ‘boxing day sales’.

We will be talking more about the Christmas online retail trends in the final part of our trilogy of webinars which is being held on Friday 6 January at noon. In the meantime you can keep up to date with the latest data trends on Twitter or on the blog.

8 Internet Predictions for 2012

2011-12-21T14:36:27Z

With New Year fast approaching it’s time to look ahead to 2012. What does online hold in store for the year ahead? We’ve put together our top predictions for 2012.

1. Entertainment will be the most visited online category of the year as TV, movies and games become more dependent on online as a distribution channel.

2. Facebook will continue to dominate social media with over 50% market share of visits to all social networks. The UK’s most popular social network will reach a new milestone in 2012 with over 500 million hours spent on the site in a single month from UK Internet users.

3. Social media will have a greater impact on traffic to transactional websites than ever before. In 2012 between 50-60 per cent of all traffic leaving social media websites will go to transactional websites up from 43 per cent in 2010 and 49 per cent in 2011.

4. Online video will continue to grow as a channel with YouTube leading the way for video consumption. At some point during 2012 online video will pass the 1 billion visits per month milestone.

5. Department stores will increase their influence in online shopping accounting for 25% of all visits to online retailers as consumers move towards more one-stop-shops in their online shopping habits. John Lewis, Debenhams, House of Fraser and Amazon will lead the growth of this category.

6. Consumers will be bargain-hunting for online discounts more than ever before. Visits to Rewards and Directories websites (our collective term for voucher sites, cashback sites, group buying sites etc) will see 10 per cent growth during 2012 as consumers look for the best deals online.

7. 2012 brings a feast of sporting events with the London Olympics, Wimbledon and Euro 2012 all taking place this summer. 650 million visits will go to sporting websites in July 2012, the biggest ever month for this industry online.

8. Two growing trends in travel for 2012 will be glamping and Balkan holidays. Glamorous camping ‘glamping’ searches were up 90% in 2011 and look set to be a more mainstream holiday option in 2012. The Balkans are also flying up our hot destinations list as a trendy and affordable alternative to the Mediterranean in particular Bulgaria, Kosovo and Albania.

Stumble Upon overtakes MySpace in social rankings

2011-12-14T08:49:01Z

MySpace – once the most visited social network in the UK - fell out of the top 10 Social Networks and Forums rankings for the first time this November to be replaced by “discovery engine” Stumble Upon.

In the latest Hitwise search and social analysis MySpace was absent from the top 10 rankings for the first time ever. Stumble Upon leapfrogged into 10th place accounting for 0.31% of all visits to social media websites.

MySpace traffic has been in decline for the last three years. Since November 2008, MySpace’s market share of visits to the Social Networks and Forums category has fallen from 5.8% of all visits to just 0.36%, whereas visits to Stumble Upon’s have increased by 44%.

Despite numerous redesigns and efforts to diversify the site, MySpace is primarily still a place for music. Looking at the top search terms driving traffic to MySpace for the four weeks ending 3 December 2011 you can see that other than navigational searches for the MySpace brand, people are searching for music artists like Ben Howard, Two Door Cinema Club and Florence and the Machine.

MySpace is clearly still an important online portal for music, it was the top recipient of traffic for all searches for ‘ben howard’ for example, but the problem is that MySpace is now competing for traffic with so many other websites. Let’s take Florence and the Machine as an example, an artist that was one of the top drivers of traffic to MySpace in December 2008 and December 2011. If we look at the downstream websites receiving traffic from searches for ‘florence and the machine’ in 2008 MySpace is the clear market leader, accounting for almost 40% of clicks.

Fast forward to 2011 and MySpace has fallen to the eighth biggest recipient of traffic, accounting for just over 2% of all search clicks. YouTube and Facebook on the other hand, account for 6.9% and 5.4% respectively, more than twice as much as MySpace.

You can find out more about the latest search and social statistics by reading our press release which also went out today. Or you can follow us on Twitter.

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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Cyber Monday smashes online retail records

2011-12-06T16:14:20Z

Yesterday (5 December), millions of consumers went online for Cyber Monday to do their Christmas shopping. We predicted last week that there would be 85 million visits to online retail websites on Cyber Monday and yesterday we monitored 84.6 million visits, 18% up on last year’s figure of 72 million visits.

In total, 14 million hours were spent shopping online by UK Internet users yesterday, spending an average of 10 minutes per visit to each retail website. The result is a new record for online retail websites for pre-Christmas shopping. However, like last year, we are expecting the biggest online shopping day overall to be Boxing Day (26 December) as consumers look to spend Christmas money and vouchers, as well as browsing ahead of the post-Christmas sales.

Looking at the websites that have increased their market share of visits between Cyber Monday 2010 and 2011, it was the online-only giants Amazon and eBay that were leading the charge. Amazon UK accounted for 10% of all visits to retailers yesterday whereas last Cyber Monday it had 8.49% of all visits to the Shopping and Classifieds category.

There was marked growth for eBay UK’s mobile site as traffic tripled year-on-year. This was in part due to eBay’s pop-up store in London’s Oxford Street. The shop encouraged window-shoppers to scan QR codes into their smartphones and tablets in order to buy one of the top 350 eBay bestsellers.

Also among the fast movers, were price comparison sites LowPriceShopper and SupaPrice, as well as daily deals site Groupon UK. This could perhaps indicate that there will be an increased dependence on discount bargain hunting this Christmas. ASDA also had two websites in the fast movers although we are expecting much higher visits to grocery websites as we get closer to Christmas Day itself.

Keep following the blog and Twitter for more Christmas insights, and don’t forget we are running the second of our Christmas webinar trilogy on Tuesday 20 December which you can sign up for now for free.

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.