Hitwise Intelligence - North America

Canadian Banks Brand Association

2009-11-04T16:30:12Z

Internet search data can be an excellent input to understand what consumers associate with a brand name. Looking at the words that consumers include with a brand name in a search query provides insight into the products, services and attributes consumers associate wtih that brand. The data, updated weekly is far more timely and cost effective than the traditional phone surveys to measure brand association.

Today, I want to follow up on a post from last week to show what Canadians associate with the brand names of the big banks. The following table shows the top 10 branded search terms for the Big 5 banks in the twelve weeks to October 3, 2009.

It is not surprising that most consumers are searching first for online banking for all of the banks. We tend to use search engines to navigate the web and banking is no exception. There are a few other things of note, however:

- Bank of Montreal's Mastercard appears at #8 among search terms for Bank of Montreal, while credit card searches don't appear among most other bank search terms. Notice also the brand for their Mastercard product, "mosaic mastercard".
- CIBC's credit card, Visa, is also among its top 10 brand searches, again at #8.
- TD Canada Trust's search terms reveal the continued strength of the TD brand, with "td" at #2 while "canada trust" appears at #10.
- Looking beyond the top 10 terms, I found searches for TD Canada Trust Insurance offering, "rbc visa" and "desjardins visa".

You can view last week's post on the online strength of the brands of the Big 5 banks here.

Black Friday and Cyber Monday Predictions

2009-11-02T23:11:09Z

Holiday projections are out and many are predicting a gloomy holiday season for retailers. The NRF forecasts a 1% decline growth in total retail sales for the 2009 holiday season, totaling $437.6 billion. The online channel is poised to fare somewhat better, with Forrester Research projecting an increase of 8% to $44.7 billion. The official shopping season usually gets underway during the Thanksgiving holiday with heavy promotional activity taking place around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However this year, fearful of weak sales, retailers are already starting to release Black Friday promotions and discounts. What else can we expect to see as the holiday season gets going? To delve into potential trends, we pulled together data from across Experian Marketing Services to predict what may happen around Black Friday this year.

Search will continue to play a strong role for Black Friday

Shoppers have been starting their searches for Black Friday sales earlier and earlier each year, with queries beginning in August, when speculation begins about which products may have the biggest discounts during the kickoff to the holiday season. In 2006, the searches took place over a 9 week period leading up to Thanksgiving & Black Friday, growing to 14 weeks in 2007, and 16 weeks in 2008. The number of variations including the term ‘black friday’ have increased significantly as well, increasing 41% year-over-year to reach 7,822 different combinations for the week ending Nov. 29, 2008. The number of websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘Black friday’ during the four weeks leading up to and including the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday increased to from 416 in 2007 to 473 in 2008 – an increase of 14%.

Every year, more consumers flock to Black Friday websites looking for information about sales & promotions both online and off. In 2008, visits to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites grew over the previous holiday season overall – with a 21% increase in visits to this category during the week of Thanksgiving. During that peak week, 53% of the traffic was driven by search referrals.

Source: Experian Hitwise

Overall email volumes will be higher, but will increase at a lower or equal rate

The volume of email sent by Experian CheetahMail on Black Friday increased 64% from 2007 to 2008 and 40% on Cyber Monday from 2007 to 2008. Analysis of the most current email data suggests an expected 30 percent increase in volume on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as compared to 2008, particularly if sales are low towards the end of November. In that case, there is a large chance that marketers will react by increasing volume to an even higher capacity. Mentions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also expected to be more prevalent in email campaigns earlier in the year.

Source: Experian CheetahMail

Expect consumers to start shopping online early

With Thanksgiving falling late again in 2009, consumers are expected to start shopping online a few weeks prior to the official start of the shopping season – Black Friday. In 2007, online purchases peaked during the week ending Monday, November 26 (Cyber Monday) when fully a quarter of all adults bought something online. Online purchases remained high for several weeks after Thanksgiving before falling to 17% the week of Christmas. In comparison, when Thanksgiving fell a bit later in the month last year, online purchase activity occurred earlier – several weeks prior to Black Friday. In fact, between the weeks ending November 3 and November 10, the share of adults who made an online purchase more than doubled – increasing from 11% to 23%.

Source: Experian Simmons

Please join us on Wednesday, Nov. 11th for a webinar on 'Crafting Black Friday Strategies' - register here.

Twitter Revisited - in More than 140 Characters

2009-10-29T17:29:11Z

A quick update from my Twitter post from last month. I had the pleasure of speaking at two excellent conferences this week, iMedia Breakthrough and Digital Media West. During the Q&A of my talk at Digital Media, I was asked about my views of Twitter's staying power versus competition from Facebook.

I think this charts sums up the competitive threat that Twitter may pose to Facebook's astounding 6% of all U.S. Internet visits (read: no threat).

Facebook's dominance minimizes the detail and recent decline in visits to Twitter's domain. This chart gives a clearer picture of Twitter's decline over the last few months. As I noted in last months entry, this chart only portrays web visits to Twitter versus application traffic.

At iMedia Breakthrough, Jeff Rosenblum from Questus referenced a Harvard Business School Study finding that the median number of tweets per twitter user over the life of their twitter account is 1!

I Believe this figure confirms our original hypothesis of Twitter-stall due to a drop in new users. As Facebook continues to grow, its user-base across Mosaic types shows that its user-base is becoming ubiquitous. Twitter by contrast was showing greater coverage amongst types earlier in its growth phase. Since Twitter's decline in July, the number of over-indexing has narrowed significantly, indicating that early growth may have been the result of significant trail behavior leading up to this summer.

That being said, I still plan to tweet this entry.

Google’s rumored Music service launch today

2009-10-28T20:54:46Z

Google is expected to launch their music service this afternoon, so we decided to look at some of Google’s history with the Music category. Of course we all know that the majority of people start with Google for search - last month, 71% of all searches took place on Google. Out of the top 1000 search terms that took place on Google last week, 6% were music-related (includes bands, music services and content). Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits, 95% of the downstream traffic to Music websites were returning visitors (that had visited Google in the past 30 days).

Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30% of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace.

Last week, 15% of the clicks from the search term portfolio of Music that includes the names of over 900 band & artist names resulted in a visit to a Google property, especially YouTube, among the Top 10 websites to receive traffic.

Now we can just wait and see what Google Music will look like and what overall impact the service will have on the category.

Balloon boy floats into popular searches

2009-10-21T19:09:05Z

Americans are fascinated with the story of the ‘balloon boy’ as facts unfold in the highly unusual tale of a boy floating away in a mylar balloon - only to be discovered in the attic three days later. Searches jumped last week for ‘balloon boy’ related news, with ‘balloon boy’, ‘boy in the balloon’ and ‘balloon boy hoax’ leading the search term variations in terms of overall volume.

Among the search term variations for ‘balloon boy’, there were several mentions of the coverage from several television outlets, including the “Today Show’, ‘Good Morning America’. This could be a good opportunity to drive traffic to their websites although a big driver around many of the searches were due to the vomiting incidents that took place during the interviews.

Apparently vomiting may make good TV and online video viewing because many of the searches from ‘balloon boy’ were going to YouTube last week. The top recipient from searches was Google News followed by CNN.com and Yahoo! News. All of the traffic to the top 10 websites was purely organic, so there could be some opportunities to steal visitors via paid search if the fascination with the balloon boy continues.

Canadian Banks, Internet Search Data and Brand Strength

2009-10-15T15:41:05Z

Internet search data is an excellent source of insight into what consumers associate with a brand as well as the "top of mindedness" of any particular brand. I did some analysis of the top search terms sending visits to Canadian banks to see how Canadians search for their banks.

The top search term sending Canadian traffic to Banks and Financial Institutions in the 12 weeks rolling to October 3, 2009 was "td canada trust" accounting for 5% of clicks to this industry. A close second, searches for "rbc online banking" accounted for 4.85% of clicks.

But while TD may take the top spot in individual search terms, when I aggregated searches relating to TD Canada Trust, Royal Bank and the other big banks, I found that RBC is actually the most searched for Canadian bank, capturing 26% of branded searches among the top 300 terms sending clicks to Banks and Financial Institutions websites. TD was second capturing 20%. The following pie chart shows the breakdown for the Big 5 plus Desjardins.

All but 10 of the top 300 search terms sending visits to Banks and Financial Institutions websites were branded terms. Most generic search terms related to the Canadian dollar exchange rate and they accounted for less than 1% of clicks.

Also interesting, Capital One's URL, GetMyCard.ca was the #171 search term sending visits to Banks and Financial Institutions. The analyst team at Hitwise has done a bit of work in the past to help brand marketers use internet usage data as a measure of the effectiveness of offline advertising. This is a nice example of how awareness of a particular URL promoted in offline advertising can be measured over time and against peers.

Stay tuned for a follow up post on brand association for Canadian banks as measured by Internet search data.

TD Canada Trust Facebook

2009-10-14T14:36:14Z

As the most trafficked site in Canada, Facebook is inevitably going to appear in the clickstream reports of just about every site in Canada. However, the social network is more prominent than you might expect in clickstream reports for TD Canada Trust. TD Canada Trust had for the past couple of years built up a strong presence on the social network, and the question among many Canadian banks and online marketers is whether the effort has been worth while.

TD Canada Trust's most popular Facebook Group is Money Lounge. It was set up to provide budgeting tools and strategies for students and has amassed an impressive 19,000+ fans through contests and promotions.

Hitwise data reveal that TD Canada Trust is getting more traffic from Facebook than the other banks. Last week, the TD Canada Trust Online Banking website was the #24 downstream website from Facebook and TD Canada Trust was #26. The TD Canada Trust websites were the top commercial websites downstream from Facebook last week. Royal Bank of Canada followed at #29 and eBay Canada at #33.

Facebook is an important source of traffic to TD Canada Trust. It was the #3 source of traffic to the site last week, accounting for 6.66% of visits. Facebook accounted for more than twice the share of upstream visits to TD Canada Trust than Bing and Yahoo! Search Canada combined.

Hat tip to Shane Mullane of Hitwise for the idea for this post.

Stay tuned for more posts to come on the banking category. The next one in the hopper is on the brand strength of Canadian banks online.

Google Street View Launches in Canada

2009-10-14T14:06:55Z

Google launched Street View to 10 Canadian cities last week. Our Canadian fast moving search terms report was filled with references to Street View. The #1 fast moving search term last week was "google street view" and 4 of the top 10 fast moving search terms related to the launch.

The launch pushed up the share of Canadian internet visits to Google Maps Canada by 36% to capture 51% of Canadian internet visits among Maps websites last week. The following table shows the top 10 Maps websites in the week to 10/10/2009 based on share of Canadian internet visits.

Google launched Street View in 10 cities but Hitwise search data reveals that while demand for Street View was high for Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver some cities did not even appear among the top 100 search terms that included the words "google street view" last week, including Squamish, Whistler, Kitchener and Waterloo. However, if Google were looking for which cities to hit next, there seems to be a lot of interest in Hamilton and Sudbury.

Tylenol Recall - Parents Using Yahoo! Search?

2009-09-29T14:10:22Z

Last week's recall by Johnson & Johnson of some of its liquid Tylenol, in particular some Children's Tylenol, products has caused a stir among parents. I was not alone in searching for details of the recall online before I dashed to our medicine cabinet to see if we had any of the recalled products. It was just over two months ago that Johnson & Johnson suffered another blow to its valuable Tylenol brand, when an FDA report indicated it planned to put sweeping limits on acetaminophen (the generic name for Tylenol).

Hitwise search data reveals that searches for tylenol reached a four year high last week, far surpassing the July increase in response to the FDA report.

In doing research for this blog post, it quickly became obvious that there are some major differences in how consumers are searching for information on this recall on the different search engines. The following table shows the top 10 search terms entered into Google and Yahoo! Search last week that included the word "tylenol".

The search term "children's tylenol recall" experienced the highest volume of searches of any search term with the word "tylenol" last week. Experian Hitwise data indicate that 79% of searches for "children's tylenol recall" were performed on Yahoo! compared to 19% on Google.

As illustrated in the table above, the #1 search term that included the word "tylenol" last week on Google was "tylenol recall 2009", a term which only showed up at #9 among searches on Yahoo! Search. The #1 term on Yahoo! Search by contrast, "children's tylenol recall" only shows up at #5 on Google.com. This once again highlights that query content varies dramatically by search engine (note, we posted on how qeury content varies by engine for travel queries a few weeks ago). It serves as an important reminder that search campaigns can't just be copied from one search network to another.

Getting back to the title of this blog post, there are many possible reasons for the differences in queries across search engines. One is demographics. Perhaps parents of young children are more active users of Yahoo! Search. Another possibility is the list of suggestions the search engines offer when you search. This reminds us yet again that search campaigns need to be created and implemented individually for each major search engine.

Twittered Out?

2009-09-25T16:42:35Z

On the heels of yesterday's rumor that Twitter is close to securing an additional $100 million in financing, which would place the company's valuation in the $1 billion range, I decided to take a quick look at Twitter's market share of visits to see if the hype is matched by site traffic.

It should be noted that the above chart indicates visits to Twitter's website, and does not include application and mobile traffic. That being said, even without application and mobile data, visits to the main Twitter domain should have some correlation to new user adoption.

Another angle on measuring new user adoption is to track the volume of searches on "Twitter." As we can see in both visits and searches, Twitter appears to have hit a resistance point as of April 2009.

To explore the hypothesis that slowing and now decreasing market share of visits may be attributable to the drop in new users, we can turn to our Experian Hitwise Clickstream report that shows new versus returning users from the top Twitter traffic sources. Here's a table for those traffic sources in April 2009:

You can see the drop-off in new users if we examine the same report as of last week:

Temporary set-back or user-saturation, what are your thoughts?

Canadian Banks - Who Are They Competing With Online

2009-09-23T14:48:22Z

Who else do your customers bank with and to whom do they compare your offers? Hitwise clickstream data can provide useful insight into a competitive set by looking at where customers go after leaving your site. Last week, nearly half (47%) of visits to Banks and Financial Institutions websites came from other Banks and Financial Institutions websites and 58% went to other sites in the same category. These figures may seem staggering but keep in mind, part of this is traffic moving among websites of the same brand (i.e. the main home page, banking and brokerage). However, much of that is also traffic coming from and going to competitive sites.

The amount of traffic going to and from competing sites varies dramatically from bank to bank. For example, most of BMO Financial Group Online Banking's traffic goes to other BMO sites with 50% going to www.bmo.com last week. By comparison, CIBC Online Banking sends a much larger proportion of its traffic to non-CIBC websites, with only 3.7% going to CIBC Online Brokerage closely followed by TD Canada Trust Online Banking at 3.38% and RBC Online Bank at 2.6%.

I created a table of the top 10 downstream competitors from the big five banks. I used the online banking websites of the big five (online banking gets the most traffic). The downstream brands are listed, rather than individual URLs so that you can see the top 10 competing brands. In most cases, there were multiple websites for each brand (such as TD Canada Trust Online Banking and TD Waterhouse).

It is perhaps unsurprising to see TD Canada Trust at the top of the list across the board. I found it interesting that some regional differences seem to persist. In particular, notice Desjardins among the downstream brands from BMO and RBC. Other differences may be regional or may be a product of other demographic characteristics with for example, VanCity only showing up in CIBC's clickstream and HSBC only showing up in RBC's clickstream. It is also interesting that ING Direct Canada ranks ahead of BMO in downstream visits from RBC.

Who are your customers comparing your offers to? Which competitor sites are sending you the most traffic? Clickstream data can help firms better understand their competitor set.

We plan to post next week on TD Canada Trust's promotion with Facebook. Stay tuned...

Update - the post on TD Canada Trust and Facebook is now live.

Free Shipping - Vendor and Consumer Perspectives

2009-09-15T22:37:09Z

Our sister company Experian CheetahMail released an insightful white paper on the topic of free shipping email offers (download the paper here). Among several interesting findings, the paper provides some seasonality data on the percentage of clients that sent free shipping offers by quarter. "As expected, the sharpest increase occurred at the end of the year for the holiday shopping season." The paper also notes that free shipping offers were at equal to higher levels when comparing Q1 2008 to Q1 2009.

Leveraging Experian Hitwise data, we can visualize free shipping demand using search terms as a proxy for interest.

A couple of interesting observations:

- "Free shipping" search breadth has been accelerating earlier each year, with 2008 holiday season searches beginning in mid-October (in 2007 "free shipping" searches began ramping early November)

- The actual peak for "free shipping" searches each year is the first week of the New Year, as online buyers look for post-holiday sale items

- "Free shipping" searches have increased 75% comparing the first week of 2008 versus 2009, which given CheetahMail's data might indicate a gap between vendor offers and consumer interest.

By utilizing our Search Intelligence tools, we can also see that during the height of "free shipping" searches, the most common search phrases contain a brand name + "free shipping" as well as the word "code" or "codes".

Experian Hitwise

2009-09-10T14:52:22Z

You may notice a new identity to Hitwise today that reflects the integration of our brand with that of our parent, Experian. While the look and feel of our brand may change – the values, commitment and quality that have made Hitwise a market leader will not.

Learn More.

Facebook pushed past MySpace with Connect

2009-09-09T17:36:05Z

Social networking has continued to be one of the most activities online with online users, second only to search (and likely to surpass soon). The Social Networking category has experienced a resurgence of growth as websites like Facebook and Twitter have increased in popularity. Visits to a custom category of 155 Social Networking websites increased 53% during the week ending Sept 5, 2009 when compared to the same week the previous year. During the past 5 weeks, visits to the category reached the highest levels of the past three years. The previous peak occurred during the week ending June 23, 2007 when visits to MySpace reached their highest point.

Two major players continue to dominate the Social Networking custom category, Facebook and MySpace. During the week ending May 30, 2009, Facebook displaced MySpace as the top social network ranked by visits and has since also become the second ranked website overall behind Google. For the week ending September 5, 2009, Facebook captured nearly 58% of visits in the Social Networking custom category, followed by MySpace with 31%.

There are several drivers that have helped the growth of Facebook – such as a cleaner layout and mobile applications on the iPhone and BlackBerry to access Facebook anywhere. Another is certainly the Facebook Connect program, which allows users to share stories in their news feed and make comments on websites and blogs. The program launched in beta during July of last year, then officially launched to developers in early December. The number of websites participating in Facebook Connect has grown quickly to over 15,000 websites (globally) including CNN.com, NBC.com, ABCNews.com, Hulu, WashingtonPost.com, The Huffington Post, and others. And what is really interesting is to look at the year-over-year growth in the market share of visits to Facebook because there is a clear uptick in the growth rate following the launch of Facebook Connect.

A clear benefit of Facebook Connect is the ability of the user to use a single portable identity – and most importantly, one password, rather than logging into multiple accounts across the network of websites. Facebook’s recent purchase of FriendFeed will also help to aggregate this single portable identity across the Internet. Participation from websites in Facebook Connect also has strong implications to appear more often in the search results executed on Facebook resulting from member postings as search becomes a more prevalent activity within this large audience.

For more about the social networking landscape, watch the archive of our webinar, 'As the World Tweets: Trends in the Social Media Landscape.'

Flyers the Coupons of Canada?

2009-09-09T13:55:49Z

In looking through Search Term Variation reports on Hitwise for some top Canadian retailers, I kept noticing the word "flyer" included with the brands' names. For example, a Search Term Variations report for "loblaws" puts "loblaws flyer" at #3 behind "loblaws" and "loblaws superstore" in the twelve weeks to September 5, 2009. Similarly, "canadian tire flyer" ranks at #6 among searches with "canadian tire" and "walmart flyer" ranks #5 for searches with "walmart".

The French language equivalent "circulaire" also showed up prominently in the Search Term Variations reports and in all the examples I looked at was the first specifically French language query.

The word "coupon" was noticeably less prominent than in similar reports using US data.

In the twelve weeks to September 5, 2009 Hitwise captured 505 unique search terms that included the word "flyer" in Canada. By contrast we captured 317 search terms that included the word "coupon" in Canada. In the same period in the US, we captured more than 10x as many search terms with the word "coupon" than "flyer".

Flyers aren't the same as coupons but their intent is similar. Retailers use them to promote special offers and consumers use them to look for cash savings.

This example highlights how important flyers are for Canadian promotional efforts. Search data can be a goldmine for foreign brands looking to enter a new market to understand the language consumers use and their priorities. It can also be a goldmine for domestic brands looking for ideas on how to reach consumers in this weak economy.

Below is a list of the top 10 search terms that included the word "flyer" in Canada in the past twelve weeks.