Hitwise Intelligence - North America

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.

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".

Resurgence of layaway programs continues

2009-08-20T20:33:23Z

With many consumers remaining cautious with spending, retailers are turning to layaway programs again this holiday season to offer shoppers a payment plan to buy gifts. In 2008, layaway programs made a comeback as retailers hoped to encourage shoppers to spend during the recession. Searches for the term ‘layaway’ jumped as consumer awareness increased about the offerings. The layaway programs were effective to drive early purchases with the peaks for search term variations that included ‘layaway’ taking place last year during the 5 weeks leading up to Thanksgiving. Kmart.com and Sears.com both launched holiday pages featuring layaway payment options on their websites in July to start capturing spending.

The top twenty variations of ‘layaway’ for the 4 weeks ending August 15, 2009 include both Sears and Kmart in the search queries as well as Wal-Mart, TJ Maxx and Meijer. Other popular search queries are by consumers who are looking for which stores offer layaway – a good opportunity for retailers to reach potential shoppers. When comparing variations of search queries that include ‘layway’ for the last twelve weeks to the previous holiday season, we’re already seeing increased share for search terms like ‘layaway online’, ‘layaway electronics’ and ‘stores that do layaway’.

Bing Shopping takes off

2009-08-14T16:37:34Z

Microsoft recently announced a promotion to receive Double Cashback when consumers use Bing Shopping for searches and online purchases. Back in October of last year, I wrote about the initial success of the Cashback program to capture visits, so this particular promotion (especially as consumers continue to curb spending) made me curious as to how Bing Shopping has performed since launch.

Within a custom category of 12 Comparison Shopping Tools, visits to Bing Shopping increased 169% when comparing the week ending June 6th to the week ending August 8th. Bing Shopping entered the category with an 8th place ranking and 4% of the visits within the category, jumping to 4th place and capturing nearly 11% of visits last week. As a result, there was a decline in visits to many of the comparison shopping tools.

Nearly 30% of the traffic to Bing Shopping was referred from Bing (18.32%) and MSN (11.34%) last week. Of the visitors to Bing Shopping referred from Bing, 66.81% were new visitors to the website (have not visited in the past 30 days) and 49.88% from MSN were new. Additionally, 5.86% of visitors were from Google (75.01% new) and another 3.54% were from Yahoo! Search (68.41% new).

Amazon.com, eBay, and Buy.com were the most visited retailers following a visit to Bing Shopping. Among all of the retailers, Bing Shopping is sending a significant share of new visitors to the websites, highlighting good customer acquisition opportunities for back to school shopping and the upcoming holiday season.

Yes, this includes all referrals - paid, organic, and direct. Last week, 31.60% of the visits to Bing Shopping were referred from search engine and 52.50% of the search traffic was from paid listings.

Amazon acquires Zappos.com

2009-07-22T23:51:07Z

Amazon announced a deal today to acquire apparel and footwear retailer Zappos.com. The popular online retailer ranked 3rd last week among online retailers within the Apparel and Accessories category behind Victoria’s Secret and Old Navy. Both Amazon and Zappos.com are well-known for the breadth of product offerings, so it is not surprising that they share much of their audiences. For example, last week, Zappos.com was the top visited Apparel & Accessories website following a visit to Amazon and of those visitors, 79% had visited Amazon within the past 30 days. The chart below is filtered to include only websites from the Apparel & Accessories category.

Amazon delivered more traffic to Zappos.com than one of its own properties, Endless.com, which also sells footwear & accessories (with very little tying it to Amazon until an actual purchase), which has been the case for the majority of weeks over the past year.

The shared traffic combined with the size and reach of both websites also results in a similar audience composition, particularly by age and household income. The chart below displays the top 5 retailers, filtered to include only the Apparel & Accessories category, ranked by the similarity of their demographic profiles to Amazon. The closer the score is to 1, the more alike the demo profile.

Age is a good example where the audiences are very similar, but subtle differences do exist. Amazon attracted a higher share of visitors between the ages of 18 and 34 than Zappos.com over the past 4 weeks. Conversely, visitors to Zappos.com were slightly older, so there could be growth opportunities for both of the websites.

For now, it looks like business as usual for Zappos.com, so customers may not even realize that ownership has changed hands.

Online Sample Sales

2009-06-12T21:43:25Z

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

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

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

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

Michelle Obama’s Impact on Fashion

2009-05-07T18:04:15Z

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

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

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

Last Minute Mother’s Day Planning

2009-04-30T20:06:24Z

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

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

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

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

Who Benefits from Circuit City Closure Online

2009-04-09T22:40:40Z

Back in January, Circuit City announced ceasing all operations, so we thought it would be interesting to analyze which retailers have benefited from their exit in the market. The brand Circuit City is very well known and drove a significant share of searches from consumers using the name to navigate. As a result of the website and store closings, the share of visits that are going to the Circuit City website that included a search term from a portfolio of Circuit City’s branded terms have declined from 87% during the week of Christmas to 68% for the week ending April 4, 2009. Among Circuit City’s former competitors in the electronics arena, the main beneficiaries of the Circuit City searches are Radioshack.com and Bestbuy.com.

Both of the retailers are receiving the search traffic from the portfolio of branded terms in opposite ways. For Radioshack.com, 100% of the traffic from the Circuit City Terms was from paid search over the 4 weeks ending April 4, 2009. With Bestbuy.com, all of the search traffic was driven by organic search results during the same timeframe.

While Circuitcity.com continues to receive visits as the results of searches and other sources, the only content on the website is the message about the store closings. Once they reach that message, visitors often move on to other retailers to look for products. Here there are also two retailers who are the main beneficiaries of the traffic from Circuitcity.com, Bestbuy.com and Walmart.com. During the week of April 4, 2009, Bestbuy.com captured 20% of the downstream traffic from CircuitCity.com and Walmart.com followed with close to 10%. Kmart.com and Sears.com each captured 4% and 2%, respectively.

Retail traffic still down

2009-02-26T23:03:02Z

Not much good news is comes out of the retail industry lately, consumer confidence is at an all-time low and retailers have reported steep declines in revenue. The economic downturn also continues to impact overall visits to online retailers, which was down 7% for the week ending Feb. 21, 2009 as compared to the previous year.

Visits have also declined across the majority of product categories, as depicted below. The map shows the different types of product categories tracked in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds parent category, the size of the box represents the market share of visits for the week ending Feb. 21, 2009 and the color represents the year-over-year change. The categories in blue experienced an increase in visits over the same week last year – Grocery & Alcohol and Department Stores. The grocery category has attracted more visitors in recent months as while consumers look for weekly specials, recipes and coupons as they opt to eat at home more often to save money. The categories in red, Computers and Music, experienced the largest year-over-year declines at 23% and 22% of visits, respectively.

To help confirm the theory about consumers visiting Grocery websites to help save money, I compared the household incomes of visits for the current period to one year ago. Here we can see that the share of visits to the Grocery & Alcohol category shows an increase in traffic from the less affluent. For the 4 weeks ending Feb 21, 2009, the share of visits from those earning less than $100k reached 81% of the visits to the category as compared to 72% one year ago. Not surprisingly, the biggest decrease came from the segment making over $150k, who may be cutting back on services like online grocery orders and delivery.

If you are interested in more retail trends, please register to receive a copy of our newly published ‘Holiday 2008 Retail Recap’ report.

Guest Post - Opportunities with Coupon Promotional Terms

2009-02-17T15:32:48Z

At Hitwise our clients are always discovering new trends within our data and then applying them to their own businesses. From those findings we frequently get asked by clients to let them post their findings to our research blog to share actionable findings from their discoveries. Today, I am happy to introduce guest blogger, James Bake, Hitwise user and Internet Marketing Professional. He talks about taking advantage of coupon and promotional opportunities through partnerships online. You can also read more from James on his blog about Search Engine Marketing.

Coupons and promotions are an essential part of the shopping experience, and promotional search terms are popular on almost all referring search term reports. Like many online shoppers, I have learned that promotional codes can be found all over the web. As a commerce site, there is an array of opportunities to employ the promotional frenzy to work for you.

Along with finding discounts online, I am also a fan of using analytics to prompt action. The Hitwise Clickstream reports can be used to locate upstream websites that are driving traffic to your website as well as those driving traffic to competitors. In this particular post, I encourage you to focus your attention on websites from the Rewards and Directory category, including coupon and rebate sites. The findings from this report can identify key partners to develop relationships and inform your competitive surroundings.

Next, use the Hitwise Search Intelligence tools to discover coupon search terms that visitors are using to find your competitor’s site, your top reward/coupon partner, and even your own site. Some examples of common terms include, ‘promotional code’, ‘coupon code’, ‘free shipping, ‘cash back’, and the list goes on.

As an example, here are the top results for searches that drive traffic to Michaels.com that include the term ‘coupon’, ‘discount’ and/or ‘code’:

I offer the following prescribed advice to maximize and strengthen your site’s marketing efforts with online partnerships:

Improve natural rankings on coupon terms using search engine optimization:
Create a landing page to house all your active partners with coupon offers. For this posting, we’ll call this the Promotions Page. This dedicated landing page is a way to promote exclusive partnerships by providing links to partners with valid promotional codes. Promotions do not always have to be deep discounts, but rather cash back rebates to schools and/or charities with the help of online partners, such as Upromise. This is a website dedicated to help online shoppers save for a college education by directing their spending to Upromise partners. This Promotions Page is also to trade exposure with those partners. For three months, you will feature these exclusive partners’ promotional offer on your landing page and for the same duration they will feature your product/service on their homepage; conceivably sending a featured email to their member base. Work with partners to provide back links to each other’s websites in efforts to boost your natural search rankings.

Promoting coupon terms using search engine marketing:
As part of your search engine marketing efforts, build out pay-per-click campaigns to include bidding on coupon terms and directing traffic to your Promotions Page. Shoppers are out searching on the web looking for your promotional codes. Why risk the chance of losing those shoppers to a competitor by having them hunt for a discount code or become disappointed in finding invalid/expired coupons? While maintaining your own Promotional Page, you have control over the offers your audience sees. Test this by conducting a search on your favorite search engine for ‘your company + coupon code.’ Most likely, dozens of coupon code sites appear in the results. By clicking on one of these coupon sites, you will find your promotional offer along with your competitors offer or worse you may just find your competitor’s offer.

Directing existing traffic using internal search engine:
For commerce sites with customizable internal search engines, I would recommend setting up coupon terms to be directed to your site’s Promotions Page. This way, if a visitor is on your website and searches for “coupon” within your internal search engine, they will be directed to your site’s Promotions Page. By using this strategy, visitors bypass going elsewhere to find coupon codes and potentially being snatched up by your competitors.

Building relationships with online partners that work with you and your site helps you maximize your marketing exposure, capture your target audience and convert them into customers on the spot. By analyzing the competitive intelligence data collected by Hitwise and gaining a deeper understanding of the audience at hand, you can be in a position to have an unparalleled competitive advantage when developing and executing your online marketing plan.

Snuggie slays the Slanket online

2009-01-28T22:57:32Z

An article about the success of the Snuggie in AdAge on Monday prompted me to compare the popularity of the two competing 'blankets with arms' - the Snuggie and the Slanket. I’m sure everyone has been plagued with the problem of cold arms when tasked with any type of activity while using a blanket, so these products were just in time for the holiday season to help chilly consumers. During holiday season, visits to getsnuggie.com were significantly higher than to theslanket.com, which may be tied to the Slanket's higher price point. Visits to the Snuggie's website peaked during the week before Christmas as shoppers placed gift orders and checked where to to buy the blankets in-stores.

Search volume was also significantly higher for the Snuggie and searches have remained stronger for a longer time frame. The share of searches for ‘snuggie’ were 3.7x greater than that of ‘slanket’ during the peak week of search activity before Christmas.

The popularity of the Snuggie has also extended over to YouTube, where the television commercials can be viewed online, as well as several videos that mock and parody the Snuggie as well. For the 4 weeks ending January 24, 2008, YouTube ranked third among websites that received traffic from the search term ‘snuggie’, behind the official website and Amazon.

Everyone seems to love or hate the Snuggie & Slanket, although perhaps the real barometer is on Facebook where the Snuggie has over 6,000 fans.

Circuit City to close all operations

2009-01-19T19:56:09Z

On Friday, Circuit City announced that the company is closing 567 stores and will be laying off more than 30,000 workers. During the holiday season, despite being one the top visited websites among the Retail 500 on Thanksgiving (#5), Black Friday (#7), and Cyber Monday (#9), there was a decline in the market share of visits from previous years. For the week of Thanksgiving, which is typically a peak traffic week, the market share of visits to CircuitCity.com had dropped 33% from the previous year within the Appliances & Electronics category.

The demographics for Circuitcity.com shifted from the previous Thanksgiving holiday as well. The biggest loss was affluent shoppers with an income over $150k where a share of 4% of total traffic represented by the group was lost and replaced by visitors with lower household incomes.

The consumer electronics space has always been a very competitive category, which is illustrated through the websites appearing in Circuitcity.com’s downstream, where 29% of visitors were cross-shopping or visiting another retail website. Not surprisingly, Bestbuy.com received the highest share of traffic in December followed by Walmart.com, Target.com, and Amazon.com. Each of these retailers along with several others in the electronics category are likely to benefit from Circuit City’s demise.

Holiday Search Referral Growth

2009-01-16T21:56:19Z

Search engines accounted for the largest share of upstream traffic to the Retail 500 ahead of cross-shopping on other retail websites and email during the holiday months of November and December. An integral part of every retailer’s marketing strategy; the share of visits being referred by the combination of paid and organic search has grown over the past two seasons. In December 2008, search represented 30% of the upstream traffic to the Retail 500, an increase of 6% from the previous year.

It is no secret that Google captured a greater share search market during 2008, representing 66% of all searches in January 2008, growing to 72% of all searches by December. The growth is also similar to the share of Google-referred traffic within the retail category, where retailers received a higher share of referrals from Google during the holidays. The share of upstream traffic in January from Google represented 64% of the search-referred traffic to the Retail 500, increasing to 72% in December. Over the past two holiday seasons, referrals from Google have increased, growing 12% in 2007 and 23% in 2008 over previous years in November. In December, Google-referrals increased 13% in 2007 and 18% in 2008 over previous years.

The Season of Online Coupons

2009-01-16T00:40:20Z

We all knew heading into the holiday season that consumers were going to be highly sensitive to price due to the economic conditions, paving the way for an increase in online deal seeking. Coupon websites experienced growth in visits throughout the holiday season as shoppers searched for promotional codes to use online and printable coupons for offline purchases. The weekly market share of visits to coupon websites increased 15% from the previous year during the week of Thanksgiving & Black Friday and also increased 16% during the week of Cyber Monday. Overall, visits to the custom category of 70 websites increased 17% and 12%, in November and December, respectively, as compared to the previous year.

Coupon website referred traffic to retailers relies upon the availability of promotional codes and coupons for a given retailer. The availability of coupons and desired savings can certainly help to finalize and capture the transaction, making participation with coupon websites beneficial to the majority of retailers - particularly as many offer discounts & promotions during the holiday season and consumers inevitably share them anyway. In December 2008, the most commonly visited product categories following a visit to a website within the coupon category were department stores, computers, and appliances & electronics.

One interesting point is that many shoppers are looking for coupons from a specific retailer or brand, suggesting that many coupon searchers may be further along in the purchasing funnel and are close to making the purchase - but may need some type of final incentive. For the week ending December 27, 2008, 69% of the searches for the top 300 search terms that include ‘coupons’ also included a specific brand such as Pizza Hut, JCPenney, or Target. The other 31% of searches to include the term ‘coupons’ were generic in nature, seeking out grocery coupons, online coupons, and free printable coupons.

Gift Cards - Rumored Death Greatly Exaggerated

2008-12-23T18:21:41Z

Despite survey results to the contrary and concerns of their viability in times of economic uncertainty, Internet searches for gift cards continue to surge this holiday season . If we look at the following chart of search term volume on "gift cards" we see that while we are experiencing a slight decrease over the previous year (this week's data, update expected Monday, will provide insight into the anticipated peek for searches), searches are far from the 51% decrease reported by shoppers in the above survey.

Since our search behavior shows increased numbers of words per query (as we become more sophisticated in our queries) we should also examine the breadth of our "gift card" searches.

Breadth has increased over the previous holiday season, with top gift card searches including; Visa, American Express, iTunes and WalMart. Analysis of the full list of "gift card" variations reveals that discount stores are the clear winners this year, but here's the surprise, when we compare the top gift card searches this year compared to last year, the second hand market via Craigslist appears to be flourishing.

A quick search for "gift cards" on Craigslist in various markets reveals several listings with sellers discounting cards as much as 20% off their face value.

Hot Products - Toys and Electronics Categories

2008-12-19T22:55:43Z

The short holiday season is rapidly coming to an end, but shoppers have not given up on looking for the hot products online. The Wii Fit continues to dominate the fast moving search terms list, when comparing the top searches to the Appliances & Electronics and Toys & Hobbies categories for last week with the previous year. The short supply has even spawned a website called Buy Wii Fit to aggregate the retailers where the game is available, in the same spirit of the Wii Tracker and TMX Elmo Tracker started in past holiday seasons to refer shoppers to retailers that had received a supply of the hot toys.

Naturally, there are new gadgets released every year like the Blackberry Storm that become popular. However, searches for several products like the iPod Touch and GPS units remain strong and have increased from the same timeframe last year. Cell phone accessories are also popular, suggesting some consumers may be opting not to replace their cell phones with new models, instead replacing things like cases and headsets to extend the life.

Bakugan was on top of the fast moving search terms for toys and also ranked #14 among all search terms driving traffic to the Toys & Hobbies category for the 4 weeks ending Dec. 13, 2008.

Bakugan has become so popular this holiday season that the searches even ranked above established holiday favorites Barbie and American Girl.

Bakugan is a huge hit, but Lego was the top product brand driving traffic to the websites for the Toys & Hobbies category - maybe people are picking some up to join in on the Lego album cover making fun!

Free shipping searches abound

2008-12-19T00:05:59Z

Yesterday I posted about the uptick in traffic and searches related to coupons during this holiday season, but I would be remiss not to give special attention to one of the most popular online promotions of all – free shipping. Why does free shipping outshine the majority of promotions offered each year by online retailers? This is mostly due to the fact that free shipping can eliminate the potential price difference between a purchase online and in-store. Avoiding potential ‘sticker shock’ during the final check-out can help all retailers stave off some shopping cart abandonment, especially for online-only players that do not offer a physical store location as an alternate point-of-purchase.

Consumers love free shipping and seek out the promotion if it isn’t already appearing in their inboxes from the retailers themselves. The share of variations for ‘free shipping’ during this holiday season has increased, with a higher number of search terms that include ‘free shipping’ in the query. The peak to date occurred during the week ending Dec. 6, 2008, which included Cyber Monday, where there were 954 variations, up 43% from the corresponding week last year. Last week there was an increase of 47% of queries to include ‘free shipping’ and an increase of 31% during the week of Thanksgiving from the previous year.

The top website to receive traffic from the search term ’free shipping’ is Freeshipping.org (smart name, search-referred traffic is 100% organic), an aggregator of free shipping deals from participating merchants. The website also happens to be sponsoring Free Shipping Day today as we get closer to the deadlines to get packages in time for gift giving next week, so if you don’t want to hit the stores, it might be a good time for some online shopping (after work of course).

Coupon traffic and searches continue to grow

2008-12-17T17:52:36Z

Amid the trying financial climate, consumers are still doing some holiday shopping, although in more moderation than last year. For the week ending Dec. 13, 2008, the market share of visits to the Retail 500 represented 4.28% of all internet visits, down 6% from the same week last year (week ending Dec. 15, 2007). The websites of the brick & mortar retailers were impacted the most again last week, with visits declining 8%, while visits to the web-only retail category were flat year-over-year. The real surprise is that the visits to comparison shopping tools have been down throughout the holiday season as compared to last year, a category that should be well-positioned to help shoppers save money. Instead, many are opting to seek out deals directly from the retailers on coupon websites, driving up the market share of visits 25% as compared to last year, while comparison shopping tools dropped 15% during the same time frame.

Consumers are increasingly aware of the coupon and promotion codes that are available online, causing searches for coupons to surge. Last week, searches for generic coupons (no inclusion of brand) jumped 172% from the same week last year and searches for retailer-specific coupons increased 34%. During the busy weeks of Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday, searches for retailer-specific reached their highest share of searches in the past 3 years. Another driver of growth is likely to be the disparaging news in the media about declines in retail sales and plenty of coverage about the need for heavy promotional activity to drive sales. Shoppers may be pulling back spending, but they still love a bargain.

The growth of the coupon websites is significant due to their role as an effective driver of traffic to online retailers. Last week, 24% of the traffic from the coupon websites visited the Retail 500 and 13% visited the Retail Chain 100 (a subset of the Retail 500 which includes the websites of brick & mortar retailers). Much of this traffic can be attributed to the fact that consumers have a few retailers in mind where they would like to make a purchase and then search to find any promotion codes that may be available.

Holiday comparison - Brick & mortar vs. online-only retailers

2008-12-13T00:22:34Z

One popular topic that comes up each year during the holiday season is comparing the amount of traffic to the websites of brick & mortar retailers to the online-only players. In order to perform the analysis, we created 2 custom categories of retail websites (excluding auctions, classifieds, video rentals, and membership clubs) of the top 100 ranked by market share. To date during this holiday season, the websites of the brick & mortar retailers are attracting a greater market share of visits than the top 100 Web-only retailers, which has historically been the case during the past 3 years.

While the brick & mortar retailers capture a larger share of visits, the Web-only retailers have experienced year-over-year increases in daily visits, particularly on Thanksgiving and Black Friday. In the weeks leading up to and following the Thanksgiving holiday, the web-only retailers had 15 days of YoY increases, while the brick & mortar players had only 2 out of the 20.

In order to understand who is driving the growth for the online-only retailers, I used our new Demographics & Lifestyle tool to compare the audiences between the two custom categories. Basic demographics illustrated no major differences between in gender, age, and household income. For a more detailed analysis, also done by my colleague Robin in the UK, I used the Experian Mosaic profiles of each of the custom categories to see if there are specific segments that prefer to visit online-only retailers over the websites of the brick & mortar retailers. The analysis is based upon the difference in the share of visits between the two categories for each segment, which is then ranked in ascending order. On the left side, we have the segments that tend to prefer the online-only retailers in orange. The right side then shows the segments that prefer the brick & mortar websites in the blue.

The Young Cosmopolitans segment emerged as the segment that most preferred the online-only retailers, which is not surprising considering they tend to be a more tech-forward, early adopter crowd online. This segment is described as heavy buyers of tech products that spend a lot of free time online, checking out social networking websites. Other segments that are popular for the web-only players, Stable Careers and Urban Commuter Families were also those likely to be more pressed for time from work obligations and seek the convenience of online shopping.

The top segment for the brick & mortar retail websites, Struggling City Centers, have a lower proclivity to online purchasing, so this group relies more on the websites to research future in-store purchases. Each of these segments, Family Convenience and Prime Middle America, purchase some categories online, so these highlight the multi-channel customers that are purchasing both online and off.

For additional descriptions of the Mosaic segments can be found here and more information about how the data is collected and used for segmentation here.

Layaway - Lexicon Changes with the Economy

2008-12-04T17:49:04Z

The term "layaway" seems so 1970's. Yet if you look at search terms sending traffic to the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category, you'll see this retro term resurfacing as consumers struggle to find ways of navigating purchases this holiday season.

Here's a chart of searches on "Layaway" over the last three years.

And who is getting traffic on the term? The top sites downstream from a "layaway" search include; elayaway.com, lay-away.com and Kmart.com. As we continue to experience tumultuous economic conditions, its important to remember, as search marketers, that offline conditions can and do influence our online search behaviors. Winners in this tighter market will be those that can adapt to these changes.

If you happen to be in Chicago (Forecast 6 degrees Fahrenheit so dress warm) on Tuesday for Search Engine Strategies, stop by my Keynote conversation with Kevin Ryan where we'll be discussing my new book Click and more insight into what our search behaviors reveal about economic sentiment.

Traffic to Web-only retailers increases on Thanksgiving and Black Friday

2008-12-02T00:51:21Z

The holiday shopping season is officially upon us and for some online retailers, prospects may be rosier than expected thanks to heavy promotional activity to encourage spending (and unfortunately also erode profit margins). On Thanksgiving, which has been the heaviest day of traffic to online retailers over the past 4 years, experienced an 11 percent decline in the market share of visits as compared to last year. The websites of brick & mortar retailers took a harder hit with a 16% decline as compared to last year, while traffic to web-only retailers was up 11%.

For Black Friday, traffic to the Retail 500 was down 5% year-over-year, with the brick & mortar players also down 10%. Web-only retailers also fared better with a 10% increase over last year, where Black Friday was the peak traffic day of the holiday season (followed by Cyber Monday, suggesting today may also prove fruitful).

We have watched traffic decline across the majority of product categories over the past 12 weeks with the exceptions of Classifieds, Grocery & Alcohol, and Health & Beauty. Last week traffic increased slightly for the Books and Sports & Fitness categories, while the traffic for holiday mainstays like Apparel was flat & Appliances & Electronics was still down.

Last year, we saw traffic to retail websites increase 22% on Cyber Monday, which was much larger than the 8% increase between the 2005 & 2006 holiday seasons. We may see a double-digit increase for some of the online-only retailers today, but that may not be the case across the board.

Retail traffic flat from 2007

2008-11-25T23:34:57Z

Thanksgiving is almost here, time for turkey, pumpkin pie – and online shopping. Each year Thanksgiving is the peak traffic day to the Retail 500, particularly among many of the brick & mortar players, who use the online channel to help inform shoppers about in-store (and online) Black Friday deals. Although bad news about holiday sales is piling up around us as we finally kick off the holiday shopping season, there is a positive sign. We continues to see growth in traffic to a custom category of Black Friday websites during the week ending Nov. 22, 2008, where the market share of visits grew 58% when compared to the week before Thanksgiving in 2007.

In addition to the growth in traffic to the Black Friday websites, the visits are also sending shoppers over to retailers' websites, so there is definite interest from consumers in terms of what Black Friday specials are going
to be out there. These visits will not necessarily always translate into sales, but in this current economic climate, any interest may be a positive sign towards future purchase intent. Last week Wal-Mart received the greatest share of referred traffic from the Black Friday websites, followed by Sears, and Circuit City.

Right now, for the retail category overall traffic is flat when the market share of visits for last week is compared to the week before Thanksgiving in 2007 (to adjust for the later holiday this year).

The daily market share of visits to the Retail 500 (adjusted to reflect the number of days leading up to Thanksgiving) has also remained relatively flat as we head into the holiday shopping season.

Flat traffic doesn't translate into the greatest news, but its more optimistic in this scary climate than sharp declines in traffic, right?

Black Friday countdown is on

2008-11-21T23:55:21Z

With one week left to go, Black Friday (aka the day after Thanksgiving) is almost upon us. Historically, Black Friday sales were typically called After-Thanksgiving sales, but thanks to a growing number of websites leaking retailer promotions, Black Friday has become part of the vernacular for consumers (rather than an industry term). Both searches around Black Friday and traffic to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites has been increasing over the past 6 weeks, but fewer publicized sales to date and a late Thanksgiving has the total market share of visits currently lower than the same timeframe last year.

The searches including ‘black friday’ in the query have increased in complexity and gotten longer over the past three years when comparing the breadth of search terms during the peak week, growing 54% year-over-year to reach 4,605 combinations during the spike for ‘black friday’ searches during the last holiday season. The number of websites receiving traffic from Black Friday searches increased to 416, up 16% in 2007 from 358 websites during the previous year.

One of the largest shifts in search behavior that was driving traffic to the Black Friday websites was the inclusion of a retailer’s name as shoppers sought out deals from specific retailers. During the peak week of Black Friday traffic in 2006, 40% of the searches included a retailer name, which increased to 51% during the same week in 2007.

For retailers who are deciding which Black Friday websites to work with, for the week ending 11/15/2008, BlackFriday.info and Black Friday Advertisements captured 65% of visits to the category. The top 5 websites represent 93% of the total visits to the category last week, providing an opportunity to work with a few of the websites but still capture the majority of the audience seeking out and comparing Black Friday deals.

Next week will be an interesting one to see if the shopping category starts getting more traffic as retailers ramp up promotional activity and consumers begin to react. With the Thanksgiving holiday falling late this year, we've been in somewhat of a holding pattern that is exacerbated by economic conditions as we wait to see if consumers are going to start shopping.

Traffic down to online retailers

2008-10-14T20:34:18Z

Last week, several retailers announced steep same-store sales (based upon physical stores open for at least a year) declines in September as compared to previous years. Additionally, other economic indicators such as the Deloitte Research’s Leading Index of Consumer Spending declined in September. At Hitwise, we have been tracking these various economic indicators very closely and are now seeing a similar trend in visitation to the websites of retailers, particularly during the past few weeks where the economy has become top-of-mind for the majority of Americans. Last week, traffic to a custom category of 500 retailers (excludes auctions, classifieds, DVD rentals, and book/music/DVD of the month clubs) declined 5% from the same week during the previous year.

Traffic to the category has been down each week as compared to last year for the past six weeks as financial concerns have risen significantly. These declines are the only drops in retail traffic that have occurred this year and reflect the reaction of consumers that have pulled back on spending in the current economic climate.

These declines have strong implications for the upcoming online holiday season as well as offline sales. Everyone is aware of the role that the Internet plays to influence offline sales through research, so this slowdown may indicate a further ripple effect in sales in retail locations.

Next up, we will look at which product categories are being hit the hardest over the past 6 weeks.

MSN Cashback successfully attracting visitors

2008-10-03T17:21:26Z

This week MSN announced the launch of SearchPerks!, a new promotion that rewards visitors that use Live Search with tickets redeemable for various prizes. The latest endeavor is separate from the Live Search Cashback rebate program launched a few months ago, but certainly uses a similar tactic (pay for search) to reach the same goal (drive search activity) on MSN’s search properties (including both MSN Search & Windows Live Search). So far the question has been are people using Cashback? Is it a successful promotion - particularly with the launch of another?

One of the most common metrics discussed is the overall share of searches for each of the major search engines, and there we have not seen significant growth. However, an important (and optimistic) note is that we also have not seen a loss or decline in the share of searches. Everyone is aware that the share of searches on Google has continued to increase, but over the past 3 months, the share of searches on MSN’s search properties has remained consistent.

In looking specifically at MSN Cashback, we see an interesting trend where the share of visits to the Cashback section of MSN Live is increasing. Eleven weeks ago, MSN Cashback represented 3.75% of the traffic to Live.com and grew to 6.29% last week. This rise in Cashback’s traffic underscores the interest in the program, which is likely to be getting a boost from shoppers looking to save money and stretch their budgets given the current economic climate.

Who is visiting MSN Cashback? For the 4 weeks ending Sept. 27, 2008, the visitors to MSN Cashback were skewed slightly more female and represented 55% of traffic. Nearly half of the visitors were between the ages of 25 to 44: 22% were aged 25 to 34 and 27% aged 35 to 44. The majority of the visitors have a HH income of under $100k.

MSN Cashback on its own ranked #12 within a category of the top 50 search engines for the week ending Sept. 27, 2008. Not bad for a shopping search/rebate program!

Online shopping traffic remains strong

2008-08-18T14:28:22Z

One sector that we continually monitor here at Hitwise for insight into consumer behavior is traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Given the current economic climate, price sensitivity is driving more visits to the websites of online retailers, coupons, and comparison shopping tools as shoppers increasingly research potential purchases online. Overall, the market share of visits increased 19% in July 2008 as compared to the previous year.

Consumers are turning to websites like Craigslist to sell items to augment their income and also seek save money by purchasing used goods, driving significant growth in the Classifieds category. The category of Classifieds websites experienced the highest traffic growth in July 2008, increasing 88% over the previous year. Grocery websites ranked 2nd in terms of year over year growth with a 40% increase, with much of the growth in this category can be attributed to shoppers collecting coupons and information on weekly specials. House & Garden followed with 30% growth with home owners avoiding the weakened real estate market and opting to turn to retailers like The Home Depot and Lowe's for DIY home improvement options instead of moving. The Rewards & Directories category, which includes comparison shopping tools (e.g. Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber.com) also received higher traffic in July as compared to the previous year.

Overall, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 25% of traffic referred from search. While the number may seem low, keep in mind that many of the product categories received a higher share of traffic from search while the Auctions & Classifieds are less reliant upon search (15% and 14%) but represent nearly 35% of the visits within the Shopping & Classifieds category.

Our current Search Intelligence offerings at Hitwise offer insights into the share of Paid & Organic search traffic for individual websites and in the coming weeks, we’ll be upgrading the tools to include even more detail into the search landscape. One new feature will be the ratio of Paid & Organic search traffic by industry. As an example, below is a paid search quadrant with the majority of the product categories tracked in the Shopping & Classifieds. Along the x-axis is the share of upstream traffic to the product category from search, the product categories that are on the right side of quadrant received the highest share of search referrals (both paid & organic combined). Among the product categories, House & Garden and Sport & Fitness received the most traffic from search, 38% and 35%, respectively. Along the y-axis is the share of paid search traffic, so the product categories in the top right corner are buying the highest share of search traffic. As an example, 40% of the search traffic to the Office Supplies was from paid search.

In addition to offering benchmarking data, these varying ratios can point to the reliance of a product category or industry in driving traffic through organic search results, highlighting the imperative for optimizing a web site vs. the faster testing grounds of paid search copy.

Summer of the FitFlop

2008-07-23T16:46:27Z

As an avid NYC walker I am fascinated by shoes that are designed to help you exercise – shoes that turn an ordinary walk into a ‘workout’. One of the first ones I learned about was the ‘MBT’ walking shoe, thanks to the Bliss catalog and now this summer the Fit Flop has become the latest craze. Recent reports cite that over a million pairs have been sold and traffic to the website has grown steadily for the summer season.

Increased searches for ‘fit flops’ and ‘fitflops’ also highlight the fact that consumers have become far more aware of the FitFlops this season and are seeking out information and where to purchase the shoes.

The most common destination from the searches is the official FitFlops website – which is informational only and refers visitors to online & offline retail outlets. Retail websites then followed as the next beneficiaries from the searches, most likely due to paid search campaigns. For Victoria’s Secret, ‘fit flops’ ranked 22nd among keywords driving traffic to the website for the 4 weeks ending July 12, 2008.

And for fun, here is more evidence of purchase intent for the FitFlops – the downstream traffic report for June from the FitFlop website is dominated by retail web sites where the shoes are sold with Macy’s, Bath & Body Works, and Victoria’s Secret receiving the highest volume of referrals.

The wisdom of crowds seems to be flip flop sales and possibly better toned legs!

Shopping traffic up – but is it the tax rebates?

2008-06-12T19:54:53Z

Today the US Commerce Department reported a gain in retail sales for May 2008, attributing the increase in consumer spending (at least partially) to the tax stimulus checks that were sent out during the month. We have also been theorizing quite a bit around what the impact of the rebate checks would be and if traffic to Shopping & Classifieds would increase as a result. It is very likely that some consumers did turn around and spend the rebate, but so far in 2008, visits to the category have been up every month, signaling that the shoppers have always been out there. In May 2008, the monthly market share of US visits for the Shopping & Classifieds category was 9.37%, an increase of 26% over May of last year. Some or all of this activity may be research, but consumers are still showing a lot of interest in shopping despite the current economic climate.

This isn’t to say that consumers are not price conscious – we just issued a press release yesterday discussing the rise in traffic to coupon websites, which have increased 56% for the week ending June 6, 2008, as compared to the same week last year. One interesting point is that consumers know what they are looking for when they seek out coupons online. Among the top 250 search terms driving traffic to the coupon websites for the 4 weeks ending June 6, 2008, 60% of the search queries include a specific retailer brand or branded product as opposed to only 20% of the search terms which were broad, generic terms like ‘grocery coupons or car rental coupons’.

Shoppers seem to be spending on home & self-improvement in May - the House & Garden and Health & Beauty categories were among the top growing product categories in May 2008 as compared to last year.

What do you think? Are people running out or logging on to spend their checks?

School's out! Social networks on the rise

2008-06-10T14:58:32Z

Today I am speaking at the Internet Retailer conference at a session called 'New Frontiers: Marketing and Merchandising on Social Media'. Since the discussion could never be complete without a look at the traffic on social networks, I checked to see how everyone's favorite category is doing (c'mon you love it or hate it). When traffic levels began to decline in January & February, many naysayers were the first to jump on the 'social networks are dying' bandwagon (or something like that). Good news for those who were not so quick to knock them - school is out for the summer & the traffic is on the rise.

The weekly market share of visits for a custom category of Social Networking websites reached 6.82% for the week ending June 6, 2008. This is still lower than the traffic peak in June of last year, but is the highest level since the Christmas holidays.

Since this is a retail conference & all, let's also see what the direct impact of social networks is on various product categories:

Overall, the share of upstream traffic coming from social networks to each of the product categories is small, but it does show that people are visiting retail websites afterwards. Its no surprise that online music & ticketing stores are the most frequently visited since entertainment is one of the most popular character traits & profile mentions on social networks. Apparel is also a great example as many people also view their personal style as an important component of their personalities - highlighting a great opportunity for the coming back to school selling season. It should also be noted that these categories tend to be more active with social networks in terms of applications and fan groups.

Is your category at the bottom? What can be done to change that???

The Gap brings all of their brands together online

2008-05-30T19:12:59Z

Earlier this week The Gap publically launched ‘universality’ across the websites of their four brands – linking them through navigation, a single shopping cart and shipping & fulfillment. Each of the brands certainly has a specific identity and target market, but the potential overlap for the shoppers is clear: the demographics of each website are very similar and tend to skew heavily towards females between the ages of 25 to 34. While the official announcement was made on Tuesday, May 27, we have already noticed some interesting trends where the websites have already had a positive impact upon one another.

Oldnavy.com attracts the largest audience out of the four brands, so it no surprise that their traffic can benefit the others. The impact is immediately noticeable on April 22, 2008; for example, when we look at the share of downstream traffic from Oldnavy.com. Before the integration, each received less than 10% of traffic from their sibling. However, afterwards, Gap.com received 30% of their traffic from Oldnavy.com and Bananarepublic.com followed with 17% and Piperlime.com with 13% on May 28, 2008. A similar pattern occurs for each of the websites, highlighting the advantages of leveraging the network of brands.

The Oldnavy.com referrals are also bringing in new visitors, or at least those that had not visited the websites in the past 30 days, offering possibilities to cross-sell across brands to drive additional sales. When the weeks prior to the website linkages are compared to current ones, you can see that there has been an increase in the share of new visitors coming from Oldnavy.com to each of the websites.

Overall, during the week ending April 26, 2008 when we see the traffic referrals increase, there was a lift in traffic for across each of the websites, particularly for Gap.com, Bananarepublic.com, and Piperlime.com (which have continued over the past few weeks).

I will be curious to see how this impacts traffic during the back-to-school and holiday seasons – and if any other retailers will follow suit and test out this strategy.

Price conscious consumers seeking deals online

2008-05-08T16:35:22Z

On Sunday I presented at the eMetrics Industry Insights Day on high-level Internet behavioral trends. One trend that I discussed is the rise of consumers using the Internet to save money (even more so than usual!) through searches for coupons, visitation of coupon websites, and usage of price-comparison tools.

The market share of visits for a custom category of 11 printable coupon websites is up 85% for the week ending May 3, 2008 as compared to the same week last year. While these websites represent a small percentage when compared to all Internet activities, they offer a good opportunity to influence offline sales for purchases – particularly for companies that sell consumer packaged goods. Visitors to the websites are also spending more time looking for coupons - the average visit time to the category was 6 minutes and 14 seconds (for the week ending May 3, 2008), up from 4 minutes and 29 seconds one year ago.

Searches for the generic term ‘coupons’ are up 45% for the week ending May 3, 2008, compared to the same timeframe in 2007. Not surprisingly, 45% of the searches for coupons referred the traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Among the top ten searches for ‘coupons’, the most popular words included in the queries were ‘grocery’, ‘printable’ and ‘free’ during the same timeframe. The top branded coupons being searched are Pizza Hut, Target, and Dell.

Comparison shopping engines also benefit from tightening budgets as consumers compare prices and availability. The market share of visits to the CSEs increased 75% for the week ending May 3, 2008 as compared to the same timeframe last year. Last month, April 2008, the top product categories to receive referrals from the CSEs were House & Garden, Apparel and Appliances & Electronics.

JCPenney’s American Living Launch

2008-03-05T21:38:34Z

During last week’s broadcast of the Oscar awards, JCPenney launched the new American Living line (through a partnership with Polo Ralph Lauren Corp.) of apparel & home products. American Living is the biggest merchandise launch in JCPenney’s history, so I thought I would have a look at the initial online results.

There was an immediate bump in traffic to the American Living website on the day following the airing of the commercials promoting the new brand. In addition to the media coverage around the launch, traffic from an email campaign also helped drive interest in the microsite. Forty percent of the upstream traffic to AmericanLiving.com was from Yahoo! Mail and 28 percent was from Windows Live Mail on Monday, Feb. 25th.

JCPenney.com experienced lifts in traffic in the days following the Oscars, but only the brand was promoted during the awards show, with no direct mention of the URL. These traffic lifts could in part be from the availability of the new American Living products; however the retailer regularly runs online sales that could also have an impact.

The American Living website is one page deep and acts essentially as an online placeholder for the brand. Following the initial airing of the commercials, the site was successfully driving traffic to JCPenney.com as visitors clicked through to see more information about the products. On Monday, Feb. 25th, American Living was the top referral source and responsible for 13.45% of the upstream traffic to JCPenney's website.

An interesting point to note about the traffic is that 41% of the visitors were new, or had not visited JCPenney.com in the past 30 days. The share of new and returning visitors can help JCPenney evaluate if the new brand is both appealing to the current customer base and attracting incremental new customers. The numbers were similar for the entire week (ending March 1, 2008), with the upstream traffic to JCPenney.com from American Living split with 42% new and 58% returning visitors.

Although the American Living website has not been around long, there is a significant difference in the audiences of the two websites. For American Living, the initial audience is skewing older than the typical JCPenney.com visitor – 55 percent of the traffic is aged 55 and over as compared to 25 percent for JCPenney.com during the same time period (4 weeks ending March 1, 2008). The differences may be attributable to JCPenney customers by-passing the American Living website altogether, seeking information directly on JCPenney.com.

Valentine’s Day planning challenges (and hope for procrastinators)

2008-02-14T22:20:23Z

The celebration of Valentine’s Day is an annual tradition that brings stars to the eyes of some and terror to the hearts of others. For those that love the holiday, planning for the big day presents a challenge for gift ideas, poems & quotes for cards, and of course necessitates a special layout for MySpace profiles.

Searches on ‘valentines day’ increased 65% for the week ending Feb. 8, 2008 over the previous week as excited cupids worked on their Valentine's Day preparations. Within the searches that included the phrase ‘valentines day’ last week, 12% out of the top 200 also included ‘gift’ and 8% included ‘idea’, providing many opportunities for retailers to offer suggestions. One particularly interesting trend that has continued from last year is that among those that were seeking help for gift ideas, many were specifically looking for gifts for men – 9% of the same top 200 ‘valentine’s day’ searches included a male reference like men, guys, or boyfriends. Women, however, may be considered far easier to buy for since female descriptors aren’t found until further past the top 200.

Many Valentine’s Day gifts allow for more procrastination – traffic to the eGreetings and Flowers & Gifts category begin to increase only a few days before the holiday due to quick delivery options. The market share of visits peaked on the actual holiday for both categories, especially eGreeetings, which increased 75% on Feb. 13th, 2007 from the previous day and built upon that growth, jumping another 87% on Feb 14th, 2007 compared to the 13th. The Flowers and Gifts category also increased 19% and 35% on Feb 13 & 14 of last year.

Another online procrastinator’s aid are restaurant reservation and information websites (good for early planners, too) to help make Valentine’s Day plans quickly. Opentable.com and Zagat.com also experience traffic increases closer to the actual day as people decide where to make dinner reservations. Last year, the market share of visits increased 18% for Opentable.com and 17% for Zagat.com on Feb. 13th, 2007 from the previous day.

Even though there are lots of planners out there, it looks like offering last minute gift options and quick delivery may be the way into the hearts of Valentine's Day gift buyers!

Ticketmaster makes its move to master online ticket reselling

2008-01-16T19:24:40Z

Ticketmaster has purchased secondary market ticket seller TicketsNow.com (WSJ cites price of $265 million) in an effort to capture (and share with partner venues, artists, etc.) more revenue from ticket reselling. This move will help Ticketmaster compete more directly with StubHub, which eBay purchased in January 2007. Each of the two combinations are compelling – the market leader for ticket sales moving more aggressively into ticket reselling (Ticketmaster also operates Ticketexchange, a smaller service in terms of market share, to resell tickets), going against the online market leader for reselling almost anything.

Until last week, StubHub has led TicketsNow in market share of visits since the week ending Aug. 11, 2007.

Interestingly, TicketsNow is already receiving traffic from the search term ‘ticketmaster’, which provided more traffic tthan ‘ticketsnow’, its own brand, for the 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008. The one benefit however, is that the traffic from ‘ticketsnow’ is partially driven by organic results (78%), while the traffic from ‘ticketmaster’ all originates from paid search. One immediate benefit – the acquisition will help keep all of the traffic under one owner.

Search Terms Driving Traffic to TicketsNow.com, 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008

Currently, the high demand for tickets to the Hannah Montana & Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Tour are driving searches to many of the ticket reseller websites. The event is driving the top search phrases for a specific event – ‘hannah montana’ and ‘hannah montana tickets’ for both StubHub and TicketsNow. For the 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008, TicketsNow benefited more than StubHub from the search phrase ‘hannah montana tickets’.

Search Terms - Websites that received traffic from – ‘hannah montana tickets’, 4 weeks ending Jan. 12, 2008

Woot - there it is!

2008-01-14T18:15:58Z

Rumors are circulating (again), that woot! has received an investment from Amazon. While this may just be speculation, it reminded me that several of my friends have been addicted to this website for some time. They diligently check woot! each day to see the daily deal – which they often debate, then purchase because they simply could not resist. Traffic to Woot.com is still small, but growing, the market share of visits increased 8% for the week ending Jan. 12, 2008 compared to the same week in 2007. Woot! does have some variability in the traffic patterns since the traffic is highly dependent upon the amount of interest in the specific product being offered for the day and the availability of the product.

The limited time-only offers have been successful in developing a loyal following for woot!, with 88% of its traffic consisting of returning visitors. The audience is heavily male, 65% of the traffic for the 4 week period ending 01/05/2008, mostly due to the types of products being offered – consumer electronics and computers.

Woot’s sources of traffic are diversified across a number of industries. Rather than relying on search to drive traffic, like many retailers, the site receives the greatest share of traffic from email, portal frontpages, and social networking sites. The loyal customer base helping to generate interest through word of mouth is probably a strong asset for woot!, based upon the amount of traffic coming from email and social networking sites.

An Amazon investment in woot! would make a lot of sense – the websites have partnered in the past to help source inventory for Amazon’s Gold Box promotions and woot's product lines are complimentary to Amazon's strengths in the consumer electronics & computer categories.

Shipping deadlines loom for holiday gifts

2007-12-20T23:45:22Z

With the majority of standard shipping deadlines upon us from online retailers, traffic has increased for the websites of major shipping providers. For these websites, avoiding a site failure should be easy thanks to the predictability of the peaks. Historically, there are 2 consecutive days that make up the peaks in traffic - the Tuesday and Wednesday before Dec. 25; in 2005 the peaks occurred on Dec. 20 & 21 and in 2006, Dec. 19 and Dec. 20. The same trend has continued for 2007 with the highest market share in visits to shipping sites occurring on Tues, Dec. 18 and Weds, Dec 19. The 1st peak day increased 12% from last year, and the 2nd peak increased 17%. The regularity of the peaks is interesting as many retailers have pushed back shipping deadlines to accommodate procrastinators, yet shoppers stick to the same calendar each year.

The majority of traffic being referred to the Shipping category* naturally originates from the retailers themselves either from their own sites or via email confirmations. The sources of the traffic highlight the importance of easy package tracking for customers because multiple sources (e.g. retailer’s sites, email, search) are being used to access information. Shoppers need simple processes to track packages to assuage fears of gifts not arriving on time as the holidays approach and retailers ultimately benefit from the customer service cost savings. Many online retailers have done a good job streamlining this process, however some time-consuming barriers still exist such as forcing an account log-in to access shipping info.

The chart below shows us the strength of the referral channels throughout the holiday season. For the week ending Dec. 15, 2007, the categories of Shopping and Classifieds and Email referred 27% and 26% of traffic, respectively. Search engines ranked third as a source for upstream traffic, sending 15% of traffic to the shipping sites.

The retailer emails alerting that a package has been sent is one of the most obvious triggers for a consumer to track the progress & estimated delivery dates for gifts. Yahoo! Mail And Windows Live Mail were the most popular email sites driving traffic, sending 15% and 8%, respectively.

In the spirit of the season, we'll need some sort of name for these days... suggestions are welcome!

*The custom Shipping category is made up of the websites for UPS, USPS, Fed-Ex, and DHL USA.

Social Shopping Still Small, but Usage Increasing

2007-12-19T17:36:00Z

The advent of consumer-generated content focused specifically on shopping has driven a significant amount of user reviews on a variety of blogs, retail sites, and comparison shopping engines. With the exception of some blogs, the majority of the reviewers lack a personality for the reader to identify with, and instead many sites rely upon the ability to rate how useful the reader found the review. For many categories, the reader review system can work well, particularly for commodity-type products that are easy to research and compare the overall experience (e.g. consumer electronics and computers). A new(ish) group of websites being dubbed 'Social Shopping' has emerged that center around the users creating customized wish lists to share with friends or people with similar tastes, rather than aggregating content around the product or retailer. Social shopping is a interesting concept, because the content is less about price comparison and instead centers around an individual's own taste and style.

The Social Shopping category is still small, receiving less than 1% of the total market share of US visits, but there has been significant growth. Traffic to the custom category of Social Shopping sites was up 447% for the week ending Dec. 15, 2007 over the previous year. Among the social shopping sites, the leader is currently Kaboodle, with a 68% market share of total US visits to the category and traffic has increased 210% over the same week last year.

Despite the small size of the audience, Social Shopping sites are worth exploring as an acquisition tool because of the qualified audience interacting with the sites. Social shopping sites should be of particular interest to department stores and specialty retailers selling within the apparel and house & garden categories, where the sites perform the strongest in delivering visitors due to their more fashion-oriented nature.

The social nature of these sites also lends a natural relationship with broader social networking sites. For example, Kaboodle, ThisNext, and StyleFeeder all offer applications to add to Facebook profiles, while Buzzillions and StyleHive each have discussion groups available on Facebook.

Viral Hit 'Elf Yourself' Leading Humor Website

2007-12-13T17:11:54Z

In case you were wondering what you would like as an elf, Office Max has brought back last year's popular microsite Elf Yourself. The website allows users to upload photos of up to 4 people to generate personalized, dancing elves and record a synchronized message through a special toll-free phone number (to create an elf-like voice). Elf Yourself has become the top-ranked site in the Humor category, holding the position for the last 3 weeks. Traffic has increased 89% for the week ending Dec. 8, 2007 from the prior week.

The site's popularity is being driven by viral activity from the users as they share their elves with friends & family via email - 62% of traffic to Elf Yourself for the week ending Dec. 8 came from the Email Services category. Yahoo Mail was the leading email service to drive traffic to the site at 35%, followed by Windows Live Mail at 19%. The majority of visitors to the site were aged 55 and over, which suggests that this demographic could be ripe for viral marketing programs - assuming they engage the audience.

Although Elf Yourself tends to attract an older user, Social Networking sites (which continue to skew towards a younger audience, only 11% of visitors are 55 and over) were also a popular source of traffic. MySpace and Facebook provided 5% and 2% of visitors, respectively, as users send their elves out into their network of friends.

If you aren't feeling the holiday spirit this year (or have a fear of elves), there is also Scrooge Yourself, Elf Yourself's less cheery cousin.

Alternative Online Payment Growing In Popularity

2007-12-12T18:10:40Z

Traffic to the Alternative Payments Category is up 17% for the week ending Dec. 8, 2007 over same week during the previous year. The main driver of this growth was from the increase in traffic to Bill Me Later, which is up 271% from last year. The service is growing in popularity through 'buy now, pay later' and '90 days same as cash' options as opposed to storing payment information. Despite discounts and promotions to encourage usage among the two other major players in the category, PayPal and Google Checkout each experienced declines in traffic of 1% and 34% respectively from the same time last year.

There are two key factors for success within the Alternative Payments Category - availability on retailer's web sites followed by consumer adoption. For Bill Me Later, being a payment option on large retail sites such as Walmart.com and Overstock.com has been a major source of traffic. For the week ending Dec. 9, 2007, 12% of the upstream traffic to Bill Me Later was from Walmart.com and 8% was from Overstock.com. Both of the sites are successful customer acquisition channels, the majority of visitors are new - 84% for each site - and have not visited Bill Me Later in the past 30 days.

Once shoppers have been approved for the Bill Me Later service, they are checking out where else they can spend their new line of credit and various promotions on shopping.billmelater.com (a listing of merchants that offer the service). 15% of visitors to Bill Me Later visited the merchant listings following a visit and traffic to the site has been growing steadily since the week of Oct. 6, 2007.

Yesterday, Amazon announced that they would begin to offer Bill Me Later as a payment option. This partnership will certainly help drive usage of the service with Amazon's broad reach in the online retail market. Additionally, Amazon will also invest an undisclosed sum in the company.

Nintendo Wii Hunt is on - Comparison Shopping Traffic off to Early Start

2007-12-06T04:45:36Z

On Tuesday, Dec. 4, I presented at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago on a panel titled "Shopping Search Tactics". I have included a high level summary of some of the key points from the presentation with some exclusive new analysis.

This year the holiday season started well ahead of the traditional trend for the comparison shopping engines.

For the week ending Dec 1, 2007, traffic to a custom category of the top comparison shopping engines was up 44 percent compared to the same week from the previous year. Traffic to the category has grown steadily since May of this year on October 13, 2007, surpassed the peak traffic levels of the previous holiday season. More growth is expected as we head into what has traditionally been the peak traffic weeks for the comparison shopping engines.

Comparison shopping brands & generic products are most common search terms.

The top search terms by volume driving traffic to the comparison shopping engines (4 weeks ending Dec. 1, 2007) were dominated by comparison shopping eninge brands Shopzilla, Pricegrabber, and Nextag, suggesting brand awareness among consumers and possibly some repeat usage based upon a successful previous visit, recommendation from friends, or marketing campaigns. On average, 23 percent of the visitors to the category have visited in the previous 30 days. For product searches, the Nintendo Wii game console was the only branded product in the top 15 search terms.

Fast Moving Search Terms

Hitwise is now providing fast moving search terms, allowing online marketers to identify the quickest rising search terms within our database. This data is available for search terms by over 170 different industry categories.

The search terms that experienced the highest relative week-over-week growth for the custom comparison shopping category for last week (week ending on Dec. 1) versus the previous week, included a new term 'black monday' indicating that some consumers are combining the terms Black Friday with the new Cyber Monday term.

The hot products for last week were the rc 1776 (a Norelco razor), the kdl-40v3000 (a Sony LCD HDTV), and playstation 3. The ps3 may be experiencing a boost from the very limited supply of Nintendo Wii consoles as we approach the holidays.

Retail 100 Index - Fall Increases over Last Year

2007-10-23T23:33:46Z

Today we issued a release on the new 2007 Retail 100 Index, a collection of the top 100 retailers in our Shopping and Classifieds category (the category contains over 20,000 sites). Our analysis shows positive growth in visits to the retail category comparing this year to last year. In a blog exclusive, below is an analysis of the daily pattern of visits to the 2007 Retail 100 Index, which on a daily average is showing a 13.5% increase over last year.

While visits to the Index may not match online (or offline) retail sales, their should be some correlation between visits and online sales. I noticed in this report Coach's CEO Lew Frankfort warned of a weak holiday outlook, more conservative than Wall Street is expecting. Frankfort went on to say that the retail landscape was weakening across the board.

Below, I've created a chart showing the market share of visits to Coach's website compared to our Apparel and Accessories category. Coach, going into this month is weak compared to the apparel category, but our data (at least in terms of visits) seems to contradict a sector wide decline.

The Grinch that Stole -- Mrs. Fields' Cookies?

2007-10-23T19:51:01Z

Occassionly strange data crosses my desk (o.k. maybe not occassionly, regularly really). Luke McGuinness our VP of Sales on the West Coast popped his head in my office to ask if I knew why Mrs. Fields, suddenly, was getting almost all of her traffic from web based email services (such as Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Gmail, etc...). Here's the clickstream report that I pulled on the Mrs. Field's site for the day of the spike October 12, 2007.

But what caught my eye was what was on the other half of the clickstream report... where people go when they leave MrsFields.com. Over 73% were heading off to -- The American Family Association?

Whatever was happening between email services and the American Family Association was having a huge effect on visits to the MrsFields.com, increasing the marketshare of visit to over 3x its normal level.

A little Internet searching revealed the source of this mystery. Apparently, according to this story, a Michigan woman, called a Mrs. Fields to order Christmas cookies. The company representative gave her inaccurate information according to a later statement from Mrs. Fields that, the store was no longer carrying "Christmas" cookies. An email blast was issued from the AFA site. Mayhem ensued. Mystery solved.

This little diversion today highlights the value of daily Internet data as a source of information for what, at first, appears to be errant data, but later proved to be the negative impact of an email campaign.

Black Friday Comes Earlier

2007-10-22T19:34:32Z

Earlier this month I conducted a Hitwise client webinar with Anita Gandhi, our Client Intelligence Director. The topic of discussion was the growing popularity of Black Friday searches on the net. Anita pointed out during the presentation that the popularity of Black Friday ad sites (and the growing coverage in the media) has repurposed a term-of-art in the retail trade to a consumer search phrase.

This chart shows the growth in "Black Friday" searches in 2005 vs. 2006.

Another remarkable trend is how interest in Black Friday has been creeping earlier in the calendar now showing up as early as July, ramping by mid-September, show the growing consumer demand for information on sales the day after Thanksgiving.

Wal-Mart is bringing increasing interest to the sales date with a letter to Black Friday ad sites last week warning them not to post any leaked Black Friday sale material as their ads are copyrighted material. Ironically, the one brand associated with Black Friday Ads (based on search containing the term "black friday" for the four weeks ending 10/20/07) is Wal-Mart, the only brand that shows up in the top 20 terms. It shows up in position #10 "Walmart Black Friday ads," #13 "Walmart Black Friday," and #20 "Walmart Black Friday ad."

Shopping, Search, and MySpace

2007-06-05T22:47:36Z

How have sources of traffic to Shopping and Classifieds websites changed over the past year? In May 2007, the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category received 24.95% of its upstream visits from search engines. This number increased by only 0.7% since May 2006, but the balance of search engines sending traffic has changed in favor of Google. Google was responsible for 15.55% of Shopping & Classifieds upstream visits in May 2007, an increase of 8.7% since May 2006. Google's traffic, share of search, and impact on e-commerce websites have grown in lockstep over the past year.

MySpace is another growing source of traffic for shopping websites. In May 2007, 3.15% of Shopping & Classifieds site visits originated at MySpace, an increase of 86.1% since May 2006. This increase could be attributable to several factors: 1) the sheer increase in visits to MySpace (up 67.1% from May 06 - May 07, vs. the 6.6% increase in visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category), resulting in more non-referred traffic, 2) increased retailer advertising on MySpace, 3) the Google-MySpace search deal, which may have led to more general web searching on MySpace as well more potential retail contextual ads. The leading Shopping & Classifieds websites in MySpace's downstream for the month of May largely resemble the top overall retail websites - 7 of the websites shown in the table below were also top 10 Shopping & Classifieds sites in May 2007.

Swimwear and Diets - The Search Correlation

2007-05-17T20:49:16Z

Swimsuit season is upon us - magazine racks are full of headlines promising not only to help us find the perfect swimsuit for our body types, but also the perfect diet and fitness plan to help us look our best on the beach. Not surprisingly, it turns out there is a seasonal correlation between 'swimwear' and 'diets.' The search term chart below shows that the lowest volume of searches for the two terms is in October, November and December. Of course, searches for 'diets' surge in January when people make their New Year's Resolutions, but 'swimwear' doesn't pick up again until March, when spring break approaches. It is odd though, given how much time it takes to loose any significant amount of weight, that the correlation between 'swimwear'' searches and 'diet' searches is timed so close. Apparently, we're shooting for immediate results, since some of the popular search terms are '3 day diet,' 'fad diets,' and 'fast weight loss diets.'

Yahoo! Auctions Closing, Ebay at 94% Share of Category

2007-05-08T17:47:19Z

Yahoo! Auctions is closing as of June 16, 2007. It comes with little surprise given Yahoo's advertising relationship with eBay, and eBay's massive dominance of the Auction category. eBay websites (including eBay, eBay Motors and eBay UK and Canada) accounted for more than 94% of visits the Auctions category for the week ending May 5, 2007. Yahoo! Auctions came in at #10, with only 0.19% of the Auctions category.

EBay is the largest e-commerce site in the downstream for Yahoo! Search, at 1.34% of Yahoo! Search's total downstream for the week ending May 5, 2007. In comparison, Yahoo! Auctions accounted for only 0.01% of the traffic leaving Yahoo! Search in that period.

Pajamas, Teddy Bears and Chocolate Covered Strawberries - Fast Movers Last Week

2007-02-14T18:36:14Z

One of the useful Hitwise features that we don't often mention is Fast Mover Alerts. I have configured my alerts so that each Monday I receive an email that showing the fast movers in the Shopping and Classifieds category for the previous week. I was not surprised to see that for the week ending Feb. 10, 2007, Valentine's Day oriented gift sites were prominent, but was pleasantly surprised by the types of sites listed, which showed the sweet intentions of Valentine's Day shoppers.

Pajamagram and Vermont Teddy Bear Company figured prominently in each other's clickstream last week, which is not surprising considering that they are sister companies, and teddy bears and fuzzy pajamas probably have similar customers. It's nice to see that lovers want to add fruit to their chocolate via Shari's Berries, and are thinking of the planet when they visit Organic Bouquet.

Fast Mover Alerts are a great way to keep track of trends in your category, and otherwise stay informed of growing sites. Happy Valentine's Day!

Google Base and Google Checkout Traffic Analysis

2007-02-09T15:07:09Z

This week it was reported in the Wall Street Journal that MySpace -Google negotiations hit a roadblock due to MySpace plans to partner with eBay for commerce. Google has its own online commerce ambitions with is relatively new services, Google Base and Google Checkout. But how have those sites been faring since last summer?

Market Share Comparison
According to Hitwise data, last week (week ending 2/3/07) the market share of visits to eBay was 844 times greater than the share of visits to Google Base. Paypal's market share exceeded Google Checkout's by 71 to 1 in the same period. Clearly Google Checkout has been doing better than Google Base, thanks to aggressive promotions, which is not something that Google typically does. Windows Live Expo, Microsoft's Craigslist play, currently has a slightly larger market share than Google Base.

Traffic Growth
Google Base's market share of visits has declined by 18% when comparing January 2007 to July 2007. Google Checkout's market share was up 362%, but it remains to be seen if those users will keep coming back. eBay and Paypal showed minor increases of 1.3% and 1.9% respectively in that period. eBay commanded 1.6% of all Internet visits in January 2007, so an incremental 1.3% growth for eBay is almost 10 times larger than Google Base's entire January market share of 0.0019%.

Session Time
Visiting an online auctions or classifieds site can consume a lot of time. eBay's average session time last week was almost 20 minutes. Visitors to Craigslist New York, the most visited Craigslist subdomian, had an average session time of nearly 16 minutes. Visitors to just Google search alone stayed more than 12 minutes, while visitors to Google Base stuck around for less than 8 minutes. Google Checkout's average session time was about 2 minutes shorter than session time for Paypal.

Google Base Clickstream
Last April I did an analysis of the downstream traffic from Google Base in an attempt to surmise what the site was being used for. It's evolved a bit since then. In January 2007, the top downstream categories of traffic leaving Google Base were:

Real Estate - 16.79%
Employment and Training - 14.84%
Automotive - Classifieds - 7.99%
Food and Beverage - 6.85%
Shopping and Classifieds- 6.03%
Search Engines - 5.92%

If Google Base is primarily being used by house, job, car, and recipe hunters, it doesn't seem to pose a very big threat to eBay, and is more of a classifieds play on Craigslist. The second most popular site in eBay's downstream in January was Paypal, at 10.7% (after eBay Motors, at 20.5%), while 4.3% of Google Base's downstream traffic went to Google Checkout.

The Big Picture
Google and eBay both are getting more traffic from MySpace than ever before. From December 2006 to January 2007, MySpace accounted for 19% more of eBay's upstream traffic, and 11% more of Google's upstream traffic. Both MySpace and Google are growing in market share, while Google's efforts with Base are floundering. Google needs to show that has an e-commerce offering that is even remotely competitive for it to have a say in eBay - MySpace discussions.

Note: www.google.com/base is included in base.google.com, and www.google.com/checkout is included in checkout.google.com.

Barbie v. Bratz - Differences in Lifestyle

2006-12-17T23:03:28Z

Reading the Sunday paper (San Francisco Chronicle) this morning, I came across a great article by Reyhan Harmanci about the increased interest in Bratz dolls v. the traditional Barbie (see LeeAnn Prescott's post here comparing searches in the top dolls this holiday season).

I decided to see if I could detect a difference in interest in the two dolls based on our Hitwise Lifestyle tool, which is based on the Claritias Prizm NE segmentation. The chart below shows the swing of visits to two sites, the official Barbie site (barbie.everythinggirl.com) represented above the line and Bratz (www.bratz.com) represented below.

Lifestyle Swing Barbie.com v. Bratz.com

Interest in the two dolls demonstrates a division in socio-economic classes.

The groupings are based on urbanicity, with U's representing urban visits, S = suberban, C= small city T = towns and rural areas. The numbers are a measure of affluence from 1 (most affluent) to 4 (least affluent). The comparison shows us that Barbie is popular in affluent segments and Bratz with less affluents. This difference is most pronounced in urban and small city groups, less so in rural areas.

And how do the two toys compare in volume of searches?

Zune vs iPod - The Story in the Data

2006-12-15T17:49:11Z

Since the launch of the Zune less than a month ago, I've been curious to see how Microsoft's new mp3 player compares against the iPod.

A chart of search volume for 'ipod' and 'zune' shows that the share of searches for 'ipod' was 3X greater than the share of searches for 'zune' for the week ending 12/9/06. Not bad for a product that's only been on shelves for three weeks.

But how are people searching for 'zune' versus 'ipod' and what does that tell us? The Hitwise Search Term Suggestion report for the two products shows an enormous delta in related terms - there were over 9,062 search terms captured by Hitwise containing 'ipod' in the last 4 weeks, compared to 666 for 'zune.' Certainly, iPod has several years behind it, and a complete line of products and accessories. However, three of the top 10 search terms containing 'zune' are looking for reviews or iPod comparisons, which would be expected for a new product.

The sites that people go to after conducting a search give another indication of consumer mindset (i.e., John Battelle's Database of Intentions). Search term analysis for 'zune' shows that people are more likely to be looking for information on the Zune than going to a retail site to purchase it, with only three retailers in the list of top 10 terms receiving traffic from 'zune.' In contrast, nine of the top 10 sites receiving traffic from 'ipod' were retail sites. Another unique Hitwise feature that can be used to determine the interest in a product is the ability to chart a term's share of searches in terms of visits sent to sites within a specific category. Charting the share of searches that 'ipod' and 'zune' sent to the Shopping & Classifieds category revealed that last week 'ipod' sent 10X more visits to Shopping & Classifieds category than 'zune' - certainly not as positive as our 3X number above.

The search term data show us that if it is possible to unseat a product with such a dominant market share as the iPod, it will be a long slow road. People are slowly checking out the Zune, reading reviews, and seeing what other people think before they make the leap. Its social networking features will need a signficant amount of time to gain hold. After all, it took MySpace over a year to rise to dominance, not just one month.

Another metric worth looking at is Demographics. By examining the demographics of the iTunes website versus Zune.net is our best indication of who us already using the iPod versus who is considering purchasing a Zune. The first thing that pops out is that visitors to the iTunes site are more likely to be female, while visitors to Zune.net are more likely to be male. Not surprising, as males are typically early adopters. The difference in age groups shows that iTunes users are strongest in the 25-44 age groups, while Zune.net is attracting more 18-24 year olds and 45-54 year olds. It makes sense that young males would be checking out the Zune, but what about 45-54 year olds? Are they older geeks (early adopters too), or parents of teens?

While Zune has generated a good deal of interest, it's not going to unseat the iPod this holiday season. After the Christmas, we will be able to look at the software registration and download sites as we did last year to see how the iPod fared against the Zune.

Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii - More Data

2006-12-14T21:38:43Z

Following Heather's post in the UK, on the surging popularity of game consoles (she omitted Playstation 3 as its not commercially available in the UK), I decided to post some U.S. data comaring queries for the two popular console "playstation 3" and "Nintendo Wii," as well as last year's holiday hit the Xbox 360.

Some interesting things to note... the combined volume of queries for "Playstation 3" and "Nintendo Wii" during their peaks in November this year do not equal the volume of queries for Xbox 360 last holiday season. Also, spikes in queries for both consoles this year is relatively short lived, possibly due to store scarcity.

In fact, running a search term suggestion report (most common queries containing "playstation 3" and "nintendo wii") reveals several popular queries regarding availability such as; "playstation 3 availability" and "nintendo wii instock."

UGG Boots are Back!

2006-12-13T20:29:34Z

This morning I taped a segment for CNBC about our press release yesterday on the hottest products this holiday season. One of the things that struck me about our search data this holiday is the resurgence of those foot warming sheepskin phenom. the UGGs.

Here's a graph of searches on "ugg boots" for the last two years:

If you read any of the fashion blogs (which I have in researching this issue), UGG Boots are sooo 2004. So why then are searches for this fashion-snubbed footwear brand over double that of searches from the 2005 holiday season?

The answer is in the data. If you look at the demographics of visitors to the official UGG website, visitors are predominately female, 25-44, earning between $60-100K. Our regional data indicates that the New York Tri-State area and California are indexing the highest for visits to the site. Finally, U1 or the Urban Uptown Claritas Prizm segment (affluent urbanites) are the largest contributor of traffic to the site, making up 13.5% of visitors. Combining this data with some guerilla market research stats (read anecdotal) several local San Francisco vendors of the footwear confirm that they are selling out, primarily to parents of Tween girls that have UGGs on their holiday wishlist.

Toys R Us Online Store Takes 22% Share of Category

2006-12-12T22:08:51Z

Until July of this year, Toys R Us online retail was hosted at Amazon.com, leaving ToysRUs.com to serve as little more than a store locator and source for corporate information. Now that it's the peak season for online toy shopping, it's a good time take a look at the effects of the new ToyRUs.com retail site on online toy shopping this holiday season.

Using Hitwise Charting, it's easy to figure out how ToysRus.com is doing against its competitors by running a series of four charts.

1. Market Share
During the 2005 Holiday season, ToysRus.com was competing neck and neck with KBToys.com and eToys for market share, all with less than 4% category share. In July, when ToysRUs.com ecommerce functionality went live, its market share of visits skyrocketed, and last week (week ending 12/9/06), it was the #1 site in the Toys & Hobbies category with market share of a whopping 22%.

2. Clickstream
Since ToysRUs.com was partnered with Amazon.com for retail, it follows that most of the downstream traffic leaving ToysRus.com would go to Amazon.com. Running a chart of downstream to Amazon shows us that this was indeed true - over 50% of the traffic leaving ToysRus.com went to Amazon.com. When ToysRUs.com became a retail site, the downstream to Amazon.com dropped to around 3%, which is typical competitive traffic for an online retailer. What's interesting about this chart is that the downstream from eToys and KBToys.com to Amazon.com dropped as well - it seems that as soon as users figured out that ToysRus.com was now a retail site, they were less likely to go to Amazon.com to look for toys.

3. Session Time
Last week the average visit length to the Toys & Hobbies category was nearly 11 minutes. During the 2005 holiday season, the session time for ToysRUs.com hovered around 2-3 minutes, while visits to competitors' sites lasted upwards of 9 minutes. Apparently ToysRus.com has built a site that is much stickier than competitive sites, as last week's average visit was longer than 12 minutes, while KBToys.com and eToys.com average visits were under 9 minutes each.

4. Search
Charting share of searches can offer insights into brand popularity. In this case, I charted the top navigational search term sending traffic to each of the three toy sites. It turns out that searches for 'toys r us' have always far exceeded searches for 'kb toys' and 'etoys.' This demonstrates the strength of the Toy R Us brand, and offers clues as to why Toys R Us went through the effort of building its own online retail infrastructure. Clearly consumers expected to find a ToyRUS.com retail site, even though products had been sold through Amazon for years. Also notice the significant growth in searches during the the holiday season - Toys R US is definitely top of mind during the Christmas shopping rush.

Postscript: Google Checkout
Two weeks ago I reported that ToysRUs.com was the leading site sending traffic to Google Checkout, accounting for 24% of Google Checkout's upstream visits. For the week ending 12/9/06, it was virtually unchanged at 23% of upstream for Google Checkout. Looking at it another way, 3.5% of the traffic leaving ToysRUs.com went directly to Google Checkout, giving an indication of the conversion rate for ToysRus.com.

Heelys: Hot Trend or IPO Interest

2006-12-11T22:37:19Z

Tomorrow we'll be releasing our hot searched-for-products of this holiday season. As a little taste of whats coming, over the last several weeks, we've noticed a steady increase in searches for Heelys (the tennis shoes with wheels responsible for many mall near-collisions). This morning, reading through my RSS feeds, I came across this article from Bill Simpson at Seeking Alpha, pondering if Heely's were just a passing fad.

One of the best ways to gauge consumer interest in a product is to chart the volume of queries on that product or brand over time. Here's the Heelys chart:

It appears that Heelys is enjoying a substantial lift in search volume when compared with last holiday season (already doubling last year's searches). I'm still investigating the spike in July as either a safety related concern or possibly related to the use of Heelys by "So You Think You Can Dance" contestant Ivan Koumeav during one of his dance solos (scary that I know that).

A more interesting question however, is the recent surge in Heelys searches purchase related or the result of last week's IPO. To answer that question I leveraged the full line-up of Hitwise tools. Clickstream analysis reveals that only 7.9% of last week's upstream visits to Heelys.com came from financial sites. Search Term analysis revealed only a few Heely terms associated with the IPO, and finally I looked at the demographics of visitors to the site, which were predominately female age 25-44 (most likely moms looking for the shoes as holiday gifts).

So bottom line, even though Heelys have been around since 2000, it looks like we're seeing a major resurgence in wheeled shoe interest.

Baby Alive is Back, Bratz Searches up 64% over Last Year

2006-12-05T19:05:27Z

This week I was surprised to see that 'baby alive' was the #9 product search term sending visits to Shopping & Classifieds sites. It turns out that Baby Alive is back, and in a big way. Searches for the doll that was introduced in 1973 and talks, eats, and even messes up diapers increased by 268% in the past two weeks (week ending 12/2/06 vs. week ending 11/18/06). Searches outnumbered those for 'bratz' and approached 'american girl' in popularity.

As a former doll-loving little girl, I know first-hand how much time and money can be sunk into collecting dolls, as well as purchasing and making clothes and accessories for them. While Baby Alive is geared toward a younger child than some of the other dolls on this list, it's important to note a resurgence in popularity that could shift girls' interests away from other dolls or toys. Visits to the Hasbro Toy Shop were up 128% for the week ending 12/03/06 versus the same week last year, possibly due to interest in Baby Alive.

It's interesting to note on the chart below that searches for 'barbie' and 'bratz' show less of a seasonal trend, while searches for 'american girl' peaked last year during the holiday season. The data show that the share of searches for 'bratz' is up 64% from last year (week ending 12/02/06 vs. 12/03/05) and searches for 'american girl' were also up by 14% in the same period.

Cyber Monday - Up 13.3% from 2005

2006-11-28T23:10:45Z

The stats are in for the much-hyped Cyber-Monday and compared to Cyber-Monday in 2005, the Hitwise Retail 100 Index is up 13.3% for yesterday (11/27/06). As we've seen for the fourth year running (as represented in the chart below), Thanksgiving Day remains the peak day for retail traffic in market share of visits.

Daily Market Share of Visits (U.S.) Hitwise Retail 100 Index

Comparing Cyber-Monday 2006 to Thanksgiving Day this year, the index was down 33.87% and down 26.29% compared to Black Friday 2006. One of the theories that we've subscribed to as to why Thanksgiving Day continues to be the busiest day for retail traffic in market share of visits is that consumers use the Internet to research Black Friday sales the day before venturing out to bricks and mortar stores.

Indeed, our rankings data reflects that on Thanksgiving Day, Walmart.com and BestBuy.com held the #1 and #2 slot for the Retail 100 Index (the #1 spot is traditionally held by Amazon.com), by Cyber-Monday, Amazon is back in its #1 position. Furthermore, as shown below, on Cyber-Monday six of the top fifteen sites in the Retail 100 Index are online pure-plays versus three on Thanksgiving Day.

In other news, weekly search terms driving traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category indicate that the Nintendo Wii is pulling ahead of Playstation 3, possibly due to the scarcity of Sony's game console.

Black Friday Searches up 462% Over Last Year

2006-11-28T01:24:11Z

Every year, there are dozens of stories about shoppers standing in line for hours outside of stores in order to buy discounted items on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. It's no wonder then that last year, a teenager from San Jose made headlines when he obtained leaked copies of the Black Friday circulars in advance and posted the sale items on his website, BFads.net. The site reached a rank of 44 among all Shopping & Classifieds sites for the week ending 11/26/05. This year, it reached a rank of 31 during the week ending 11/25/06, and four other Black Friday sites achieved rankings in the top 300 Shopping & Classifieds sites last week. See our press release for more coverage, including rankings and demographics on Black Friday sites.

Black Friday sites are a great example of the Internet disrupting an offline experience. Shoppers want to know what deals they can get in advance so they can decide how to allocate their shopping budgets and time. 'Black friday' was the #3 search term (after 'ebay' and 'craigslist') sending visits to the Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending 11/25/06. That means that more searches were conducted last week for 'black friday' than 'target,' 'amazon,' 'nintendo wii' or 'ipod.' The share of searches for just the one term 'black friday' was up 462% over Thanksgiving week in 2005. Hitwise captured 4,101 unique search terms containing the words 'black friday' during the 4 weeks ending 11/25/06, an increase 71% from the 2,393 terms captured during the 4 weeks ending 11/26/05. Shoppers now expect to know, far in advance, what deals to expect on Black Friday, and they know where to find that information. Expect them to remember next year as well.

Google Checkout Visits up 30%, Buying Traffic with $10 Off Offer

2006-11-22T22:18:27Z

Google Checkout has been quietly building traffic by adding merchants and offering new customers $10 off a purchase of $30 or more. Its market share of visits was up 30% in the past four weeks (week ending 11/18/06 vs. week ending 10/21/06), and soon it should rank in the top 20 Google properties (See Bill's post from yesterday). Paypal could be considered the nearest competitor to Google Checkout, but Paypal is still dependent on eBay for the majority of its traffic: for the week ending 11/18/06, 70% of Paypal's upstream traffic came directly from eBay. Google Checkout is partnering with a wide variety of merchants, as you can see below in its list of upstream websites from the Shopping & Classifieds category for last week.

Hitwise clickstream data can offer competitive insights into how companies are using Google Checkout. Downstream traffic from a site to Google Checkout could be considered a loose proxy for conversion. The chart below shows the trend in visits leaving merchant sites to Google Checkout. Both Buy.com and Jockey sent 16% and 7% of their respective traffic to Google Checkout last week, which seems like a very high conversion rate. Both sites are promoting the $10 off Google Checkout offer on their home pages, which indicates that the offer could be increasing conversion rates. The other sites on the chart are only showing the offer on the checkout page itself.

Google, with its deep pockets, is effectively buying traffic for its Checkout service, and smart retailers are using the offer to increase their conversion rates, but it could be a long time before it reaches Paypal's traffic levels - the market share of visits to Paypal was 96 times greater than for Google Checkout last week (week ending 11/18/06). Possibly Google's promotional efforts that will launch on Monday 11/27/06 will help.

Halloween Costume Searching - Visits to Halloween Retail Sites up 39%

2006-10-25T18:26:31Z

Halloween is by far my favorite holiday of the year. When else do you have permission to don a costume and pretend to be someone else for a night? So it is with great interest that I peruse the most popular search term suggestions for costumes every year from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US internet users. I reported earlier in the season that 'pirate costume' captured the largest volume of searches, and that still holds true for the most recent four weeks:

Most searched for 'costume' terms, 4 weeks ending October 21, 2006
pirate costume
tinkerbell costume
wonder woman costume
jack sparrow costume
fairy costume
playboy bunny costume
dorothy costume
dog the bounty hunter costume
little red riding hood costume
jango fett costume

When I looked further into this year's data versus last year, I noticed an increase in searches on terms related to 'adult' and 'sexy' costumes. Further investigation revealed that share of US searches for the term 'adult costumes' was up 209% for the four weeks ending October 21, 2006 versus the same four week period in 2005 (four weeks ending October 22, 2005). In addition, the share of searches for 'sexy halloween costume' was up 400% in the same period. You can see on the list above that searches for 'playboy bunny costume' and 'dog the bounty hunter costume' indicate a more adult bent to costume searching.

Not only are searches for 'adult' and 'sexy' costumes up over last year, visits to online costume retailers are up as well. The market share of visits to a custom category of 30 online costume retailers was up 38.5% for the week ending October 21, 2006 versus the week ending October 22, 2005.

I suspect that as consumers become more accustomed to online shopping, they are finding that the convenience of shopping online for costumes is a godsend. My Halloween shopping usually consists of at least a whole afternoon of combing racks at vintage stores for the perfect outfit, which usually has to be pieced together from various locations. Then a trip to the Halloween superstore, with its long lines, to find last minute make up and other accessories. This year, I bought my costume online, and my only in-store purchase was a ribbon for my hair. So simple! Now my only worry is that I will meet someone with exactly the same costume, since I'm not wearing a one-of-a kind vintage outfit. But I will have the experience of being Alice in a Wonderland of costumed partygoers for a night - and here's a list of who I might see, based on the ten most popular search term suggestions for 'adult costume':

Most searched for 'adult costume' terms, 4 weeks ending October 21, 2006
adult pirate costume
adult tinkerbell costume
adult elmo costume
adult tigger costume
adult batman costume
adult ladybug costume
army adult costume
adult mermaid costume
adult care bear costume
adult belle costume

Surprisingly, this list did not have to be filtered for any 'adult' terms - I guess a lot people will be reverting to childhood for a day!

(Product) RED Successful in Driving visits to Partner Sites

2006-10-19T19:54:00Z

Last week I began noticing an outdoor campaign running here in San Francisco featuring Gap's "INSPI(RED)" and "DESI(RED)" t-shirts and it brought my attention to Bono's (RED) campaign to raise money to fight AIDS in Africa. The campaign was kicked into high gear with his October 13 appearance on the Oprah Winfrey Show. (Product) RED partners Gap, Emporio Armani, Converse, Motorola, Apple, and American Express have produced merchandise that will raise money to benefit the Global Fund to Fight AIDS.

On the day of Bono's appearance on Oprah, Hitwise shows that US traffic to the Join (RED) website increased by 2600 percent versus the previous day, and the Oprah website was the source of 20.5 percent of visits to Join (RED) that day. This differs considerably from our UK data which show that MySpace was the lead source of traffic for Join (RED), possibly due to a message sent to MySpace UK users. As a US resident, I did not receive a message from MySpace Tom about (RED) and in the US only 2.6% of Join (RED)'s traffic came from MySpace for the week ending October 14, 2006.

What is striking about this campaign is that 66.3 percent of visits to Join (RED) continued on to one of the (Product) RED merchandise partner websites for the week ending October 14, 2006. Gap, as the most visible sponsor, was the leading beneficiary of traffic from Join (RED) website, receiving 26.9 percent of visits to the site last week. What's so amazing about list of Join (RED)'s downstream sites below is that every single one the top sites is a partner. Usually clickstream tables show visits going back to search engines, competitors, or sometimes unrelated topics. This campaign clearly has the audience engaged with its products and sponsors, which also include MySpace and AIM.

A look at the top search terms that drove traffic to Join (RED) last week show how strongly Bono is associated with the campaign: 9 of the top 20 terms that sent visits to Join (RED) last week contain 'bono.' It's great to see a star of that stature using his celebrity for a good cause, and also to see that people are listening and are interested in buying the products.

This kind of Hitwise data can be used to monitor campaigns such as this and to get daily and weekly updates on how consumers are searching for and reacting to offline media events.

Crocs Shoes Gaining on Major Brands

2006-09-28T13:24:46Z

This summer I was surprised to see more and more brightly colored clogs and sandals adorning the feet of Americans, particularly when I traveled outside of San Francisco. Nearly every airport I've been through in the past four months has had a kiosk selling Crocs for $29.99. Whether or not you agree that they are attractive, Crocs have won rave reviews for comfort and have been steadily increasing in popularity for the past year. Hitwise search term data for the term 'crocs' shows that searches for the shoes have increased by 149% in the past year (ending 9/23/06 vs. 9/24/05). The only shoe brands that accounted for a greater share of Internet searches during the months of July and August were 'nike,' 'adidas' and 'heelys.' Additionally, the market share of visits to the official Crocs website have increased by 124% in the past year.

I was wondering why I hadn't seen that many Crocs in San Francisco or even New York, where I travel frequently, so I looked at the regional demographics of the Crocs website. It appears that Crocs' low price point and practicality have given the brand a stronghold in rural states like Louisiana, Mississippi, and New Hampshire, according to statistics on website visits for the four weeks ending September 23, 2006. This shows how not all fashion trends originate in major cities like New York, and Crocs grassroots approach (see the great testimonial section on the site) has won it legions of fans. It will be interesting to see if the trend continues through next summer - I'm guessing it will, since people love happy feet!

TMX Elmo In Stock - the Search Quest

2006-09-27T17:21:31Z

Last week parents and gift-givers flocked to stores and the web in an attempt to purchase what will surely be the hottest toy of the upcoming holiday season - TMX Elmo. It was released on September 19, and was immediately sold out at online and offline retailers. 'tmx elmo' and 'elmo tmx' were the most popular product terms that sent visits to the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending September 23, 2006, trumping the usual #1 product term, 'ipod.' Visits to the Fisher-Price US website were up 75% versus the previous week, and visits to eToys were up 32% in the same period.

Hitwise search term analysis shows that searchers quickly adjusted their searches in their quest for the toy by searching for terms like 'elmo tmx in stock' and 'buy tmx elmo.' Of course you can now purchase it on eBay for more than twice the suggested retail price of $39.99. Otherwise you will have to wait until Fisher-Price ships more products. Forums and discussion boards are already abuzz with reports of shoppers spotting the new Elmo on store shelves, and there are pages dedicated to tracking its availability. My hope is that the shoppers' smart use of the Internet, along with the ability to pre-order online, will somewhat abate the frenzy at stores that I remember from the Cabbage Patch Kid craze in the 80s, and also allow more actual gift-givers than profiteering resellers a chance to purchase the product.

Dropping Gas Prices Fuel Online Retail Visits

2006-09-21T17:53:30Z

On Tuesday the National Retail Federation (NRF) released its forecast for holiday retail sales, expecting U.S. retail to increase by a very moderate 5% over the previous year. This article from CNN Money, makes the point that declining fuel prices will likely have little effect on this year's holiday retail sales.

I decided to revisit a chart that I created last year that showed the effect of rising gas prices on online shopping visits to see if the recent drop in pump prices was having any effect on consumer shopping activity. First, here's a chart that shows a year-over-year comparison of visits to our Retail 100 index (top 100 online retailers).

As we've seen before, there tends to be great similarity in year-over-year seasonality of visits to the Retail 100. That being said, visits to online retailers have been lagging this year compared to last (in second quarter 2006, retail visits were down an average of 3.3% in the U.S.).

In this next chart, I focused in on the time period between March and September, again comparing market share of visits 2005 to 2006 in the U.S., but this time, overlaying mean U.S. retail gas prices (all grades) to show the effect of gas price fluctuation on retail visits.

For the first time this year, we are seeing a year-over-year increase in online retail visits as of the first week of September, which coincides with a drop in retail gas prices. To make the relationship between these two data-sets clearer, I created the following chart.

Above, the bars indicated the difference in retail visits for the Retail 100 index between 2005 and 2006, with the mean retail gas price figure plotted in red. The correlation between the two appears to be strong. Regarding causation, an argument could be made that even though gas purchases amount to only 7-8% of household budget, gas prices are a key factor in consumer sentiment, and that if the relationship between online shopping visits and gas prices continue to fall we may be seeing a stronger growth in online retail for the 2006 holidays.

Pirate Costumes for Halloween

2006-09-18T22:01:54Z

Search activity on Halloween costumes has been on the rise since early August, mirroring the trend we saw last year. It always surprises me that Internet users are conditioned to plan so far ahead for holidays like Halloween and Christmas. Expect Christmas searches to start increasing as early as October, as we reported in November 2005.

You will most likely see a lot of pirate trick-or-treaters this year: 'pirate costume' has been the most searched for costume term since August 2006, and 'jack sparrow' costume comes in at number 3. Pirate costumes were also the most popular costume search term last year, as Bill reported. The difference is that this year Jack Sparrow came back to the theaters in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest. Movies have a strong influence on children’s costume choices- Superman Returns and Curious George being the next most costume-worthy films of the past year.

BAPE Shoes and Hoodies Catch on in US

2006-08-03T16:37:17Z

This week I noticed the term 'bape shoes' in a search term report. Since I was not familiar with this brand, I decided to investigate. BAPE, or A Bathing Ape, is a Japanese footwear and apparel brand that has developed an urban following in the US, partly thanks to its strategy of producing limited quantities of its merchandise. Scarcity drives demand it seems, especially when hip-hop music stars like Pharrell Williams are seen wearing BAPE. Thus shoppers turn to search to find out where to buy BAPE - the volume of searches for 'bape' and 'bathing ape' have increased by 780& and 430% respectively in the past 6 months (week ending 7/12/06 vs. week ending 2/11/06).

Just which BAPE products are the most sought after? Search Term Suggestion shows us that BAPE shoes and BAPE hoodies are the most popular items. Given that production quantities are limited and that BAPE shoes come in such a multitude of colors, I can imagine that it would be difficult to find the color you want in the size you want, thus driving repeat searches.

Retailers and trendspotters should not take the growing popularity of this brand lightly - recently there was a robbery of 11 BAPE jackets from a private sale in parking garage in Walnut Creek, CA that had been advertised on Craigslist. The theives drove off in a Lexus with their booty.

'Amazon.com' Google Search Returns No Results

2006-06-26T23:52:02Z

A post on John Battelle's Searchblog today mentioned that a Google search for 'amazon.com' was not returning results. I checked this out for myself, as you can see below. Very strange. However, each of the links on the page returns a result that will get you to Amazon. Searches for 'ebay.com' and 'yahoo.com' returned results normally.

I'm puzzled as to why Google would do this, or if it's a glitch in the system. A quick look at the Hitwise search engine analysis report for Google shows that for the four weeks ending June 24, 2006 'amazon' was the 31st highest volume search term, with 0.26% of Google's searches, while 'amazon.com' was the 42nd highest volume search term, with a share of 0.20% of Google searches.

The chart below demonstrates that the volume of searches for 'amazon.com' sometimes exceeds that for 'amazon.' You can also see on the chart a nice upward trend in searches for both terms over the past 15 months - searches for 'amazon' were up 34% for the week ending 6/24/06 versus the same week last year (week ending 6/25/06). The chart also shows the dramatic spike in searches for Amazon that coincides with the holiday shopping season. Last year searches for 'amazon' and 'amazon.com' peaked during the week of December 17, as shoppers rushed to place last minute orders and check order status.

Since we know that 'amazon.com' has such a high volume of searches, does anyone have an idea why this might be happening, and why Google would take so long to fix it? Battelle's entry was posted 8 hours ago.

Google Base: What Is It?

2006-04-04T22:51:19Z

Since Google Base launched last November, many have speculated on the threat it poses to eBay, Craigslist and other classifieds sites. By examining Hitwise Clickstream data by industry, we can see which categories of sites people are visiting after Google Base, thus getting an indication of what kind of content is being searched for on the site. For the month of March, Shopping & Classifieds was the largest downstream category, with Rewards & Directories site Shop.com accounting for 5.1% of downstream traffic from Google Base. So yes, it looks like people are interested in shopping when they go to Google Base.

An additional 15% of Google Base users went back to Google or another search engine in March, and another 13% went to recipe sites (Food & Beverage). Automotive sites accounted for 8.2% of downstream traffic, and auto classifieds sites accounted for the majority of the automotive downstream traffic. Job listings also appear to be a popular use of Google Base, with employment sites accounting for nearly 8% of its downstream traffic. Average session time was fairly brief, at just under 6 minutes for the month of March. So what is Google Base? Part shopping directory, part recipe search service, part classified service. It remains to be seen which of these services will take hold with Google Base users.

Hitwise market share data shows that Google Base, after a fairly strong start, received approximately the same market share of visits for the week ending April 1, 2006 that it did a month after launch. The January increase shown in the chart below can be attributed to the yearly increase in visits to Employment sites after the start of the New Year. The week ending January 14 was the peak for visits to the Employment & Training category, and 16.7% of Google Base's downstream visits went to Employment & Training websites during that week, more than double the number sent to the category in March 2006.

January Online Retail Visits Grow 4.4%

2006-02-15T22:24:47Z

On Tuesday, the Department of Commerce issued their report on January retail sales excluding autos. According to the report, retail sales grew 2.3% when compared to January 2005. Below, I've created a chart of visits to the Hitwise Retail 100 Index for January 2005 and January 2006. The Index indicates an average daily growth of visits to the index of 4.4% for January 2006 v. 2005.

In this daily view, we can see that the growth in visits year-over-year decelerates through the month, and that the two trend lines reach parity by the end of January. One of the theories on the strong beginning of January 2006 is that the holiday period was extended due to increased gift card sales in December (gift card revenue is only realized when the gift cards are redeemed for purchases). Hitwise search term analysis reveals that the peak searches for "gift cards" this holiday season grew 19.1% compared to the peak in 2004.

Macys.com visits up 27%, opportunity for MayCo online conversions

2006-01-20T22:47:40Z

This week a Reuters article was published regarding the benefit to Macys.com of Federated Department Stores' converting former May Company stores into Macy's. I wrote an article about this same topic in Chain Store Age last spring, in which I examined how a national brand will allow Macys.com to gain a larger, national audience and increase its traffic from search.

According the Reuters article, "the retailer studied its shoppers and found that 72% of Macys.com transactions come from a zip code within 20 minutes of a Macy's store." Indeed, Hitwise demographic data showed that the majority of visitors to Macys.com reside in the states in which Macy's offline stores exist. Similarly, the visitor profiles of the MayCo's online stores reflected their offline regional footprint.

Federated chairman Terry Lundgren said "when Macy's enters a new market, it experiences a jump in traffic to its Macys.com site." According to Hitwise data, the MayCo store conversions may be helping the Macy's online brand -in December 2005 the market share of visits to Macys.com was up 27% over December 2004, outpacing growth for Macys.com's competitors. Visits to JCPenney.com increased by 18% in December 2005 versus December 2004, and visits to Nordstrom.com were down 1% in the same period.

The conversion of the MayCo stores presents significant opportunities for Macys.com to build its brand online by converting MayCo online shoppers to Macys.com early in the process. Run a Google search for any of the major MayCo stores - Filene's, Foley's, Hecht's, and you'll see no mention of Macy's or the merger. But if you search on "strawbridges," a paid listing for Macys.com appears. It also shows up in Hitwise Search Term Analysis as the fifth most popular site receiving visits on that term, demonstrating that Macys.com can begin converting MayCo customers online now, before the offline stores are converted.

James Frey Controversy Over the Truth of "A Million Little Pieces" Benefits Booksellers

2006-01-17T20:49:22Z

Last week the news was abuzz on the revelation on The Smoking Gun that parts of James Frey's bestselling memoir "A Million Little Pieces" may have been fabricated. Indeed, Internet searches for "james frey" were up 452% for the week ending 1/14/06 vs. the prior week, and searches for "a million little pieces" were up 293% in the same period. Hitwise Search Term Analysis shows that Amazon.com was the leading site receiving traffic from searches for "a million little pieces."

The chart below shows the share of searches for the author and his newly controversial book that went to sites in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds - Books category, which is of course dominated by Amazon.com. The October spike was due to James Frey's appearance on Oprah's book club show on October 26, 2005. It seems that whether the truth was embellished or not, people loved the book, and the controversy will only serve to sell more copies.

Hitwise Retail 100 Index Maps Closely to Holiday Spending

2005-12-28T01:15:22Z

Today MasterCard Advisors' Spending Pulse service announced that year-over-year holiday spending increased 8.7%. This is pretty close to the 9% that we predicted going into the holiday season. The chart below provides market share growth for our Retail 100 index (top 100 retailers in our Shopping & Classifieds Category) for 2004 versus 2005.

It is interesting to note in the same release, Spending Pulse stated that the Home & Garden category was one of the greatest gainers this year versus last. We're seeing a 17% increase year-over-year compared to MasterCard's 15.2%. Here's the chart:

One other stand-out of the release was that jewelry sales were down 4.6% this year. This year, we were expecting to see a spike in searches on "engagement rings" for the week preceding Thanksgiving (as we saw in 2004). Looking at data through this week, we've seen no holiday spike on what must be one of the key revenue drivers for jewelers this time of year.

Holiday Shoppers Seek Free Shipping and Products On Sale

2005-12-15T20:25:45Z

Free shipping has long been a key offer from online retailers, to the extent that online shoppers have come to expect it. They also search for it, as the chart below shows, particularly during the holidays. We've been finding the new keyword breadth charting function (explained here) very useful in finding trends in searches for keywords that might not be searched for alone. Here I charted keyword breadth for "free shipping" and "on sale."

Searches containing the terms "free shipping" were up 62% for the week ending 12/10/05 compared to the week before Thanksgiving (week ending 11/19/05), and the leading search term suggestions were "toys free shipping" and "jcpenney free shipping" for the 4 weeks ending 12/10/05.

Unlike "free shipping," searchers are unlikely to enter just the words "on sale" into a search engine, but by examining the search term suggestions, we can see what products consumers want deals on the most. For the 4 weeks ending 12/10/05, the leading terms were: "psp on sale," "laptops on sale," "notebooks on sale," "xbox 360 on sale" and "ipod on sale." This list looked very different in July, with terms like "houses on sale" and "cars on sale" leading the group for the 4 weeks ending 7/23/05. While keyword breadth for "on sale" has less of a seasonal trend than "free shipping," it did experience an increase of 38% during the week of Thanksgiving compared to the prior week.

Heating with Wood Stoves

2005-11-22T17:15:57Z

In researching this week's Holiday Retail Series press release on comparison shopping sites, I was surprised to find "pellet stoves" and "wood stoves" among the leading search terms sending visits to sites in that category. Upon on charting the terms, I found that there was a massive increase in searches on these terms in recent months compared to last year. Indeed, heating with wood is a viable and cost effective heating option, particularly in areas like rural New England where I grew up. With increased concern over fuel prices, as Bill mentioned in October, it's not surprising that searches for alternative forms of home heating increased as homeowners prepared for winter.