Hitwise Intelligence - US

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.'