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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America
Analyst Weblog
Haiti Earthquake Relief - News Sites are Major Traffic Driver
January 15, 2010
With the devastating earthquake in Haiti on Tuesday, you would expect that traffic to charitable websites would register an increase. The chart below shows daily visits to the top 325 sites in our Community - Humanitarian websites.
While search continues to be the #1 driver of traffic to charitable websites, news websites registered the greatest increase as a source of traffic.
And which news sites were the top contributors of traffic on the days following the tragedy; Drudge Report 3.6%, ABCnews.com 0.2% and MSNBC 0.14%.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 05:34 PM
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Bing - Rising Success (rate)
January 14, 2010
Yesterday we published our monthly search volume statistics, and as expected Google continues to dominate the space with 72.3% of all U.S. searches executed, while Yahoo! Search and Bing shares were at 14.8% and 8.9% respectively.
A far more interesting stat is the positive movement that we've seen in Bing's success rate. At Experian Hitwise, we measure success rate as the percentage of executed searches that result in a visit to a site other than a main search domain.
Here's a time series of success rates for Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing:
In October 2009, BIng's success rate was well below the competition with a success rate just north of 70%. That rate has been steadily increasing, and now Bing is showing a success rate over 75%. There is one caveat when reading these numbers; search success rate is often influenced by the complexity of the search. Traditionally, portal search engines tend to have more simple navigational and brand related queries in their top searches which are easier to resolve then searches for information.
When examining the top 100 search terms from Google, Yahoo! Search and Bing, we find that nearly all terms are brand and/or navigational in nature for each engine. When we look at the percentage of searches that these top 100 terms account for on each engine, we find that Google is at 9.5%, Yahoo! Search is 15.1% and Bing is at 16.5%.
If we take navigational percentages into account, Bing would probably still trail Yahoo! Search in success rate, however, given the rapid improvement in this metric over the last three months, future success rate trends should prove interesting.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 10:59 AM
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Facebook Hits #1 on Christmas and New Year's Day
January 04, 2010
The main Google page has been ranked the most visited site on a daily basis for U.S. Internet users. That statement has held true for 364 days of 2009. Google's dominance of "all category" visits was disrupted when Facebook visits surged on Christmas Day. Facebook was able, albeit by a slighter margin, to recapture the #1 position on Friday, New Year's Day. Here's a chart showing market share of visits (U.S.) to the Two domains over the last two months.
Its interesting to note that Facebook's two #1 days both occurred on major holidays. Is there something about holidays that might cause social networking to trump search as the most popular online activity? One possible explanation might be that being home for the holidays might also mean being physically separated from one's social group, leading to greater virtual contact.
Another Interesting stat to close out 2009 is the most searched on terms across all major search engines in the U.S. for the year. Here's the list:
Top 10 Search Terms (U.S.) for 2009:
1. Facebook
2. MySpace
3. Craigslist
4. Youtube
5. Yahoo Mail
6. Google
7. Yahoo
8. eBay
9. Facebook login
10. Myspace.com
Source: Experian Hitwise
Along with its surge in visits, "Facebook" captured the #1 spot for most searched on term. In 2008 "MySpace" held the top spot, with Facebook in the #10 position. I still get a kick out of seeing "Google" in the search term list. Over the last four weeks 64% of "Google" searches were executed on Yahoo! Search and Bing, while 29% were executed on Google itself. I often wonder why anyone would Google "Google" on Google. I'm interested to hear your hypothesis.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 01:45 PM
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In Categories Google | Search | Social Networking
News Corp. - If You de-Index Will They Still Come?
November 23, 2009
Two weeks ago we posted on Rupert Murdoch's threat to block Google from Indexing News Corp. content. While at first it seemed as though Murdoch was merely posturing with hypotheticals, reports continue to indicate that News Corp. is seriously considering choosing Bing as the exclusive "indexer" of their news content.
While our data hasn't changed substantially since the last post on this topic, given continuing talks I think we should dig a little deeper into our search data. For brevity's sake, I'll restrict this analysis to U.S. traffic to WSJ.com and leave the analysis of other News Corp. properties and markets for another post.
As of last week, WSJ.com's referred and non-referred traffic from Google and Google News amounted to 15.3% and 11.0% respectively. Analyzing Google search terms driving traffic to the Journal, the top 100 terms accounted for over 21.6% of all Google search traffic to WSJ.com. Of that 21.6%, 13.4% were navigational or brand searches (e.g. "Wall Street Journal," "WSJ," "WSJ.com" etc...). Even if Murdoch decides to block Google, these navigational search queries will most likely remain intact.
Of the remaining 8.2%, the majority of searches were for stock quotes, and general business related searches. Most specific news related searches fill-out the long tail of search queries. While the Journal may lose traffic if it ceases to cooperate with Google the loss may be less then anticipated.
The potential loss of Google News traffic is potentially more serious. As reported here, over the three years, WSJ.com's traffic from Google News has grown from 2% to over 11%. As we see in the table below, the Journal is receiving more than double the traffic from Google News than newspaper sites overall (a custom category including national and regional papers). Bing, a potential News Corp. suitor for search exclusivity provides less than half of Google News' volume as of last week.
As newspapers continue to search for a way out of the search rip current, its hard not to root for Murdoch's maverick de-index strategy, that being said, the numbers bring us back to reality. As print continues to hemorrhage readership, could blocking your most significant traffic source be a wise choice?
Posted by Bill Tancer at 05:03 PM
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In Categories News and Media
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