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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America
Analyst Weblog
Facebook - The Most Searched On Brand in the U.S.
April 01, 2010
As I've discussed before, examining search term data across all engines, while providing excellent tactical insight for search programs, also can provide invaluable insight for brand marketers. We're now able to provide a new search metric beyond volume (search volume for a specific term over all term volume) and breadth (# of search term variations over all search term variations), our new metric which I'll call breadth volume, sums the volume for all variations on a root term.
Here's a table for the top brand searches (U.S. for week ending 3/27/2010) by breadth volume:
So in this example we see that when we combine the volume of searches for all queries that contained the root "Facebook" over the last week (there were 10,673 unique terms), those searches accounted for 2.8% of all U.S. searches.
Exporting our data into Excel, we can chart the changes in a brands "breadth volume" over time, and in this case compared to a competitive brand.
Stay tuned for some other exciting ways we can leverage our new breadth volume metric.
Posted by Bill Tancer at 03:14 PM
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In Categories Search
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
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