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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America
Analyst Weblog
Tracking Hurricane Earl online
September 02, 2010
Visits to the website of the National Hurricane Center jumped to represent 7.5% of all visits to the News and Media – Weather category on Tuesday, August 31, 2010. The National Hurricane Center ranked 4th among the 227 websites included in the category on Tuesday as fears increased regarding the projected path of Hurricane Earl, after being named a category 4 storm. The storm also drove increased visits to the News and Media – Weather category on Tuesday and visits increased 13% from the previous day.
Searches for ‘hurricane earl’ and ‘national hurricane center’ ranked 5th and 6th, respectively, among search terms driving traffic to the News and Media – Weather category on Tuesday.
The daily search term variations of ‘hurricane’ were dominated by Hurricane Earl-related searches, with 4 queries related to tracking the path of the storm.
The National Weather Center received the highest share of clicks on Tuesday from searches on ‘hurricane earl’, followed by Yahoo! News and The Washington Post.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 03:03 PM
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In Categories Weather
Successful promotion from Groupon.com and The Gap
August 27, 2010
Over the past year, group buying websites have surged in both popularity and number. The weekly market share of visits to a custom category of 81 group buying websites & aggregators has increased 416% for the week ending August 21, 2010 as compared to the same week the previous year. Groupon is currently leading the group buying websites in traffic and captured 50% of all visits within the custom category last week.
On August 19th, Groupon offered a national deal with The Gap which offered purchasers $50 in merchandise for $25, a 50% savings. The national offers are a good strategy for group buying websites to pursue to attract a broader audience in locations where they may not have a presence yet. In this case, the discount for The Gap caused visits to Groupon.com to increase 37% from the previous day and 51% as compared to Thursday, August 12th, one week earlier.
Interested purchasers were also visiting Gap.com immediately after Groupon.com, the share of downstream traffic from Groupon.com to Gap.com jumped to 4.18% on August 19th. This figure is strong from a customer acquisition standpoint because 53% of the visitors referred from Groupon.com to Gap.com were new, meaning they had not visited the website in the past 30 days.
Also aiding in the success of the promotions was high consumer awareness and shoppers actively seeking the discount. Searches for ‘gap coupons’ ranked 4th on August 19, 2010 among the search terms driving traffic to Groupon.com.
For more insight about Group Buying websites, please visit our webinar archive to listen to ‘New Trends in Online Retail – Flash Sales and Group Buying’.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 11:41 AM
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In Categories Group Buying | Retail
Customer Acquisition Strategies in Insurance
August 25, 2010
USAA regularly captures the highest share of visits within the Insurance category and receives nearly the amount of the next 3 combined. A large driver for the high share of visits to USAA.com is the limited number of physical locations, so the majority of contact takes place online or over the phone. One caveat is that USAA also offers banking and investing services in addition to insurance.
Customer acquisition is always important within the Insurance industry, so another way to look at the category is ranking the websites by the share of new visitors to measure potential drivers of growth. Among all of the new visitors (defined as having not visited the website in the past 30 days) to the Insurance category last week, Geico attracted the largest with 8.73%, followed by Progressive and LowerMyBills.com – Insurance. Overall, 69% of visits to Geico.com were from new visitors last week, in contrast LowerMyBills.com – Insurance, an aggregator of insurance rates was among the highest with 91%.
The sources of the new visitors vary somewhat across the websites, with Geico, for example, search is the main driver of new visitors to the website, followed by social networks and other insurance websites. Search is also the top driver for Progressive along with social networks and portal frontpages. In comparison, Lower My Bills – Insurance is more reliant on web-based email and television websites for customer acquisition initiatives.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 01:15 PM
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In Categories Acquisition | Insurance
Search Behavior and Results for Laptops
August 18, 2010
Laptops have become an increasingly popular and necessary Back to School item, so we used the generic term ‘laptops’ to help understand the current search strategies and behavior around this competitive term. Many consumers put significant time and consideration into researching a laptop before committing to the purchase, since computers and electronics tend to have a longer life span and higher price tag.
In order to help understand what searchers are looking for during the purchasing cycle, we looked at the Search Term Sequence Summary report for ‘laptops’, a new tool to be released soon in Hitwise. The search terms used in queries before ‘laptops’ are an interesting lot, many include brands of computer manufacturers or retailers, along with price-sensitive qualifying terms like ‘cheap’, ‘free’, and ‘discount’. However, an interesting trend emerges following a search on ‘laptops’, where retail names seem to dominate. In some cases, there are also manufacturer names like Apple, Dell, HP and Sony, but each of these sells direct as well. These search queries suggest that shoppers may have a brand in mind to research initially, widen the search to include others (just to be sure), and then head to a retailer.
Knowing what people are searching for is half the battle and needs to be followed by understanding and improving your position with the search engines. Here we’ll focus on organic search results which take more time to create results, but could help drive sales in the upcoming holiday season.
Below are the results of searches on ‘laptops’ – the overall share of organic clicks for the search term ‘laptops’ and position in organic ranking across the 3 major search engines for last week from our new SERPs tool. Together, Best Buy and Dell captured 33% of all organic clicks from searches on ‘laptops’ for the week ending August 7, 2010 and hold high positions in organic listings on the search engine result pages (SERPs). Best Buy captured the highest share of organic clicks for searches on ‘laptops’ last week and ranked 1st in Google’s organic SERPs, 6th on Yahoo! and 9th on Bing. Dell followed with 10% of all organic clicks on ‘laptops’ and ranked 2nd in Google organic SERPs, 1st on Yahoo! and 2nd on Bing. While the position on Google is always going to be important, this is also a good way to discover additional opportunities with Yahoo! and Bing.
Also important is the landing pages appearing in the SERPs to understand where the searcher is potentially being sent following the search to compare the types of offerings being made by competitors.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 07:18 PM
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In Categories Back to School | Search Engines | Search Strategies
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