Hitwise Intelligence - Analyst Weblogs

Urban Households in Australia Dining Out in Downturn

2008-11-19T00:26:28Z

We've written previously about how recipe websites appear to be recession proof – In Australia, we're seeing a similar trend with the Food and Beverage - Lifestyle and Reference industry growing 36.43% in visits week ending 15 November 2008 compared to the same week last year. While the down economy might be prompting some households to do more home cooking, we've also measured an increase in visits of 8.85% to Restaurants and Catering websites by Australian users, suggesting that not all households have clinched their spending on eating out. Indeed, BIS Shrapnel notes that eating out remains a "way of life" for Australians.

In the Restaurants and Catering industry users were drawn to both budget outlets and high-end dining guides. Domino's Pizza Australia was the leading website for the week ending 15 November 2008 accounting for 10.38% share of visits, followed by ninemsn – yourRestaurants with 9.34% share. Menulog, an aggregated delivery service, ranked fourth with 6.46% share.

Hitwise Lifestyle Demographics data indicates that urban households are more likely than average to visits Restaurant and Catering websites. There were three main household segments identified from a mixture of income levels, including, Mosaic Groups "Young Ambition", educated and high-earning young singles and sharers in the inner suburbs, "Metro Multiculture", households in medium to high density areas with much cultural diversity, and "Learners and Earners", students and professionals living in high density, lower cost suburbs.

Several food and beverage chains have capitalised on consumer search for vouchers, with 'dominos vouchers', appearing as the top variation on 'vouchers' for the 4 weeks ending 15 November 2008. Other brands included, 'pizza hut vouchers', 'hungry jacks vouchers', 'subway vouchers' and 'kfc vouchers'. Catering websites were active on paid search campaigns, with 7.52% of search terms derived from paid traffic.

Just as budget restaurant chains have been active in promoting their voucher schemes online, high-end outlets should consider what value programs they offer to compete for tightened disposable spend.

Apple iPhone the most searched for mobile phone in the UK…just

2008-11-18T12:30:00Z

Last week we reported that the Nintendo Wii Fit video game is currently the most searched for product in the UK. In that post we also identified the Apple iPhone as the third most searched for product, followed by the Nokia N96 in fourth position. As the table below illustrates, during October mobile phones were the most searched for category of consumer electronic products in the UK, receiving over twice the volume of searches as video games, and three times that of computers.

The iPhone accounted for 5.8% of all mobile phone searches during October, and its popularity helped Apple achieve the accolade of being the most searched for consumer electronics brand in the UK last month. However, the so called ‘iPhone killers’ are tracking closely behind, with the Nokia N96, Sony Ericsson C905 and Samsung Omnia all increasing their share of searches in October. The popularity of Nokia’s N96, combined with the Finnish giant’s large back catalogue of phones, enabled the company to maintain its standing as the most popular mobile phone brand online, and 2nd overall brand behind Apple.

Sony Ericsson sits as the second most popular mobile phone brand, with three strong models in the top ten – including the recently launched Xperia X1. Samsung, the third most popular mobile brand online, has three models in the top ten. The HTC T-Mobile G1 (Google Phone), which launched in the UK the same week as the Xperia X1, was the 17th most searched for phone in the UK in October.

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Declines in airline visits = home for the holidays?

2008-11-18T09:51:37Z

In recent weeks, we have been watching visits to the retail and travel categories as consumer spending continues to decline. There have been several factors impacting traffic – the elections, the economy, and also the calendar, with Thanksgiving falling later in the season this year. Typically Thanksgiving is a major time for travel, but in the weeks leading up to the holidays, traffic to Airline websites have been at their lowest level in three years, with only a slight rebound last week following the election. Overall, last week traffic to a custom category of 47 Airlines websites was down 11% as compared to the same week last year.

To further understand this trend, we created two additional custom categories of websites – major and discount carriers. So far, the discount carriers have experienced a larger decline in visits, 14%, as compared to traffic to major carriers, which declined 7% last week from the previous year. One reason behind this could be a greater slowdown in spending among leisure travelers, while business travel helps boost the traffic for the major airlines. For example, Southwest is a discount airline that represents almost half of the visits to the discount airline category and tends to service both the business traveler and the leisure traveler. The market share of visits to Southwest.com were up 7% last week as compared to the previous year while others in the discount airlines category experienced dips in traffic.

My inbox has been filled with airfare sales for the past week, so we may see some of the traffic rebound as potential travelers are tempted by deals. Searches for 'cheap flights' increased 28% for the week ending Nov. 8, 2008, suggesting that there is demand for the right (or cheapest) price.

Hitwise will be at PhocusWright in Hollywood, CA on Tuesday, Nov. 18th, presenting ‘Search Data—It’s Not Just for Search Marketing Anymore’ with Jon Guljord of Expedia. Please join us if you are attending the conference or sign up for the webinar on Dec. 3rd.

Unemployment, redundancy and Christmas jobs

2008-11-17T09:30:00Z

The economic situation has worsened since our post on ‘redundancy’ searches in June, and unfortunately this is having a negative impact on job security. Consequently UK Internet searches for ‘redundancy’ have increased by 83% since August, reaching their highest peak over the past year in October. Over the 12 weeks ending 21st June we highlighted that UK internet users had searched for over 2,500 distinct terms containing the word ‘redundancy’. For the most recent 12 weeks, ending 8th November, that figure has increased to over 4,500.

Unemployment related searches such as ‘unemployment benefits’ and ‘job seekers allowance’ follow a similar trend to redundancy searches, peaking in June but then declining until August when searches began to increase again. Since the week ending August 16th, searches for ‘unemployment benefit’ have doubled and searches for ‘job seekers allowance’ have increased by 33%.

Over half the people searching for ‘redundancy’ (63.8%), ‘job seekers allowance’ (56.7%) and ‘unemployment benefit’ (55.1%) currently visit the government site Directgov. The five most popular employment search terms driving traffic to Directgov over the 4 weeks ending 8th November were ‘worktrain’, ‘job seekers allowance’, ‘income support’, redundancy’ and ‘job seekers allowance’. Worktrain is an online service from Jobcentre Plus that provides online job search, as well as information on jobs, careers and training.

Within our Employment and Training category, Jobcentre Plus and Reed.co.uk are currently the two most visited properties. Both sites are growing: Jobcentre Plus has experienced a 14% increase in traffic over the last year, while visits to Reed.co.uk have gone up by an even faster at 65%.

The differing growth rates of the two top job sites is a reflection of the different type of jobseeker that they attract. The economic downturn has hit the services sector particularly hard. The has caused an increase in the number of unemployed white collar workers, who are more likely to use a professional employment website like Reed over Jobcentre Plus, which is run by the government.

The majority of traffic to the Jobcentre Plus site comes from the Experian Mosaic group ‘Ties of Community’, which includes a large number of blue collar workers. On the other hand, Reed attracts a much broader audience. This includes significantly more traffic from ‘Symbols of Success’ – defined as “successful professionals with high incomes living in sought after areas” - then Jobcentre Plus.

As the chart above illustrates, searches for ‘christmas jobs’ have also doubled since this time last year. The top 10 searches including the term ‘christmas jobs’ reveal that the Post Office is the most sought after Christmas job employer, followed by Argos and then Marks and Spencer.

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Eating out: afternoon tea, listing sites and the MoneySavingExpert

2008-11-14T11:30:00Z

Last month we published a blog about recipe searches and promised to follow up with another post about eating out and restaurant websites. Well, here’s the post and there’s a lot to cover, from afternoon tea at the Ritz to cheap offers from the MoneySavingExpert Martin Lewis.

Last time we showed that there has been a growth in visits to our Food and Beverage – Restaurants and Catering category over the last 12 months. In order to understand what has been driving this growth, we’ve created a further three sub-category of eating out websites: listing and directories, chain restaurants, and gourmet restaurants. As you can see from the chart below, all three are currently growing. Of these, listing and directories is the largest sub-category and it experienced a 26% increase in traffic between October 2007 and 2008. The chain restaurants category is smaller but faster growing (49% year on year), while the gourmet restaurants is both the smallest and slowest growing (7%) category.

I’ll look into the listings and directories category first, and to give you an idea of which sites are the biggest, here is the top 10 ranked my market share of UK Internet visits to the category in October:

1. Beer in the Evening (20.6%)
2. Toptable (16.3%)
3. The UK Restaurant Guide (8.6%)
4. Where’s Best (7.8%)
5. TheFoodPlace.co.uk (6.5%)
6. Sugarvine.com (6.5%)
7. London Eating (5.6%)
8. Pub Explorer (5.3%)
9. Squaremeal (4.3%)
10. Just-eat.co.uk (4.1%)

As you would expect these types of sites are extremely reliant of search engines, which accounted for 57% of their traffic during October. The top search terms for the category are branded, with the next most popular being location based (e.g. ‘london restaurants’, ‘restaurants in manchester’, etc.), followed by searches for particular restaurants (current top five: Oxo Tower, Hakkasan, Nobu, Busaba Eathai and, erm, Planet Hollywood).

Another area that drives a lot of traffic to listing and sites is afternoon tea. During the 12 weeks ending 08/11/.08 Hitwise UK tracked over 1,400 distinct search terms containing the phrase ‘afternoon tea’. After the basic term, the most popular search was ‘afternoon tea in london’, while the most searched for venues were the Ritz, Claridges and Harrods (The Wolseley, the Hitwise UK Marketing and Research team’s favourite afternoon tea venue, ranked 85th). As you can see from the chart below, UK Internet searches for afternoon tea have increased by 67% over the last 12 months. Add in the fact that pub guide Beer in the Evening is the top listing site and it becomes clear that, one way or another, us Brits are determined to drink our way through the recession…

Restaurant listing and directory sites are also a good source of traffic for the travel sector. 10.7% of downstream traffic from the category goes to mapping sites, with a further 8.2% going to Destinations and Accommodation providers. The latter category has seen the amount of traffic it receives from restaurant listing and directories quadruple over the last three years, albeit to just 0.2%.

Looking at the restaurants’ own sites, Gordon Ramsey is the winner in the gourmet market, with Raymond Blanc in second place thanks to the success of his recent BBC series, The Restaurant. At the cheaper end of the scale, the top five chain restaurant websites in October were Pizza Hut, Domino’s Pizza, McDonalds, Pasta Hut and JD Wetherspoon.

One chain that has experienced a recent spike in traffic is Zizzi, In August, UK internet visits to the Italian restaurant’s homepage trebled after it released a two for one voucher via Handbag.com. This was then picked up by MoneySavingExpert, and the voucher went viral. During the week ending 16/08/08, 25% of Zizzi’s upstream traffic came from moneysavingexpert.com, with Handbag.com contributing a further 12%. There are a few of these offers around at the moment (Pizza Express is a current example), and the chart below – which illustrates the spike in visits from both MSE and Handbag.com to Zizzi – shows how successful they can be.

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Nintendo Wii Fit most searched for product this Christmas

2008-11-13T11:30:00Z

Wii Fit, Nintendo’s popular video game, is currently the most searched-for product by UK Internet shoppers in the run-up to Christmas. During October there were more UK Internet searches for Wii Fit than the Nintendo Wii, the most popular product last Christmas. After Wii Fit and the Wii console, the third most searched-for gadget is the Apple iPhone.

The popularity of Nintendo’s Wii Fit, which accounted for one in six searches for a video game during October, has helped online searches for video games overtake those for consoles in the run-up to Christmas. Judging by the search data, it looks as if the current generation of consoles – the Wii, Playstation 3 and X-Box 360 – have started to mature.

The chart below illustrates the volume of searches for three portfolios of search terms over the last three years. The first portfolio contains search terms related specifically to the consoles themselves, while the other two contain terms relating to actual video games and games console accessories. As you can see, last Christmas was the big year for actual console searches, but this year we haven’t seen a similar pre-Christmas uptick. However, searches for video games themselves have continued to increase, implying that this Christmas there will be more searches for console games than the actual consoles themselves.

Looking in more detail at the most searched for games during October, it is multi-platform video games that are most popular; almost one in two video game searches are for titles published across more than one console. Three of the top five most searched for video games in the UK during October were multi-platform: Far Cry 2, Call of Duty: World at War (released this week) and Saints Row 2. Wii Fit has helped Nintendo Wii Games into second place, accounting for almost one in four video game searches. Fable 2 - launched solely on the Microsoft Xbox 360 at the end of October - helped Xbox games stay above Sony Playstation games in the search chart.

In the run up to Christmas my colleague Richard Seymour - Client Intelligence Analyst and resident Hitwise consumer electronics expert – will be posting a lot more analysis on this topic. Over the next week there will be posts about mobile phones and netbooks, so keep an on the blog.

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Cruise Deals Searches Soar

2008-11-13T13:42:39Z

We on the Hitwise analyst team have been on the hunt for recession proof categories. Last week I thought I spotted another such category - Cruises. Visits to Cruises websites are up 7% year over year. However, further digging revealed that it isn't the category as a whole that is up but rather interest in "cruise deals" and "discount cruises".

Looking at the top ranked websites in the category, I noticed that, self described "clearinghouse for discount cruises", Vacations to Go received nearly one quarter of visits to Cruise websites last week. Traffic to Vacations to Go is up 36% year over year.

Second, looking at search terms sending visits to Cruise websites, I noticed that searches for "cruise deals" and "discount cruises" have soared in recent weeks.

As we mention in our forthcoming report, Fear, Uncertainty and What to Do, Using Hitwise in a Down Economy, consumers are shopping but are changing their search behavior as they try to stretch their dollars further. Adapting search marketing campaigns and website content to reflect what consumers are actually looking for is critical to keeping afloat in the weakened economy.

(To request a copy of the report, email csm.us@hitwise.com with the subject line "Report Request Competitive Intelligence in a Down Economy".

Exchange rates, currency sites and the strong Dollar

2008-11-12T09:00:00Z

Following our post on the interest rate cut earlier in the week, we’ve been looking at the impact of exchange rates on UK Internet behaviour. For the last few years, people travelling to the US from the UK (and the Eurozone) have suddenly found themselves feeling quite rich upon entering a shopping mall or restaurant. The weak Dollar helped make America feel like a cheap destination for European shoppers, but the financial crisis is putting an end to all that.

Cautious investors stung by the credit crunch have been fleeing to the Dollar, and the greenback is now much stronger against sterling. Back in July a British Pound would have bought 2 Dollars; today you would get just 1.56. One consequence of the strengthening Dollar is that more people are visiting currency websites. In fact, as the chart below illustrates, there is a correlation between UK Internet traffic to currency websites and the strength of the Dollar. To put it simply: the stronger the Dollar, the more us Brits visit currency sites.

To briefly explain the chart above: the orange line tracks traffic to a custom category of currency websites, while the blue line represents the strength of the US Dollar (USD) against the British Pound (GBP). We’ve represented the strength of Dollar using an index based on the exchange rate in September 2005. To give you the numbers: on September 3rd 2005, $1 would have bought you 54p, by last Saturday (08/11/2008) that had increased to 64p.

To me this data tells two interesting stories. The first is that more people go to currency sites when the Pound is weak than when it is strong. The second is how closely traffic is tied specifically to the Dollar – there was no correlation at all between currency sites and Pound–Euro exchange rates.

For reference, here is list of the top currency sites in the UK during October. This table is based on a custom category of currency websites that was created by looking at the top sites receiving traffic from key search terms such as ‘exchange rates’, ‘currency’, ‘dollar’, ‘euro’, etc.

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NZ Election - Politics Category Visits at all Time High

2008-11-11T04:08:21Z

The New Zealand election held on 8 November 2008 drew an all time high in daily visits to the Hitwise Lifestyle – Politics industry by NZ Internet users; 3.5 times greater than the daily average over a three year period. News & Media and Government – National websites also spiked in visits on 8 November by 12.1% and 36.1% respectively compared to the previous day, highlighting voter engagement with the online channel during the election.

Decision08, a sister website to 3 News, shot through to the top ranking in the Politics industry on 8 November 2008, accounting for 20.85% share of visits, representing a 3.9 fold increase on the previous day. The day following the election, the National Party website became the leading site in the Politics industry with 14.32% share, as users sought more information on the National Party leader, John Key, and their election win.

TVNZ and Elections New Zealand were also fast moving websites on 8 November 2008. TVNZ increased from a ranking of #25 to #14 amongst all websites, while Elections New Zealand increased from #59 to #26.

Search Opportunities for News and Media Websites

Last week Heather Hopkins wrote that News and Media websites had more opportunity to optimize on generic terms related to the US election. Similarly during the NZ general election, there were opportunities for News and Media websites to receive more traffic from candidate searches. For example, News and Media websites only received 8% of searches for 'helen clark' compared to 19.55% to Government – National websites (12 weeks ending 8/11/08). Searches for 'john key' were most likely to result in a visit to the Politics industry with 23.21% of clicks, compared to 6.36% to News and Media websites. Online publishers should be optimizing for generic terms based around events, in addition to branded search.

Interest rate cut: impact on search behaviour

2008-11-10T11:31:38Z

Following last week’s shock 1.5% rate cut by the Bank of England, UK Internet searches for ‘interest rates’ reached a three year high. As the chart below illustrates, this also led to a spike in searches for ‘tracker mortgages’ and ‘tracker mortgage’ as people went online to take advantage of cheaper borrowing. Perhaps more surprisingly, the rate cut also led to a moderate increase in searches for ‘savings’ last week.

The biggest recipient of traffic from searches for ‘tracker mortgage’ was Money Supermarket, although the price comparison website paid for almost 95% of that traffic. The highest placed mortgage provider on the list below is Halifax, while the most searched for branded term containing the phrase ‘interest rates’ was ‘nationwide building society interest rates’.

Money Supermarket provides a nice example of how finance comparison site have increased their focus on the mortgage market as a result of the credit crunch. The chart below illustrates the proportion search traffic that the website has received from four key mortgage related search terms – ‘mortgages’, ‘mortgage rate’, ‘mortgage’ and ‘mortgage deals’ – over the last three years. As you can see, following a decline during 2007, this year has seen all of these terms become more important to Money Supermarket, with a noticeable spike last week.

One site that has benefited from falling house prices recently is Hurmaz. A couple of weeks ago the ‘reverse auction’ website picked up a significant amount of press coverage about one of its listings, a flat in Highgate, North London. As you can see from the chart below, this resulted in a five-fold increase in traffic to Hurmaz.com. Visitors to the website tend to be older (during the last 4 weeks, 43% were over 55) and affluent - the most over represented Experian Mosaic group currently visiting the website is Global Connections, defined as ‘people with rewarding careers who live in sought after locations, affording luxuries and premium quality products’.

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Diana Vickers leading the X Factor pack online

2008-11-07T16:00:00Z

Now that we’ve got the American election and the Glenrothes by-election out of the way, we can finally direct our attention to more important voting matters. Last week we showed how ITV’s The X Factor was picking up more online traffic than the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, and promised to make our first round of predictions about the latter show.

Just a quick recap on our methodology: a couple of years ago Bill Tancer developed a technique for predicting the winner of reality TV shows based Internet on searches for contestants. The thinking behind his approach was this: because Reality TV shows are essentially popularity contests, analyzing search behaviour is a great way of indentifying the most popular contestants. Last year was my first go at using this technique and I successfully predicted that Alesha Dixon would win Strictly Come Dancing. This year we’ll see whether or not that was beginners luck…

There first part of the process is to look at the volume of searches for each of the remaining eight contestants. As you can see from the chart below Diana Vickers is currently the most searched for contestant, last week receiving almost twice as many searches as her nearest rivals, JLS. The one candidate that is slightly under represented in this chart because of the obscure spelling of his name is Eoghan Quigg. However, even when I included more conventional spellings, such as ‘Owen’, he still lagged behind Diana Vickers.

Given that Diana Vickers is so far ahead of the pack, can we assume that she is the most popular and will therefore win? The answer is ‘no’ – it important to dig a little deeper in the data to test whether the people searching for her are: A. doing so because they like her and B. are the sort of people who are likely to vote for the X Factor. The first test is to look at the search term variations on her name, and the top 10 for last week are displayed in the table below.

As you can see, last week UK Internet users searched for almost 600 distinct terms containing the words ‘diana vickers’. One of the key tests with searches for women is to make sure that there aren’t too many prurient searches, as people using terms such as ‘topless’, ‘upskirt’ and ‘nude’ are unlikely to be voting in reality TV contests! Fortunately there are none of these in Diana Vickers top 10 – terms such as ‘diana Vickers pictures’, ‘diana vickers pics’ and ‘diana Vickers dress’ are pretty innocent, and have pretty low volumes anyway.

That a number of the top searches for Diana Vickers that include variations on X Factor and the names of social networks is also encouraging. These searches are also reflected in the list of websites that people searching for ‘diana vickers’ are going to. Bebo is the top site, implying that she is building up a fan base on the most popular social network with younger users. The appearance of YouTube and Facebook in the top 10 further point in that direction, while seeing the Mirror and Sun is also a positive sign. The X Factor homepage is the fourth most popular destination for people searching for ‘diana vickers’; while hers is the most popular contestant name sending traffic to the site.

The final test is demographics, and to do this we’ve compared visitors to www.diana-vickers.com – an unofficial fan site and the seventh largest recipient of traffic from searches for the name – with the X Factor homepage. Again, the news is positive: both sites received 55% of their traffic from female visitors, while the age ranges are also similar.

So, it looks like Diana Vickers is currently the front runner online and the Hitwise ‘favourite’. Of course, there are still a number of weeks to go and things could change, so consider this and interim prediction. We’ll make our final prediction when the field has narrowed a bit!

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Want to know how to use Hitwise for SEO? Listen to this recording of a webinar hosted by Hitwise Account Director Guy Cookes.

News Organizations Miss Opportunities to Gain Search Engine Traffic

2008-11-07T13:09:42Z

Following from a blog post from my colleague from across the pond, Robin Goad, I looked at where consumers went in the final weeks of the election when searching for election coverage. The analysis reveals that news and media websites are missing opportunities to attract readers through generic, non-branded search traffic. Search engines account for more than one fifth of traffic to News and Media websites, but the vast majority of this traffic is from branded search queries such as “cnn” or “ny times”.

The highest volume search terms used to find news and information about the election were searches for the candidates (by name) and searches for poll data. After conducting these searches, most people continued to a politics website, rather than a News and Media website.

For the analysis, I created a Hitwise Search Term Portfolio of queries that included variations of searches for the candidates’ names. 10.59% of these searches sent a visit to a News and Media website. But remove Google News and Yahoo! News and that number drops to 1.49%. After the candidate Web sites, Wikipedia, Google News, websites devoted to dispelling urban myths and Biography.com were the top destinations. You would expect the candidate websites to top the list, but I expected to see more news websites in the downstream websites.

The top search terms relating to political polls (such as “presidential polls”, “election polls” and “polls”) sent more visits to Politics websites than to News and Media websites. Politics sites offering aggregated polling results were the top destination for these queries.

News and media organizations are missing an opportunity to attract “free” or organic search engine traffic by optimizing articles to appear in search results. Using the words consumers type into search engines in titles of articles and content of pages are factors that affect search engine optimization. A quick look at leading news and media websites shows words such as “President Map”, “Voter Surveys” and “Interactive Map” to headline sections displaying poll results, rather than “presidential poll” or “election polls” - the words consumers use to find this information.

News and media websites are being hard hit by the economic downturn as advertising budgets are cut. Opportunities abound to better optimize stories and sections to increase “free” search engine traffic.

For an update on the most visited news and media sites on election day, visit this post from earlier today.

Election Day News Event of the Year - 24 Hour Networks Win

2008-11-07T12:52:06Z

Election Day has been the biggest news event of the past three years with Americans visiting News and Media websites in droves and in particular websites of 24-hour cable news networks. Visits to News and Media Web sites reached their highest level of the past three years on November 4th, accounting for 6.6% of all US Internet visits. Visits to News and Media websites were 40% higher than the average for the month of October.

Web sites for 24 hour cable news networks, CNN.com, MSNBC and Fox News were the biggest beneficiaries of visits each seeing traffic more than double on November 4th compared to the average for October. CNN in particular was the biggest beneficiary, with visits up 190%.

By comparison, visits to Print media websites were up only 10% and in fact, Broadcast media website visits overtook Print media website visits for the first time. This tells me that print media brands are still saddled with a legacy of being viewed as static publications. Newspapers have been trying to reinvent themselves but when a story is developing and changing in real time, consumers continue to turn to the 24-hour news networks.

In a few minutes, I will post a second entry on this theme - this time looking at search data for the election showing that News and Media companies are missing out on search engine traffic by not optimizing to event based terms.

TV and US media websites big election winners in the UK

2008-11-06T19:30:00Z

The US presidential election was a global media event, and Barack Obama’s historic victory caused a spike in traffic to news websites in the UK. Here is a list of the 10 most visited in the News and Media websites in the UK yesterday (5th November, excluding weather sites and the BBC Homepage):

1. BBC News (18.2% of UK Internet visits to News and Media websites)
2. MSNBC (4.2%)
3. Sky News (3.3%)
4. Yahoo! UK and Ireland News (2.1%)
5. Google News UK (1.6%)
6. Daily Mail (1.6%)
7. Guardian Unlimited (1.5%)
8. Times Online (1.5%)
9. CNN.com (1.3%)
10. The Sun (1.2%)

Yesterday BBC News was the seventh most visited site in All Categories, it’s highest ever ranking. As with the Beeb’s Olympic coverage, the regular updates also helped keep people on the site. At just under 10 minutes, its average session time was the highest since the Scottish election in May 2007. Other TV-related websites also did well, with MSNBC, Sky News and CNN all making it into the top 10.

The inclusion of two US Cable TV news sites reflects what happened in the US, where Yahoo! News, CNN and MSNBC were the top sites on Election Day. US Media sites in general received a significant boost from the election; as the chart below illustrates, our custom category of US Media sites - which includes TV, newspaper and independent websites – received three times as much UK Internet traffic as usual yesterday.

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Heather Hopkins has written two excellent blog posts on what happened during the election in the US. The first is on the sucess of cable TV networks on the night, the second describes some of the failings of the mainstream media in the run up to the election.

In tough times, in brands we trust!

2008-11-06T06:06:07Z

In a previous blog – Online Gathering Retail Muscle – I compared the top 100 Bricks and Mortar retailers with the top 100 pure online retailers to establish a picture of the online retail landscape.

With the credit crunch taking effect and the amount of financial uncertainty surrounding us, it's a good time to review that post as we enter the crucial retail period this Christmas.

As the chart above clearly highlights, the traditional brands – Bricks & Mortar retailers, are receiving a substantial increase in visits and now lead over their online counterparts. Bricks & Mortar retailers currently hold a 21.88% share lead over Online Retailers as of week ending November 1, 2008, reversing the reported 28.7% lead by Online Retailers in week ending June 21, 2008. This separation between the two custom categories has not been seen since late 2005.

Bricks & Mortar Retailers have seen a year on year growth in visits of 29.87%, and the majority of this growth has been seen in the past four weeks, increasing 23.17%. This past week's growth of 13.79% is strong compared to the corresponding week in 2007 of 3.71%.

Click chart to enlarge.

Online Retailers are enjoying accelerated growth over the past 4 weeks up 4.19%, compared to year-on-year growth of just 1.94%. This past week's growth (w/e November 1, 2008) is higher than the corresponding weeks in 2007 with an increase of 1.75% versus 0.74%.

Click chart to enlarge.

So what has caused this change in the landscape, is it the credit crisis, is it the larger brands starting to have some greater marketing impact online or are other factors at play?

In previous years Online Retailers growth has outpaced Bricks & Mortar brands online leading into Christmas so this is potentially a substantial change in the online retailing landscape.

"In tough times people revert to brands they know and trust" is an old adage and an underlying reason why the development and management of your brand is so important.

Opportunities abound in a tough market to enhance and develop brands and market share to capture not only the short-term benefit but also the longer-term revenue advantage in a rising market.

I'd be interested to hear any alternate perspectives on this trend and philosophy.

And, as always, we urge you to follow Hitwise Asia Pacific on Twitter to keep up with the latest Internet data and trends.