About Hitwise
Hitwise is the leader in online competitive intelligence. Contact Hitwise to maximize your online marketing programs.
Hitwise Intelligence - Insider
Understanding the Credit Segment of Website Visitors
August 26, 2010
Experian Hitwise clients will soon be able to gain a better understanding of the financial composition of a website or industry audience through the integration of VantageScore. This anonymized and aggregate credit data uses a common score range of 501-990, with the highest score indicating the segment with the least risk and represented by A, B, C, D and F grade intervals in addition to the numerical range.
The VantageScore data used by Experian Hitwise is summarized and averaged data that is not tied to specific individuals. Rather, the data provides an average VantageScore by geographic area which is then mapped to geographic, aggregated users within the Experian Hitwise sample. No personally identifiable information is used in the mapping of the VantageScore data to the Hitwise online sample.
Below, Research Director Heather Dougherty illustrates the use of VantageScore within Hitwise by analyzing the differences in the credit segments of online mortgage and home rental shoppers:
Credit Segments of Online Mortgage and Home Rental Sites
The Commerce Department recently announced that the sales of US homes dropped to a record low in July. Similarly, the market share of visits to a custom category of 16 Mortgage rate information & comparison websites has declined 18% for the week ending August 21, 2010 as compared to the same week 2 years ago.
Following the subprime mortgage crisis and with foreclosures on the rise, lenders and underwriters have increasingly implemented stricter criteria to secure a home loan. To understand the credit ranges of the visitors to sites within this category we used a new report within the Hitwise tool that provides VantageScore segment of visitors to a given website or industry. As a result of tougher loan requirements, the custom category Mortgage rate information & comparison websites tend to attract a greater share of visitors with a VantageScore profile in the higher ranges. For the 4 weeks ending August 21, 2010, 55% of the visitors are in the range of 801-901 (B & A) or higher and over-indexed for visitation when compared against the overall Internet population. Not surprisingly, those in the 601-501 (D & F) ranges are less likely to visit.
For those unable to buy a home, renting becomes the most viable option. Among the visitors to a custom category of 32 Home & Apt Rental websites, the groups that fall within the 501-601 (D and F) ranges make up both the largest share of visitors and over- index compared to the online population.
More information on VantageScore can be found here.
Posted by Marc Johnson at 02:52 PM
| 
(0)
| 
(0)
In Categories Demographics | Industry | Product
Building on Powerful Demographics with Rank by Audience
August 11, 2010
Unlike Prince, who recently proclaimed the internet as “over”, Harriet Hitwise believes the internet is alive and thriving. Harriet has created a series of successful, yet niche, online content platforms - most recently one that includes a lifestyle blog for young adults in the St. Paul, Minnesota area. In order to understand her particular audience, Harriet’s been leveraging Hitwise’s Demographic Find By tool to locate websites that align with her preferred online audience. Unmatched in its breadth and data depth, Harriet is able to filter a 10+ million online sample based on Age, Gender, State, DMA, Household Income and even MOSAIC Type.
Despite the combination of data depth and demographic information, Harriet was looking for additional methods to understand her target audience. In particular, Harriet needed to grasp the competitive landscape and market share of sites within her selected audience segments (age: 18-24 and DMA: St. Paul). Access to this data would help frame other marketing decisions while benchmarking performance.
Thankfully, Hitwise’s new Rank by Audience product leverages its demographic data and incorporates market share of websites’ into Rankings, so Harriet now knows that of the visitors to the Blogs & Personal Websites Category that are aged 18-24, 3.14% of them visit www.popeater.com, a popular blog within her audience segment. Additional sorting options further allow Harriet to analyze long-tail sites that match her competitive set, allowing her to target sites that have a lower volume of traffic, but higher concentration of her preferred audience segment.
The power of Rank by Audience is its flexibility to apply any type of demographic variable, including New versus Returning visitors, to better understand the market power of websites influencing her core audience. Harriet could even compare these results relative to all visitors to the Category. See our blog post "Targeting College Students for Back to School" for an example that utilizes the compare feature in Rank by Audience.
As expected, Rank by Audience can be found within the Rankings tab and enabled by selecting an Industry and the preferred Segment.
This creates a new “bucket” of users – those from the selected demographic variable that visited the selected Category. Now Harriet can understand the impact of websites given this newly defined market and clearly view how websites perform based on market share of visits:
Beginning today, Rank by Audience and New versus Returning visitor data will be offered as part of our commitment to providing best-in-class online intelligence tools.
Stay tuned to the Insider Blog for upcoming product announcements, including several new initiatives around Search Marketing.
Posted by Anita Gandhi at 06:11 PM
| (0)
| (0)
In Categories Demographics
The Second Long Tail: Internal Search Terms
December 16, 2009
From Tim Keelan, Senior Account Manager at Hitwise:
Our savvy clients use Hitwise Search Intelligence to expand on their keyword lists using their competitors search term traffic. Each week they examine the long tail of searches and make sure every term is captured for SEM/SEO. Despite their best efforts, they must take for granted that search terms as they are typed in search engines make up only a portion of all searches that are important to a site.
Why is that? Well, for one, not everyone uses a search engine to get to a website. In fact, for the month of November, about 73% of retailer traffic came from non-search engine sources, including brand-loyal users who navigate directly to their favorite sites. On top of that, when they do come through search engines, many times they arrive by searching for branded terms. While knowing your competitor is getting branded traffic might be interesting, it doesn’t help you to expand on your keywords. To find what I call the second long tail of search, we need to look at internal search term traffic.
Hitwise's Custom Internal Search Reports allow us to see the internal searches within a website. These searches are agnostic to the origin of the visitor. Using the data we are able to see the product search patterns of visitors, regardless of the source – branded external search, bookmarks, and e-mail to name just a few. Because so many visitors come in from brand searches and direct navigation, the internal search data is often broader and deeper than external search. Let’s take a look at Target.com.
Target.com Search Term Breakout
When looking at Target.com’s internal search data I’m first struck by not only the depth of the data, but also the fact that few of the terms are shared with external paid and organic search (only 979 terms). Here we are seeing the true long tail of search terms in the internal data. In the internal search list, there are barely any Target related searches, just products that people want to find and buy.
The differences between the product choices of internal vs. external are also stark. Below you’ll find the top 10 internal product searches for the week ending November 28th and in parenthesis where those terms rank in the external search list.
Top 10 Internal Product Searches (External Search Rank)
1. Wii (116)
2. zhu zhu (No External Search Traffic)
3. cartoons network games (12)
4. ipod touch (15)
5. ipod (34)
6. psp (1822)
7. math games for kids (1444)
8. wii games (228)
9. tv (No External Search Traffic)
10. brain fun (13221)
While the iPod touch may be important driver of external search, Target.com visitors are more interested in Wii consoles and games. Oh and the lovely “Zhu Zhu” is the #2 internal search but doesn’t appear in that form externally (“Zhu Zhu Pets” does drive substantial external traffic though).
You can read a lot into the contrast between the two types of searches. Did a circular promotion drive internal searches for “Brain Fun”? Was the term “Zhu Zhu” too expensive for Target to bid on? Should Target.com be featuring Wii since it’s obvious that’s what many of their visitors are looking for? All these are important questions, but the value of this data is clear – you now have 17,770 terms you didn’t know were important to your competitor. Ask your account manager about how you can get these reports on your own competitors.
Lastly, do you know which Target.com internal search term was more popular than Wii in the first week of November? “Target Job Application”. I expect that term to return to the top of the list as soon as everyone gets their holiday credit card bills.
Posted by Anita Gandhi at 10:42 AM
| (0)
| (0)
In Categories Product
Welcome to Experian Hitwise!
September 09, 2009
We couldn’t be more pleased about the launch of Experian Hitwise, our new brand that incorporates the identity of our parent, Experian. This is the exciting culmination of a process that began a little over two years ago with the acquisition of Hitwise by Experian. Since then, we’ve found innumerable opportunities that would not have been available to Hitwise as an independent entity.
Experian is the global leader in providing information, analytical and marketing services to organizations and consumers to help manage the risk and reward of commercial and financial decisions. Experian Hitwise is the leading online competitive intelligence service, measuring the largest worldwide sample (25 million internet users) and reporting on the most online businesses (over 1 million).
For clients, this integration brings several benefits:
Global reach. Employing 15,000 people in 40 countries, the Experian global network provides local knowledge and resources to support expansion into new markets - as with recent Hitwise launches in Canada and Brazil.
Data and analytical expertise. More than 100,000 clients worldwide tap into Experian’s expertise across Credit and Marketing Services, Decision Analytics and Consumer Interactive offerings. This expertise is leveraged in ongoing enhancements to Hitwise products and processes.
Financial strength. As one of the top performing stocks on the FTSE 100 with revenue of nearly US$4 billion, Experian has the resources to reinvest in the people, data and technology that drive product innovation and greater client value.
Product synergy. Combining complementary Experian Marketing Services products such as CheetahMail, Simmons, MOSAIC, INSOURCE, QAS, FootFall and others leads to offerings that help our customers improve their marketing and grow and protect their market share.
We are looking forward to working with clients, partners, industry bodies and Experian colleagues to expand on the strength of Experian Hitwise. We hope you will join us.
Marc Johnson
Chief Marketing Officer
Experian Hitwise