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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

UK Internet Map (as featured on the BBC’s Virtual Revolution)

February 02, 2010

If you managed to catch the first episode of the BBC’s excellent Internet documentary, Virtual Revolution, on Saturday night you may have noticed occasional flashes of “Source: Experian Hitwise” at the bottom of your screen. In amongst interviews with such luminaries as Tim Berners Lee, Jimmy Wales and Bill Gates, the Beeb built a couple of funky graphics using our data. The first, at the start of the show, was an Internet map of the UK drawing on our postal data to highlight the top towns for activities such as social networking, blogging and online dating.

The second, towards the end of the programme, was a fantastic 3D visualisation of one our Network Maps. Below, in a somewhat rawer form, is our original, which is based on data from September last year. It illustrates how traffic flows between 30 of the top websites in the UK: the size of the bubble represents the website’s share of Internet visits (so Facebook and Google UK have the biggest bubbles), while the lines illustrate the amount of traffic moving between the sites (using our clickstream data).

The point made in the program is that the web has consolidated around a relatively small number of brands, and to a certain extent this is true (the top 100 sites currently account for 42.5% of all UK Internet visits), but I think the most interesting thing about these maps is the way the traffic flows between the sites. You can see, for example, how Microsoft and Yahoo! send their own properties a lot of traffic, and also how much traffic flows between the very biggest sites. It is also interesting to note how people regularly switch between social media sites such as Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

To see the BBC graphics department’s far superior rendering of this data, you can watch Virtual Revolution on iPlayer. I would suggest watching the whole thing, but if you’re feeling impatient it appears within the last 15 minutes of the program.

For further updates, you can follow both Hitwise UK and BBC Virtual Revolution on Twitter.

Christmas Dinner – Homemade cheesecakes in; roast potatoes out

January 29, 2010

Guest blog by Jonny Steel, Marketing Insights Manager, mySupermarket.co.uk

With Christmas now behind us, it’s time to look back at how our eating habits changed during one of the most financially challenging festive seasons for years.

mySupermarket.co.uk, the grocery shopping and comparison website, not surprisingly found that “turkey” was the most searched for term in December 2009, leapfrogging all of the usual top searches like milk, eggs, bread, butter and cheese. However, interestingly, sales of turkey were down from last year, perhaps as a result of shoppers opting for cheaper alternatives. Sales of fresh turkey fell 17% and frozen turkey was down 37%. Although searches for “pork” remained unchanged, it seems that this provided a popular alternative for the main course, with sales of pork up 6%.

Elsewhere on the Christmas menu, the perfect roast potatoes were once again hotly debated by the celebrity chefs. Back in 2007 Nigella called for roasting the humble spud in goose fat. Last year she suggested rolling it in semolina. This year Michael Caine joined the debate by boasting on Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs that his were the best. So what’s his secret? Soaking parboiled potatoes in olive oil before cooking. Both goose fat and semolina seem to have fallen out of favour as the nation’s favourite secret ingredients, seeing their pre-Christmas sales through mySupermarket.co.uk drop this year by 8% and 20% respectively. Olive oil sales were also slightly down, so it would appear that Michael Caine had not become a culinary trend setter either. That doesn’t mean that we ditched the spud completely, though. Maris Piper potatoes, recommended by many chefs as the ideal roasting potato, saw their sales rise by 8% while chilled ready-made roast potatoes rocketed in popularity by 79% and frozen by 32%. It would therefore seem that 2009 will be remembered as the year when we just couldn’t be bothered stressing over our roasted potatoes.

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Cranberry sauce was the top search term driving traffic to recipe sites, and the customer purchasing data from mySupermarket.co.uk highlight how big cranberries really were this year. Sales of readymade cranberry sauce increased by 23% with Ocean Spray dominating the category. While sales of dried cranberries increased by 8%, it was the fresh variety that was the real winner this year, with a sales uplift of 57% on last year.

When it comes to dessert time, non-traditional treats seem to have been the flavour of the month. While Christmas pudding and mince pies remain national favourites, Nigella Lawson, Delia Smith and Gordon Ramsay were baking cheesecakes and pavlovas. As a result these desserts topped Christmas pudding in the recipe searches this year. At the same time, mySupermarket.co.uk experienced a 19% drop in sales of readymade cheesecake, presumably as a result of home chefs trying to bake one of their own instead of selecting one from the chilled aisles of the supermarket. Christmas pudding, on the other hand, saw a 12% rise on last year, suggesting that we were putting more confidence in what the supermarkets had to offer than our own creations.

UK_Internet_Searches_for_christmas_pudding_pavlova_cheesecake_gingerread_2010_2009_2008_chart.png

There was a lot of buzz around mulled wine and cider this year, with searches for the traditional Christmas drink far outweighing champagne. Although champagne outsold mulled wine by a long way, we were certainly looking to impress our guests with some of our own home-made mulled wine. Sales of cloves and cinnamon sticks were up 13% while Chianti wine, recommended by Jamie Oliver as the best for making mulled wine, also saw sales increase by 3%.

UK_Internet_searches_for_mulled_wine_cider_champagne_2009_chart.png

mySupermarket.co.uk is the shopping and comparison website which guarantees you the lowest price for your groceries at Tesco, ASDA, Sainsbury’s and Ocado.

mySupermarket Insights is a real-time FMCG data solution for businesses, tracking daily prices and promotions for all groceries at the main supermarkets.

You can also follow both mySupermarket and Hitwise UK on Twitter.

Apple Tablet the fourth most searched for laptop in the UK

January 26, 2010

Apple’s much anticipated – but not yet even announced, just rumoured – Tablet PC became the fourth most searched for laptop model in the UK last week. The table below is from the latest Hitwise Hot Consumer Electronics List, and shows that a portfolio of searches including terms such as ‘apple tablet’, ‘apple islate’, ‘itablet’, and ‘ipad’ accounted for 1.9% of all laptop related searches last week, up from 1.1% the week before. Only the Sony Viao, Samsung NC10 netbook and Apple’s own Macbook (although not the Macbook Pro) received more searches.

UK_Internet_searches_for_sony_viao_samsung_nc10_apple_macbook_pro_iTablet_acer_aspire_one.png

However, despite the increase in searches and all the hype, the Tablet was far from being Apple’s most searched for product last week. In fact, as the table below illustrates, it accounted for just 0.8% of Apple related searches – 35 times less than the iPhone.

Top_Apple_products_UK_iTunes_iPhone_iPod_touch_mac_january_2010_table.png

Of course, the UK isn’t the only place getting excited about the Apple Tablet, as Alan Long demonstrated in his excellent blog on Australian searches. With the probable announcement scheduled for today (January 27th), it’ll be interesting to see if the initial spike in searches following the announcement exceeds that for the iPhone. Keep an eye on the blog and our Twitter feed for updates…

UK Internet visits to skiing and snowboarding websites up 18.5% year on year

January 22, 2010

The recent heavy snow and cold weather may have caused travel chaos in some parts of the UK, but it clearly has also served to remind people of the pleasures of winter sports. For the week ending 9th January 2010, UK Internet visits to Snow Sports websites were up 18.5% on the same week in 2009, as well as 7.0% increase in ski- and snowboard related searches.

UK_Internet_visits_to_snow_sports_skiing_snowboarding_websites_2010_2009_chart.png

While most of the people planning a snow skiing or snowboarding holiday are considering the more traditional resorts in the Alps or North America, some are looking closer to home. UK Internet searches for Scottish Ski resorts have increased faster than any other so far this year, and searches for Glenshee have already quadrupled thanks to the recent weather.

As the table below illustrates, during the week ending January 9th 2010, Glenshee was the most searched for ski resort by UK Internet users, followed by Cairngorm. Searches for Cairngorm are up 60% year-on-year, while the second biggest increase in searches (after Glenshee) was for Nevis Range, also in Scotland. The rest of the top ten resort searches were all in the Alps, with Morzine the most popular overseas destination.

Most_searhed_for_ski_resorts_2010_glenshee_cairngorm_morzine_alpe_d_huez_chamonix_table.png