Last week, during the Vintage Tub & Bath Dinner, Hitwise won a link from the SEOmoz blog. But, in typical Rand fashion, I decided that rather than simply point a bit of traffic their way, I'd do a real, constructive, signally post using some Hitwise data.
Below, I've looked at several commercial sectors on the web that have recently seen entrances by firms in the "Web 2.0" space. Hitwise provided their traffic data, and I pulled some stats from Yahoo! and Technorati to help provide a deeper look at what we're seeing from these firms:
Travel:
- Farecast - offers airfare predictions
- Kayak - compares fares from aggregators and airline websites
- Sidestep - as with Kayak; a comparison engine
Wikis
- Wetpaint - A hosted wiki solution
- Wikispaces - Also a host of wikis
- Wikihow - A wiki article website
Bookmarking Tools
- Del.icio.us - a social tagging and sharing tool
- Bluedot.us - also for social tagging
- Ma.gnolia - social tagging, sharing and unique media creation
Tech News
- Digg - the social news & voting site
- TechCrunch - Michael Arrington's popular web 2.0 blog
- Techmeme - Gabe's kickin' tech news tracker
In general, these charts suggest a trend that many have commented on in the Web 2.0 world - a single market leader with several "also-rans" in the space. Obviously, our sample size is too small to reliably back up this guess, but it makes for fascinating reading for us data geeks.
Hitwise is pricey - $20,000 a year minimum to be exact (maybe more at this point) and it generally sucks for calculating traffic to websites receiving fewer than 500K-1mil visitors per month, but for macro trends, they've got some very cool data. Along with information like the trend charts above, you can get:
- Downstream data - telling you what search terms and URLs sent the site traffic over time
- Upstream data - where visitors from the site went next
- Keyword research - they have a separate KW research tool that rocks, but don't offer it separately from the main package (which I've complained about many times)
- Rankings of sites in a given sector - from most popular to least, giving you an idea of who you might be competing with that you weren't previously aware of
- Tons of other spiffy information
Hitwise is pulling their data from the collected logs of ISPs - companies that provide Internet access to homes and businesses (and then track every little thing you do). This data is aggregated, so there's no worry that you might be outed for surfing Care Bears fan fiction in your free time (or discover that your office mate, Ted, is doing it), but it does come from real visits. The inherent bias centers around which ISPs provide data to Hitwise - geographic, cultural and demographic bias have all been seen in Hitwise's stats, but never refined to the degree that we could actually say - "OMG, they buy Roadrunner and Comcast and Qwest in the Southeast, Midwest and the suburbs of Boise."
I have access to some Hitwise through some clients who run it, but haven't personally subscribed - it's useful for a large business, but like any other statistical data, you need to be prepared to use it effectively and watch for errors.
Congrats to Hitwise, BTW - way to have your ticket number called 
BTW - Does anyone who reads SEOmoz use Hitwise data? What do you find useful about it?
Update: Rob from Vintage noted that Hitwise IS now offering keyword research access separately at https://www.keywordintelligence.com/
We too use it to calculate market share, but I'm not sure our categorisation is precise enough for this to mean anything.
And it's got some pretty useful stuff for keyword research (what's driving traffic to the competition) and being able to see down-stream traffic leaving your site...
Great post, and great comments shor. I too don't see value in getting it yet for some of my clients as their competitors may not have enough traffic to make this worthwhile. However there are a select few that could use this info. 20k Minimum isn't awful, but maybe we could pool our resources and get a big SeOmOZ reader discount?
Personally would love to get hold of it on an agency level, however my one gripe (whilst I understand the commercial reasons), is Hitwise not selling the products to agencies (in the UK at least).
Fantastic bit of kit thought
Last year I got a demo from them and left with a list of the top 40 sites in my industry. I then advertised on all 40 of those sites happy in the knowledge that they were the top sites. This information can be very valuable if you are looking for places to advertise or new sites to partner with.
Relative Market Share As mentioned above, the relative market share is an excellent metric for translating your online initiatives to senior management. I've run banner advertising campaigns that were generally for brand awareness and I could specifically show when our ads ran and how we took away (online) market share from our competitor sites. Very useful when trying to articulate the value of banner ads that don't generate click-throughs. Now, did it increase the intent to buy -- that remains to be seen, and there are plenty of other services out there to gauge that.
Conversions Another relatively newer service is Hitwise Conversions. I haven't personally used it yet, but have received a demo from our account rep, and plan to use it next year (it's fairly pricey). You can purchase it one-time, monthly, quarterly, or however your budget will handle it. What you can ask Hitwise to do is track conversions on a competitor's site (conversions meaning views of products, checkouts, use of a particular feature, etc.). This does require the site to get a fairly large volume of traffic if you want to track certain features (several sites I asked for data on did not have enough traffic for Hitwise to pull relevant information).
Once you've established your conversions, you can then see which keywords are driving conversions to your competitor sites. Clicks/traffic are one thing, but conversions are another -- and this is very valuable information to find out as you optimize your SEM campaigns.
Data overload My biggest complaint is the data overload. Our Hitwise account manager does a good job of checking in with me to ensure I'm still using the tool and whether or not I have any questions. Naturally, I never have any questions top-of-mind when I receive the call, but always struggle my way through the myriad of reports and graphs that are available.
We use Hitwise for all manner of competitive intelligence reports.
1) Relative Market Share (RMS): There's a nifty 'search traffic share' pie chart that displays your proportion of your industry's total search volume.
For example, if you have 20% of the auto industry's total search traffic and your main competitor has 30%, it becomes easy to track your RMS (20/30 = 66%) against the market leader on an ongoing basis.
2)Clickstream: Find out which sites are sending traffic to your competitors! Identify where users go after leaving your site! While there are flaws to this product, the ability to assess leakage to competitors and find potential partner sites is extremely valuable.
3)Paid vs. Natural split: Hitwise recently released a new product that allows you to see the share of paid search traffic vs. natural search traffic for any site. When did a competitor turn up their SEM spend? When did a competitor see a huge jump in natural traffic? What percentage of their traffic referred from "mobile ringtones" was paid vs. natural?
4)Search keyword gap analysis: Quite simply - which keywords are driving traffic to your competitors but not to you? After filtering out a competitor's brand words, this is a great way to grow your own keyword list, discover high volume traffic drivers and identify if some promotional campaign or some trend/fad drove the spike in a competitor's traffic.
The downside of pulling logs from an undisclosed selection of ISPs is far outweighed by the datasets that Hitwise produces. Suffice to say, I use Hitwise on a daily basis to determine what our competitors are doing and how our sites are faring.
edit: The pretty charts are great for senior managers that dislike looking at numbers :)
"The pretty charts are great for senior managers that dislike looking at numbers :)" -heh, I was hoping there were some of them out there who were a bit smarter :P
And BTW Shor: GREAT reply, Rand: isn't it about time to get Shor a posting account? :)
Yeah - Shor is in my book of nominations for commenter of the year. Shoot me an email sometime, Shor!
Thanks for the compliments Joost & Rand!
Adding to the SEOmoz community is simply a pleasure - knowing that there is the possibility I might be able to help people gives me the warm fuzzies - especially after another grueling day at the office :)
The Paid vs Natural Split feature was introduced in the UK, but is not yet available in the US. A Hitwise account manager told me the company was still evaluating the feasibility of providing a similar service in the States. If offered in the future, it would require an extra fee.
As already mentioned, the upstream and downstream data is really useful.
They have some of the best reps we have dealt with.
Cool graphs, great post. You're right, Hitwise totally rocks... esp the inbound/outbound on sites can be really revealing...look at the inbound searches for Craigslist and tell me what most people use their site for. ;-)