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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific
Analyst Weblog
12 things you need to know about Facebook (Australia)
October 13, 2010
While Sony Pictures are releasing the movie ‘The Social Network ‘in Australian cinemas on October 28 well behind the US and UK, I couldn’t resist providing some updated data around Facebook after seeing my colleague ,Robin Goad’s post yesterday.
For those curious about the film, The Social Network, here’s the lofficial trailer.
We’ll up the ante a little and deliver 12 insights around the Facebook phenomenon taken from the Australian Hitwise data set.
1. Facebook is the second most popular website visited by Australians after Google.com.au, accounting for 7.83% of all visits in the month of September 2010 but is the most popular website for Australian’s aged 18-24, with 8.97% of visits for the four weeks ending 2 October2010 just ahead of Google.com.au’s 8.96%.
2. Facebook’s share of page views represents almost 1 in 5 pages viewed by Australians during September 2010. Facebook’s 19.3% of all page views swamps Google.com.au’s 7.4% share of page views.
3. Facebook is clearly Australia’s most popular social network and reflects similar UK trends featured in Robin’s post. Facebook accounts for 56.8% of all visits to social networks in September 2010, being almost 3.8 times that of You Tube (15.1% share of visits).
4. Facebook Mobile (m.facebook.com) is the sixth most visited social network receiving 0.82% of all visits to social networks for the month of September 2010, indicating the growing use of mobile devices across Wi-Fi networks.
5. Facebook is the number one search term in each of the major search engines used by Australians – Google.com.au, Google.com, Bing.com and Yahoo! With variations of Facebook, including ‘face book’,’ facebook login’ and ‘fb’, search terms for Facebook accounted for 4.4% of all successful searches in the 4 weeks ending 2 October 2010.
6. Facebook received more traffic from Search Engines than any other website in the month of September 2010 receiving 9.6% of their traffic.
7. The average session time for a user visiting Facebook during September 2010 was 28 minutes and 58 seconds.
8. Over one in nine visits to all other websites directly after a visit to Facebook. Facebook accounts for 11.3% of all upstream traffic to other websites visited by Australian Internet users. This makes it the second largest source of traffic behind Google.com.au (31.7%) and well ahead of ninemsn that generates 3.8%.
9. Facebook’s share of Australian’s visits to all websites has increased 6-fold over the past three years and continues to capture more and more of Australian’s online focus , having increased its share of visits by 29.2% in the past year.
10. South Australian’s are the highest users of Facebook, when compared to the Australian online population, reflecting a 10% higher propensity to visit Facebook. NSW generates 32.1% of all Australian based visits to Facebook, on par with the online population profile.
11. A definite female skew exists of those Australian’s visiting Facebook. 55.8% are from Women and 44.2% from Men
12. Downstream traffic from Facebook to retail sites have increased 14.8% over the past year ,with Apparel and Accessories websites and Sport and Fitness websites, seeing the largest increases of 75.6% and 59.4% respectively.
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Posted by Alan Long at 06:18 PM
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Climate Change defeats a Prime Minister
June 24, 2010
Maybe a simplistic headline, but Australia now has a new Prime Minister after Kevin Rudd stood aside for Julia Gillard to take the reins of the Federal Labor Party and the Australian Government.
An impending federal election combined with a series of political errors, such as the handling of the Home Insulation Scheme and the backflip on the ‘greatest moral challenge of our generation’ - Climate Change, forced the hand of the Labor Party factional heavyweights jittery enough to make a move.
Throw in the Mining Super Tax as part of the overall Tax Reform, Immigration and Health Reform and Kevin Rudd’s government was facing challenges from all sides. But what do we as the Australian public care about? Which issues are the ones we are interested and invested in, and did the Prime Minister read the temperature of the community accurately? Obviously not.
Using search data as a way of tracking interest in specific subjects I have constructed a series of search term portfolios based around Health Reform, Tax Reform (including the Mining Super profits tax), Climate Change, and Immigration (including asylum seekers) to gain a grasp on the comparative importance to Australian Internet users.
Of all of the issues, Climate Change has the highest level of awareness followed by Immigration, the two issues that Kevin Rudd has been criticised most heavily for over the past months. The Insulation Scheme while a debacle on many fronts didn’t capture the broader interest in the community and was able to be overcome comparatively quickly.
Comparing search volumes of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard, against the backdrop of Tony Abbott, highlights the increased interest in Julia Gillard over the past months, increasing 450.0% since the beginning of April (week ending 19 June 2010 compared to week ending 3 April 2010), while Kevin Rudd has also seen an upswing of interest over the same period of 93.8%. These upward shifts for the Labor Party Leaders occurred at the same time that interest in Liberal Leader Tony Abbott fluctuated from its 2010 peak in week ending 3 April to currently sit 73.8% lower, a concern for the Liberal’s confronting a 2010 election campaign.
Interestingly the top 10 search term variations for each of the Labor Leaders are not too critical or negative, as could be expected, considering the recent political events.
One interesting variation to note is the 8th most searched for term featuring Julia Gillard – ‘Julia Gillard treason’. Maybe the Rudd family will be responsible for this search terms growth during the current week.
As Australia’s first female Prime Minister it is an historical appointment and the newspapers and bloggers will have a field day picking over the remains of Kevin Rudd’s political career. What will be interesting to watch will be the rebuilding of Julia Gillard. I have no doubt that social media will have a very large part to play and it will be fascinating to watch it unfold.
One thing that can be sure is that Labor is listening and Julia Gillard will put Climate Change back on the current agenda before any election will be called.
Could this have the unintended outcome of being the remaking of Malcolm Turnbull?
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Posted by Alan Long at 03:07 PM
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Is the World Cup of Tourism value?
June 23, 2010
How do we judge the value of large international sporting events such as the World Cup Soccer to the host nation?
- Infrastructure investment
- Employment gains
- Increased tourism – immediate and ongoing
- Ongoing awareness
It’s obviously all of these things and many more that go into making a decision and commitment to aggressively bid for an event of the magnitude of the Olympic Games or World Cup. The bid committees no doubt have a number of various formulae that support their decision and gain government support for a bid.
Using search terms as an indicator, I have categorised the top 1,000 search terms that include ‘south africa’ into four portfolios and tracked the comparative growth of each search portfolio.
General enquiries about South Africa. i.e. non World Cup specific, have been on a steady incline since the beginning of the year and in the week ending 19 June increased 121.0% over the week prior to the start of the World Cup (week ending 29 May 2010).
World Cup specific ‘south africa’ searches as expected rose sharply as the event finally got onto the pitch, with search volumes increasing 14-fold (+1,300%) in week ending 12 June 2010, then receding in week ending 19 June 2010 to be 355% higher than in week ending 29 May 2010..
Other sports including cricket and rugby experienced a doubling of search volumes (+100.0%) in the past week, but off a much lower base, the previous weeks peak (week ending 12 June 2010)is reflective of the current South Africa vs. West Indies cricket series currently taking place in the Caribbean.
Tourism related searches for South Africa rose 133.3% in week ending 19 June compared to week ending 29 May 2010, The chart highlights the gradual build of tourism related searches from early March and then a steeper growth from the start of May.
Leading search terms within the Tourism portfolio are:
So things are looking good for South Africa’s tourism efforts; later in the year we’ll be able to judge whether they have been able to retain some ongoing benefit post the World Cup.
Locally Australia’s Football Federation announced recently that it has decided to withdraw from the bid for the 2018 World Cup and focus their energies solely on winning the host nation rights for the 2022 World Cup. A specially developed website has been built to harness support and share information and news about the bid. Come Play (www.australia2018-2022.com.au) was launched in June 2009 and after the immediate hype settled down while drawn out negotiations and consultation over ground rights with the NRL and AFL played out, sometimes very publicly.
As the World Cup drew closer the site experienced strong growth, but not back to the highs of the original launch in June 2009.
Search volumes though do provide another perspective into the psyche of the Australian Internet user, and with the chart below highlights the search volume has climbed back to the levels of the launch of the bid.
Though not reflected in share of visits growth to the official bid website, the search volumes have grown over 6 times (511.1%) in week ending 19 June 2010 compared to the week prior to the start of the World Cup, week ending 29 May 2010.
A goal or two on the pitch may further support Australia’s bid to bag the World Cup in 2022, because after the debacle against Germany last week and the draw with Ghana, it’s unlikely to come downunder in 2010.
We’ll continue to update information around online behaviour relating to the World Cup in South Africa over the coming weeks, to keep up to date connect with us via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
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Posted by Alan Long at 02:43 PM
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In Categories Sport | Tourism | World Cup 2010
Ronaldinho & The Group of Death
June 09, 2010
The buzz is building around Australia’s second consecutive tilt at the Football (Soccer) World Cup which begins on 13 June against Germany in the first game of the so called “Group of Death” that also features Ghana and Serbia.
Australian Internet searches featuring ‘world cup’ increased 139.8% last month (week ending 5 June 2010 compared with week ending 8 May 2010) as Australian searched for information via over 5,000 search variations. The ten most popular search variations of ‘world cup’ were;
With interest around the final make-up of the squad and the controversial friendlies with New Zealand on 24 May and the USA on 5 June, the volume of search for the Socceroos has quadrupled in the fortnight since week ending May 22 (+314.5%).
Interest in Fantasy Football competitions and in sports betting or the available odds have generated increased search volumes in the in week ending 5 June (compared to week ending 22 May), World Cup fantasy Football searches increasing 183.3% and World Cup Odds and Sport Betting related searches jumping 225.0%.
Team related queries have increased 76.5%, and search interest in fixtures and World Cup dates increased 95.0% and 55.6%, respectively, comparing week ending 5 June to 22 May 2010.
Search queries relating to the TV and Online coverage of the World Cup increased 76.5% since week ending 22 May, with SBS being the main recipient. SBS has dominated the World Cup coverage related search terms with six featured in the top ten search queries, well ahead of Foxtel’s first appearance in the search volume rankings at number 15.
Of the 939 athlete’s within the provisional squads for participating countries, Portugal’s Cristiano Ronaldo was the most searched for World Cup athlete, outpointing Australian stars Tim Cahill and Harry Kewell. Brazil’s decision to cut Ronaldinho from the squad seems to have done his popularity no harm being one of seven internationals to make the 10 most searched for footballers last week.
We’ll continue to update information around online behaviour relating to the World Cup in South Africa over the coming weeks, to keep up to date connect with us via Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn.
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Posted by Alan Long at 01:31 PM
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In Categories Entertainment | Sport | Television | World Cup 2010
