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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Dougherty - North America
Analyst Weblog
Analyzing the Maclaren Stroller Recall
November 18, 2009
Last week parents were horrified to learn about a recall on Maclaren umbrella strollers due to multiple cases of children’s fingers being amputated. The volume of traffic to the Maclaren website jumped 9x in volume on Monday, Nov. 9, 2009 as the recall hit the news and initially overloaded the website.
While the recall was only for products within the US, concerns also caused the volume of visits to surge 12x in the UK for the British stroller company.
Search was the top driver of traffic to the Maclaren website on Nov. 9th and referred 42% of the visits that day, 97% which were new visitors that had not been to the website in the past 30 days. The Maclaren website received the highest share of clicks from a portfolio of search terms related to the recall last week, which allowed the manufacturer to communicate directly with the owners of the strollers and help control the message. The top news websites to receive traffic from Maclaren recall searches were MSNBC and Google News.
Despite the bad situation, the upside for Maclaren is that only one law firm appeared in the downstream search results at #33 last week, but quick queries on the search engines show display more than one starting to pop up. Several law firms have started to buy the recall-related search terms, which may start to attract visitors looking to file a case.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 07:24 PM
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In Categories Recalls | Search Strategies
Hunt is on for Retailer Promo Codes
November 11, 2009
Almost everyone loves a bargain and during the cost conscious holiday shopping season last year, discounts were more popular than ever. This year looks to be no exception for the discount hungry consumer with searches up 19% last week as compared to 2008. Searches on a portfolio of search terms around coupons and promotions from specific retailers (e.g ‘target coupons’, ‘target coupon codes’ and ‘target free shipping code’) peaked during the week of Cyber Monday, up 76% from the same week in 2007. Post holiday, the week ending Dec. 27, 2009 followed with the second highest share of traffic from the portfolio of coupon terms and increased 66% compared to the previous year.
The majority of the searches result in a visit to the Rewards & Directories category, which includes websites that aggregate retailer promotions and coupon offers. Other searches do result in a visit directly to the retailer and multi-category department stores, followed by apparel and electronics retailers received the highest share of clicks during the peak week of Cyber Monday last year.
Curious about who is searching for the specific coupons to help retailers and coupon websites identify who to target, we looked at the demographics for the portfolio through custom analysis during the 8 weeks ending Dec. 27, 2008 to cover the majority of the holiday gift buying season. The split is even for male & female searchers in terms of gender. The household income data is interesting because while the greatest share of searches are from those making between $30k-$60k and $60k-$100k, when compared to the online population, the searchers tend to be more affluent and over-index for those making between $60k-$100k and $100k-$150k.
Just over half of the searchers were between the ages of 25 to 44 last year and the younger searchers aged 25 to 34 were more likely to search for retailer coupons than the rest of the online population.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 11:35 PM
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In Categories Coupons | Cyber Monday | Retail
Black Friday and Cyber Monday Predictions
November 02, 2009
Holiday projections are out and many are predicting a gloomy holiday season for retailers. The NRF forecasts a 1% decline growth in total retail sales for the 2009 holiday season, totaling $437.6 billion. The online channel is poised to fare somewhat better, with Forrester Research projecting an increase of 8% to $44.7 billion. The official shopping season usually gets underway during the Thanksgiving holiday with heavy promotional activity taking place around Black Friday and Cyber Monday. However this year, fearful of weak sales, retailers are already starting to release Black Friday promotions and discounts. What else can we expect to see as the holiday season gets going? To delve into potential trends, we pulled together data from across Experian Marketing Services to predict what may happen around Black Friday this year.
Search will continue to play a strong role for Black Friday
Shoppers have been starting their searches for Black Friday sales earlier and earlier each year, with queries beginning in August, when speculation begins about which products may have the biggest discounts during the kickoff to the holiday season. In 2006, the searches took place over a 9 week period leading up to Thanksgiving & Black Friday, growing to 14 weeks in 2007, and 16 weeks in 2008. The number of variations including the term ‘black friday’ have increased significantly as well, increasing 41% year-over-year to reach 7,822 different combinations for the week ending Nov. 29, 2008. The number of websites receiving traffic from the search term ‘Black friday’ during the four weeks leading up to and including the week of Thanksgiving and Black Friday increased to from 416 in 2007 to 473 in 2008 – an increase of 14%.
Every year, more consumers flock to Black Friday websites looking for information about sales & promotions both online and off. In 2008, visits to a custom category of 12 Black Friday websites grew over the previous holiday season overall – with a 21% increase in visits to this category during the week of Thanksgiving. During that peak week, 53% of the traffic was driven by search referrals.
Source: Experian Hitwise
Overall email volumes will be higher, but will increase at a lower or equal rate
The volume of email sent by Experian CheetahMail on Black Friday increased 64% from 2007 to 2008 and 40% on Cyber Monday from 2007 to 2008. Analysis of the most current email data suggests an expected 30 percent increase in volume on Black Friday and Cyber Monday as compared to 2008, particularly if sales are low towards the end of November. In that case, there is a large chance that marketers will react by increasing volume to an even higher capacity. Mentions of Black Friday and Cyber Monday are also expected to be more prevalent in email campaigns earlier in the year.
Source: Experian CheetahMail
Expect consumers to start shopping online early
With Thanksgiving falling late again in 2009, consumers are expected to start shopping online a few weeks prior to the official start of the shopping season – Black Friday. In 2007, online purchases peaked during the week ending Monday, November 26 (Cyber Monday) when fully a quarter of all adults bought something online. Online purchases remained high for several weeks after Thanksgiving before falling to 17% the week of Christmas. In comparison, when Thanksgiving fell a bit later in the month last year, online purchase activity occurred earlier – several weeks prior to Black Friday. In fact, between the weeks ending November 3 and November 10, the share of adults who made an online purchase more than doubled – increasing from 11% to 23%.
Source: Experian Simmons
Please join us on Wednesday, Nov. 11th for a webinar on 'Crafting Black Friday Strategies' - register here.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 06:11 PM
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In Categories Black Friday | Email | Holiday | Retail | Search Strategies | Shopping and Classifieds | Thanksgiving
Google’s rumored Music service launch today
October 28, 2009
Google is expected to launch their music service this afternoon, so we decided to look at some of Google’s history with the Music category. Of course we all know that the majority of people start with Google for search - last month, 71% of all searches took place on Google. Out of the top 1000 search terms that took place on Google last week, 6% were music-related (includes bands, music services and content). Last week, Google sent 1.48% of their total visits to the Music category and of those visits, 95% of the downstream traffic to Music websites were returning visitors (that had visited Google in the past 30 days).
Google was the top referral website to the Music category accounting for nearly 30% of the total traffic to the category last week, 5x more than 2nd ranked Yahoo! Search and 6.3x more than MySpace.
Last week, 15% of the clicks from the search term portfolio of Music that includes the names of over 900 band & artist names resulted in a visit to a Google property, especially YouTube, among the Top 10 websites to receive traffic.
Now we can just wait and see what Google Music will look like and what overall impact the service will have on the category.
Posted by Heather Dougherty at 03:54 PM
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In Categories Google | Music
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