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Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
Analyst Weblog
2.2 billion visits to Search Engines in February
March 15, 2012
UK Internet users made an astonishing 2.2 billion visits to search engines in February according to our latest monthly data.
Last month we showed how search was increasing as an online channel with 100 million additional UK Internet visits going to search engines in January 2012 compared to January 2011. The February stats are even more impressive, with 174 million more visits going to search engines when comparing February 2012 with February 2011. The further demand on search represents an 8.7% year-on-year increase in visits and early indications for March suggest this trend is going to continue.
My colleague James Murray has put together a cool search infographic to demonstrate some of the top search stats that we see using Hitwise data. You can also find further search data in our monthly press release which includes the latest search trends.
The February data shows Google was once again the dominant player in the UK search market accounting for 91.57% of all searches made in Britain. Google’s market share of searches was up by 0.93% since January and 0.89% year-on-year.
Meanwhile Microsoft Sites led by bing were unable to build on their growth at the beginning of the year and instead their market share slipped by 0.48% this month. Yahoo! Sites and Other search engines also decreased in market share in February.
You can read more about the most recent search stats in our monthly search press release or you can follow us on Twitter for the latest trends and data.
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Posted by James Murray at 09:36 AM
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In Categories Search
Voucher sites overtake Price Comparisons sites online
February 15, 2012
Last year I wrote two blogs on the rise of social shopping and the changing facets of rewards websites like voucher and cashback sites. These proved very popular so I thought I would follow these up with a look at how these websites performed over Christmas.
The Experian Hitwise Rewards and Directories category was one of the fastest growing industries online in 2011. We split this parent category into four key sub-categories: cashback sites like Quidco; shopping price comparison sites like Shopzilla; social shopping sites like Groupon; and voucher sites like HotUKDeals.
Comparing total visits to each of the sub-categories in December 2010 and December 2011 you can see there has been a solid year-on-year increase for cashback, social shopping and voucher sites, but a huge drop in visits for price comparison sites.
Visits to price comparison sites have halved year-on-year, and now voucher websites are the dominant rewards category with 37.4 million UK Internet visits in December 2011, up 28% from last December. Social shopping sites like Groupon and Living Social have also overtaken cashback sites in terms of total visits, after witnessing a 58% growth in traffic year-on-year.
One of the interesting trends to look at is where these rewards categories were sending traffic to during December. I have chosen to focus on some of the key shopping categories, and you can see from the graph below that there are some very disparate results between the rewards categories.
Department Stores like Amazon, Debenhams and John Lewis were the top recipients of traffic from price comparison sites, voucher sites and cashback sites. Social shopping sites on the other hand sent the greatest proportion of their traffic to fashion websites in the Apparel and Accessories category. The chart also reveals some categories which are served well by one particular type of rewards site but not others. Appliances and Electronics for example received 9.5% of all traffic leaving price comparison sites, but not nearly as much from the other rewards categories. Video and Games also received a much higher proportion of the traffic leaving voucher and cashback sites than from the rest of the reward websites.
This data is a great example of how Hitwise can be used to identify the best affiliates for your brand, depending on the industry you work in. It is just worth noting though that not all websites encourage clickthroughs to websites, and therefore looking at the total traffic they receive is more important than the downstream traffic of where visits go to after a visit to the reward website.
Our Christmas 2011 Retail Review is now available to download, and if you missed out on the Christmas webinars over December and January you can catch up with these now on our YouTube channel. You can also follow us on Twitter for the latest data updates.
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Posted by James Murray at 12:03 PM
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In Categories Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
Morrisons double online visits in January
February 14, 2012
January is usually a pretty bleak month for shopping as people tend to be tightening belts after the excesses of Christmas. True to form, most shopping websites saw a decline in online visits in January 2012 compared to December 2011. But then there was Morrisons, which doubled its visits in January 2012 to reach a trend-bucking 5 million UK Internet visits.
As a result Morrisons became the second most visited Grocery and Alcohol website in the UK for January 2012, second only to Tesco. The supermarket increased its market share within the grocery sector from 5.5% of all visits to 13.4%, a feat all the more remarkable given that customers can’t actually buy goods through the Morrisons website as they can with the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s and ASDA.
So what was it that was encouraging people to visit the Morrisons website if it wasn’t to purchase products? The answer is the company’s promotional January campaign, which offered prizes including free shopping to customers who entered their shopping receipt details into the website.
The campaign was so successful that ‘morrisons free shopping’ was the second biggest search term driving traffic to the website after ‘morrisons’, and 7.5% of all search terms driving traffic to the website in January contained the words ‘free shopping’. Many commentators suspect that this is a way for Morrisons to accumulate data on the type of people that visit its stores and website in anticipation of the website going fully transactional in the future.
Using our own demographics data we can see the Experian Mosaic groups which started to visit the Morrisons website in January but were not visiting in December. The biggest groups by volume were Suburban Mindsets, Professional Rewards and Small Town Diversity. Interestingly, the groups which saw the greatest increase in January were older demographics, including Active Retirement, Industrial Heritage and Elderly Needs. These three groups are typically in their 60s and 70s who are careful with money and live in small affordable homes.
Comparing the two monthly figures, Active Retirement were 17% more likely to visit the Morrisons website in January than December whilst Industrial Heritage were 10% more likely. Morrisons also started attracting customers online from more rural areas in the UK, namely from the Rural Solitude and the Small Town Diversity groups.
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Posted by James Murray at 03:10 PM
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In Categories Mosaic lifestyle | Shopping and Classifieds | Supermarkets
Sherlock sets new record for BBC iPlayer
January 06, 2012
As always over the festive season there was a feast of TV delights to keep us entertained when speaking to family members grew tiresome. With so much choice over the Christmas period we were expecting Video on Demand (VOD) to increase online as consumers caught up with their favourite programmes.
At the beginning of December we predicted the UK would spend 12 million hours on BBC iPlayer with the top draws being the Eastenders and Dr Who Christmas specials. In fact there were 13.8 million hours spent on iPlayer in December with over half a million hours spent on Boxing Day alone – the day after the Eastenders and Dr Who specials were first aired. However you can see from the graph below that iPlayer received its biggest ever day of Internet traffic on 2 January 2012.
New Year’s Day saw the much anticipated return of Benedict Cumberbatch reprising his role as Sherlock Holmes in the first episode of the second season of Sherlock. Looking at the total visits to iPlayer on 2 January there were 4.3 million visits from UK Internet users, a new record for iPlayer.
Although the official BARB figures show that Downton Abbey was the most watched programme on Christmas Day, online visits indicate that it was much less popular online. The BARB figures take into account viewings on the day as well as viewings from recordings and on catch up services like ITV+1 – which show Downton with 11.6 million viewers and Eastenders with 11.3 million for Christmas Day. However, in terms of online VOD watching, our data shows that ITV Player received just 723 thousand visits on Boxing Day, compared to iPlayer’s 4.2 million - both of which were outstripped on 2 January.
Of course, these figures include all visits for content watched on the online channels, so it is not as simple as saying Sherlock was more popular than Dr Who or indeed Downton Abbey online. However, the BBC’s online video content was certainly more watched than ITV’s and 2 January 2012 marks a new milestone for iPlayer total visits which coincides with when people were able to watch the new episode of Sherlock for the first time.
We are hosting our final Christmas webinar today at noon reviewing the Christmas season in its entirety. The webinar is free to join, you can register here or follow us on Twitter for the latest updates.
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Posted by James Murray at 08:05 AM
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In Categories BBC | Christmas | TV | Video
