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Hitwise Intelligence - Alan Long - Asia Pacific
Analyst Weblog
Climate Change – An Online Perspective
October 15, 2009
Today is Blog Action Day, an annual event that unites the world's bloggers in posting about the same issue on the same day on their own blogs with the aim of sparking discussion around an issue of global importance. I join over 7,000 bloggers worldwide who are all sharing their thoughts and insights into this year’s theme ‘Climate Change'.
The recent release of the fifth annual Lowy Institute poll surveyed public opinion around a broad range of foreign policy issues, including climate change.
Key attitudinal changes towards Climate Change in the poll between findings in 2009 compared to 2006 include;
· ‘People unsure if global warming is really a problem and no action should be taken’ increased 85.7% to 13% of respondents.
· ‘People seeing that it is a serious and pressing problem and requires immediate action' decreased 29.4% to 48% of respondents
Other findings indicated that 76% of people see Climate Change as a problem and 60% see that finding a solution is becoming more urgent.
There seems to be a lowering of concern in these responses and so I have turned to search data to see if general interest around the issues of Climate Change has also cooled.
Searches for terms relevant to Climate Change have increased 6.5% over the past 12 months, (w/e 10 October compared to w/e 11 October 2008) and while there have been troughs and peaks over the past three years the overall level of search around Climate Change has declined 23.3% (w/e 10 October 2009 compare to w/e 14 October 2006)..
As an indicator of interest in a given topic the search results provide a similar view to the results from the Lowy Institute poll.
The chart below represents the downstream websites from a portfolio of search terms relating to Climate Change and Global Warming. I have analysed the top 100 websites and categorised them to provide a view of where Australians go when specifically searching for information around the subject. The top 100 websites represent 76.8% of visits from the search portfolio in the 12 weeks ending 10 October 2009.
While News and Media websites provide coverage and discussion of issues surrounding Climate Change and corresponding Government initiatives, when it comes to the Australian’s looking for specific information they turn to the Government websites, both National and State. Government websites represent 38.2% of traffic from the portfolio, with commercial websites receiving 12.0%, relying on a heavy emphasis towards Government Rebates for greener energy in their marketing efforts.
Organisations such as Greenpeace and the United Nations along with Reference websites like Wikipedia also receive a strong level of visits from the search portfolio, while News and Media websites and Social Media websites do not garner substantial levels of visits around Climate Change.
News and Media websites play an important part in the discussion and dissemination of information and news as it happens, but Government cannot rely on this coverage as a strategic driver for further discovery of policy and legislative direction.
The following table indicates where the 14 State and Federal Government Climate Change websites receive their traffic. Search Engines are the most important driver of visits generating 45.3% of all visits in September 2009, followed by a range of Government and Environmental websites.
News and Media websites generate only 1.52% of traffic to these key Government websites, highlighting the opportunity for the Governments to market their websites to deliver comprehension around complex and often confusing subjects.
Although search levels around Climate Change have decreased in the past year, the level of paid search activity is a low 2.5% (4 weeks ending 10 October 2009) compared to the all websites visited by Australian Internet users paid search rate of 4.9%.
In search marketing it is important to work with the language of the users. Within the portfolio the top search term for the 12 weeks ending 10 October is ‘global warming’ with 11.4% of search volume, well ahead of ‘climate change’ the third ranked search term accounting for 6.3% of the portfolio’s volume.
The opportunities for Governments to maximise interest and generate increased understanding include;
· Internal marketing efforts across Government Departments and between State and Federal Governments.
· Search marketing, both paid and search engine optimisation.
· Domain name strategy, www.globalwarming.gov.au is not being utilised, yet ‘global warming’ search term is almost twice the volume of ‘climate change’.
· Social Media – a resource for continually measuring the heat of the subject as well as being a part of the community conversations.
· Display /affiliate advertising across Portals, Email Services, News and Media, and Weather websites.
Visit www.blogactionday.org for further information and posts relating to Climate Change.
NB: Portfolio comprises of 156 of search terms that drive traffic to the Climate Change specific sites and variations of the term ‘climate’.
Posted by Alan Long at 06:14 PM
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In Categories News and Media | Politics | weather
eBay 10 Years On
October 13, 2009
Last week eBay Australia’s website celebrated its 10th anniversary, so I thought it timely to have a look at the website’s performance over the past few years.
Over the past 10 years eBay Australia has had many local competitors come and go, amongst them GoFish and Stuff, only to see them fold under the continued success of the eBay brand. In other sectors, established brands have risen and fallen and through all of this eBay has continued to prosper.
eBay Australia has the second highest online penetration rate amongst local Internet users, only behind eBay UK, when compared to the markets measured by Experian Hitwise. This highlights the strength and dominance of the eBay brand in the Australian market.
The chart below aggregates the top 10 eBay sites visited by local users, highlights the comparative strength of the brand across Australia, UK, US, Canada and Singapore.
In the past three years Australian Internet users’ visits to the online Auction industry has declined 7.8%, impacted by increased competition from Classifieds brands such as Gumtree and Craigslist and the rising share of visits attributed to Social Media brands such as Facebook.
The Classified industry has increased 41.7% over the past three years (September 2009 compared to October 2006) on the back of large increases by the local Gumtree websites (200 to 900%+). Auctions websites maintain a commanding share of visits enjoying 7 times as many visits by comparison to Classifieds websites and one in every 49 visits by Australian Internet Users.
eBay is the dominant brand in Australia, with 39 of its branded websites accounting for 88.3% of Auction visits. eBay Australia accounts for 81.9% of eBay websites, and 72.3% of all Auction visits.
Ranked as the leading Auctions and Shopping Classifieds website for the past three years, eBay is currently the number 7 most visited website by Australian Internet users behind Google (.com.au and .com), Facebook, Live Mail, NineMSN and YouTube.
The term ‘ebay’ was the fourth most searched for term during the 4 weeks ending 3 October 2009 also featuring the in the 6th and 54th highest volume search terms, consolidating these terms places the eBay brand as the third most search for brand online behind Facebook and YouTube, with almost 1 in every 100 search terms containing the eBay brand, (0.98%).
eBay’s audience could be described as spanning all elements of Australian society with an emphasis on blue collar workers in new and outer suburbs plus country and coastal centres. For the 4 weeks ending 3 October 2009 the four most over represented Mosaic Lifestyle Groups also reflect the largest share of visits to eBay. Over the past 12 months there has been minimal change to audience profile of eBay offering opportunities to develop strategies and tactics to increase share of the more affluent and metropolitan Mosaic Groups.
Other key statistics include:
* Average visit time increased 55% since October 2006 to 29 minutes 54 seconds.
* Gender split 53.3% Female, 46.7% Male (index of 101 and 99 against the Australian Online Population)
* 25-34 (108) and 35-44 (119) age-groups are over-represented on eBay Australia compared to the online population and make up a combined 46.3% of visits.
* 81.8% of audience on east coast states (QLD, NSW, VIC and TAS), with Tasmania (112), SA (112) and VIC (106) having the highest over representation against the online population.
Happy Birthday eBay!
Posted by Alan Long at 12:17 PM
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In Categories Auctions | Retail | Shopping and Classifieds
Experian Hitwise
September 10, 2009
Hi All,
You may notice a new identity to Hitwise today that reflects the integration of our brand with that of our parent, Experian. While the look and feel of our brand may change – the values, commitment and quality that have made Hitwise a market leader will not. Learn More
Cheers
Alan
Posted by Alan Long at 05:56 PM
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In Categories Experian Hitwise
Twitter’s Growing Influence
September 08, 2009
We have all been aware of Twitter’s amazing growth over the past 6 months, including the impact that global celebrities (such as Oprah, Britney Spears, Ellen de Generes and Ashton Kutcher) have had on the uptake and membership of Twitter in March 2009.
Twitter’s phenomenal growth has also seen it become an increasingly influential part of the web landscape, driving discovery and sharing of a multitude of other websites as it grows. To measure the growing influence of Twitter I have reviewed the number of sites in the Upstream (websites visited before Twitter) and Downstream (websites visited after Twitter) clickstream to see if the growth is in line with the overall trends and if the number of upstream websites has been key to the market share growth of Twitter.
Last week Twitter hit an all time high in terms of All Categories ranking and market share, according to Hitwise Australia.. Twitter is now the 26th ranked website visited by Australian Internet users (week ending 5 September 2009) with a market share of 0.29%, now capturing more Australian visits than news.com.au (0.28%), RealEstate.com.au (0.28%), The Age (0.21%), AFL.com.au (0.18%) and Amazon.com (0.11%). Twitter’s share of visits and ranking maybe considerably higher when taking into account usage through the various desktop and mobile applications.
The chart below shows the increase in the number of websites, both before and after visiting Twitter, growing rapidly around the time of the Ashton Kutcher challenge to CNN to reach 1 million users (he now has over 3.4 million followers), overlaid with Twitter’s market share growth (on the secondary axis).
Click chart to view larger image.
Over the past 6 months the number of sites driving traffic to Twitter has increased 479% (comparing the weeks ending 5 September and 14 March 2009)while Twitter’s market share in visits has increased a similar amount, +460%. In the past month the growth continues with Twitter’s market share increasing 42% and the number of sites in the upstream clickstream also up 42% (week ending 5 September compared to week ending 15 August 2009).
Twitter drives downstream visits to over 17,000 downstream websites (17,166 in week ending 5 September 2009) with other Social Networking sites being the major recipient of visitors from Twitter (18.42% of downstream visits during week ending 5 September 2009).
As my colleague Heather Hopkins noted in May of this year in reference to the US market, “Twitter is being used as a social network and a means of distributing content. This is by no means the only way it is being used – just one standout trend.”
Photography sites (such as Twitpic), garnered 11.1% and Search Engines 6.8%, while Multimedia sites (4.9%), Blogs and Personal websites (4.6%) and Email Services (4.2%) all receive more of Twitter’s Clickstream than News and Media (Print), who receive 3.4%.
The following chart shows downstream visits by industry. The dark blue bars represent the parent industry, while the red bars represent sub-categories. For example, Photography is a sub-category of Entertainment.
The leading sites receiving traffic from Twitter in the table below are dominated by the other Social Networking sites and led by the photo sharing site Twitpic (www.twitpic.com), which itself has had a meteoric ride up the rankings on the back of Twitter’s success. In the past 12 months Twitpic’s share of visits has increased 248%%.It is currently the number three Photography site and ranked 208 across All Categories , according to Hitwise rankings (week ending 5 September 2009).
In the future there will be many websites that ride the coat-tails of another to success by providing a complimentary meaningful utility and service. What utility or service can you provide within Social Networking?
