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Hitwise Intelligence - Bill Tancer - North America

Analyst Weblog

Groupon down 50% LivingSocial up 27%

August 26, 2011

With all the debate and speculation regarding Groupon and its planned IPO, I thought it would be a great time to check back in with our previous analysis of traffic to Groupon and its nearest competitor Living Social.

First, to be clear, the above chart measures web-based traffic to both domains and does not include mobile or app specific traffic.

Regardless of these exclusions, the drop-off in Groupon traffic this summer has been significant nearly 50% since its peak in the second week of June 2011 compared to last week. During the same time, Living Social has achieved 27% growth in visits to its site. Overall visits to a custom category of Daily Deal & Aggregator sites were down 25% for the same time.

So why is there a narrowing of the gap between the two market leaders in group coupons? Perhaps it is simply a case of increased number of competitors and deal fatigue among consumers or simply not enough of the right deals. PriceGrabber® released results from its Local Deals Survey in June, stating that 44% of respondents said they use or search daily deal Websites. However, 52% expressed feeling overwhelmed by the number of bargain-boasting emails they receive on a daily basis.

While consumer fatigue may be one factor another key consideration for these sites is to focus on the attracting new and preferred audience segments via the inbox. Currently the audience segments for both Groupon and Living Social are very similar so it will be interesting to see how both sites and category perform heading into the holiday season.

Tweet Posted by Bill Tancer at 03:34 PM | (0)
In Categories Social Networking

Google Plus – Innovators and Early Adopters

August 12, 2011

On June 28, 2011, Google+ launched with a limited, invitation-only beta. Now, nearly a month and half later and a less restrictive invitation policy, what does the data have to say about who’s using the nascent network?

The late Everett Rogers, in his book, Diffusion of Innovation, discusses the sequential adoption of new ideas or innovations, from innovators and early adopters to late majority and laggards. Using the Experian Hitwise sample of over 10mm Internet users in the U.S., combined with our New Mosaic segmentation system launched this summer, its possible to visualize the adoption of Google+.

Careful analysis of the Mosaic segments since launch; reveal that in just over six weeks, we’ve moved from innovators to early adopters to early mainstream users visiting the new social network.

Here’s a snapshot of top Mosaic types (by representation) that have been frequenting Google+.

From the graph above we can see that within three weeks of launch, the Mosaic type Colleges and Cafés (O53) peaks at a representation index of over 400 (members of this segment are more that four times more likely to have visited Google+ during the week ending July 16, 2011 then the Internet population overall).

We describe this Mosaic type as young singles and recent college graduates living in college communities. Here’s a word cloud of the key descriptors for Colleges and Cafés:

Its not uncommon for innovators to trial new services online and in some cases abandon those services when they lose interest. As of the writing of this post, for the week ending August 6, 2011, Colleges and Cafés have dropped to an index of 73 and now make-up only 0.3% of visits to Google+.

However, in this case, when innovators move on, several early adopter segments take their place. One of the predominant early adopter segments in the chart above is A03, Kids and Cabernet, described as “Prosperous, middle-aged married couples living child-focused lives in affluent suburbs.”

Here’s a word cloud of A03 descriptors:

Currently, Kids and Cabernet index at 268 in their visits to Google+, and make-up 2.9% of visits to the site. Interestingly, when we look at this segment’s stats for visits to Facebook, they index at a mere 68 and make up less than 0.7% of visits to the leading social network.

While Facebook maintains its position as social networking market leader, a number of New Mosaic segments under-index for visits to the top social networking site. As Google+ matures, watching the migration of these segments will provide an indication of whether Google+ will grow into a Facebook competitor or find its place as a niche social network for specific demographics.

Tweet Posted by Bill Tancer at 01:08 PM | (0)
In Categories Social Networking

Dating Sites by Credit Score - A Valentine's Day Special

February 14, 2011

This post is for all of our single readers. While it might be a little late to start your Valentine's Day date search (we know that dating site visits typically surge the first week of the New Year), I thought I'd give you a novel new criteria to evaluate online dating sites. Why not add good credit to your dating criteria checklist.

We have over 1,100 sites in our Lifestyle Dating category. Choosing whether you go for a major like Match.com or eHarmony versus Niche dating sites can be daunting. Using our new segmenting capability at Hitwise, I filtered all sites withing our dating category for sites visited with the highest possible credit score, those in the VantageScore "A" category.

Without any preconceived notions (ok, perhaps a few) I pulled the following table of sites based on segmentation percentage (or those sites within the Lifestyle - Dating category that had the highest percentage of the highest credit).

A couple of surprises here. Dating nudists have good credit, who knew? The dominance of ethnic-centric dating sites seems surprising. But perhaps the most interesting is #10 on the list. Sugar Daddy for Me seems like an odd top-credit dating site (that is until you look at the income breakdown and VantageScore distribution and realize that the site has a healthy component of "sugar daddies" and those looking to land a "sugar daddy".)

And if you're wondering which site had the worst VantageScore (or highest visits from the "F" category), that honor belongs to the website for the mobile application Crush or Flush. You've been warned.

Tweet Posted by Bill Tancer at 10:53 AM | (0)
In Categories Dating

We've Got Credit, Yes We Do, We've Got Credit...

February 04, 2011

There are a few things I have yet to accurately predict with Internet data, namely political races and sporting events. Politics is tricky given the existence of confounding variables in visits to political sites. Sporting events, as skill based competition, have little relationship to search volume or Internet visits. That being said, there's no reason why we can't have a little fun with the data.

On our Experian Marketing Forward Blog we have some great posts comparing the two geographic markets of Green Bay and Pittsburgh (here and here). With Experian Hitwise, using the official team sites for the Packers and Steelers (assuming visitors to each site is a good proxy for a team fan) we can analyze the difference between the two.

At Experian Hitwise, we have the ability to report, in aggregate on the VantageScore bins for visitors to sites and categories (VantageScore is a grade-based credit scoring system, A = best credit, F= worst credit).

Here's the comparison of visitors to the Steelers' and Packers' websites over the last four weeks:

While the latest Vegas odds are still showing Green Bay favored by three. The spread in VantageScore for visitors to the two sites shows a much stronger gap. While this might not help predict Sunday's winner, I'm guessing that Packer fans have been able to finance better last-minute LCD TV purchases for the game.

Tweet Posted by Bill Tancer at 11:52 AM | (0)
In Categories VantageScore