August 27, 2008

Presidential candidates - are states red and blue online?

During the primaries we took a look at the visitation to the websites of presidential candidate hopefuls to predict the winners by state. Now that the nominations have been decided and the DNC is underway with the RNC not far behind, I thought it would be interesting to revisit this analysis. Below is an electoral map from NYTimes.com which summarizes how each of the states have voted in the past 5 elections for quick visualization.

For both of the presidential candidate websites, I categorized the states by the same breakdown above. Each state includes the share of traffic from that particular state and the representational index (a method of comparing two groups or audience, and expressing the different between the two as an index, in this case, is the candidate’s website and the overall online population) which summarizes the likelihood (over 100 means more likely, below 100 means less likely) of online users in that state to visit the website. Below are the top 10 sites ranked by traffic share for each candidate.

The top 10 states to BarackObama.com represent 60% of the total traffic to the website over the past 4 weeks ending August 23, 2008. Among the top 10 are 4 states that are categorized as ‘Strong Obama’, which represent 31% of total traffic. The top 5 states that index highest for visits to BarackObama.com are Maryland, Colorado, New Mexico, Georgia, and DC. Colorado is likely to appear due to this week’s DNC in Denver, but Obama’s website has been a key component for communicating with voters, so visitation from the tossup states of Colorado and New Mexico gives a chance to communicate key messages.

For McCain’s website, 55% of the traffic came from the top 10 states, but only 8% of the traffic is from a historically Republican and 'Solid McCain' state – Texas. The abundance of visitors from historically Democratic states implies that many voters are gathering information (and may have been Hillary Clinton supporters). When the states are ranked by representational index, 4 out of 5 are in the western part of the US – Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, and Colorado, with Louisiana rounding out the top 5. But more importantly for McCain, only Wyoming is considered a ‘Solid McCain’ state, so the others may provide an opportunity to sway undecided voters.

As we have said many times, a visit does not equal a vote, but insight into who is visiting the websites of the candidates helps to identify the best mediums to reach potential voters. The flip side of this analysis is all of the stares that are not visiting either website, highlighting the need to reach them somewhere else online or away from the computer entirely.

One final note and wildcard to consider - what is the predictability based upon past elections? There are new voters that have registered in the last year which might make that map look much different in November - or not at all.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 03:59 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Election2008 | Politics

August 26, 2008

Biden VP pick and DNC invigorates candidate site traffic

Last week, the forthcoming Democratic National Convention and Vice-President selection drove the 2nd highest share of visits to each of the websites of the presidential candidates in the past year. The only week with a higher share of visits included the Super Tuesday primaries. The market share of visits to BarackObama.com jumped 53% and 46% to JohnMcCain.com from the previous week.

While both websites are experiencing greater traffic volume, the increase in visitors is driving down the average visit time from earlier this year. These shorter visits provide a more limited opportunity to distribute desired information across the audience, emphasizing ease of use in the design & layout to help visitors quickly find what they are looking for on the websites.

In the weeks leading up to the DNC, Barack Obama started a mobile campaign to text his followers to become the first to know about his running mate selection. While many have critiqued the timing of the actual text being received after many news outlets reported the VP pick, at Hitwise we found that plenty of searchers were seeking information about the texts. Among the top 350 search terms that drove traffic to Barackobama.com last week, 28% were related to the VP selection, with 12% of those specifically referring to the texts. Searches that broadly included Obama’s name commanded the largest share of the search terms at 33%. Other searches related to facts about Obama's birth certificate, local campaign volunteering activities, and specific issues.

The fast moving search terms for a custom category of the two websites of the presidential candidates were also dominated by curious searchers seeking info about the texts and the VP pick. Next week should also deliver plenty of search activity around Politics as the DNC wraps up, McCain selects a VP, and the and the Republican National Convention is set to begin.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 02:36 PM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Election2008 | Politics

August 18, 2008

Online shopping traffic remains strong

One sector that we continually monitor here at Hitwise for insight into consumer behavior is traffic to the Shopping & Classifieds category. Given the current economic climate, price sensitivity is driving more visits to the websites of online retailers, coupons, and comparison shopping tools as shoppers increasingly research potential purchases online. Overall, the market share of visits increased 19% in July 2008 as compared to the previous year.

Consumers are turning to websites like Craigslist to sell items to augment their income and also seek save money by purchasing used goods, driving significant growth in the Classifieds category. The category of Classifieds websites experienced the highest traffic growth in July 2008, increasing 88% over the previous year. Grocery websites ranked 2nd in terms of year over year growth with a 40% increase, with much of the growth in this category can be attributed to shoppers collecting coupons and information on weekly specials. House & Garden followed with 30% growth with home owners avoiding the weakened real estate market and opting to turn to retailers like The Home Depot and Lowe's for DIY home improvement options instead of moving. The Rewards & Directories category, which includes comparison shopping tools (e.g. Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and PriceGrabber.com) also received higher traffic in July as compared to the previous year.

Overall, the Shopping & Classifieds category received 25% of traffic referred from search. While the number may seem low, keep in mind that many of the product categories received a higher share of traffic from search while the Auctions & Classifieds are less reliant upon search (15% and 14%) but represent nearly 35% of the visits within the Shopping & Classifieds category.

Our current Search Intelligence offerings at Hitwise offer insights into the share of Paid & Organic search traffic for individual websites and in the coming weeks, we’ll be upgrading the tools to include even more detail into the search landscape. One new feature will be the ratio of Paid & Organic search traffic by industry. As an example, below is a paid search quadrant with the majority of the product categories tracked in the Shopping & Classifieds. Along the x-axis is the share of upstream traffic to the product category from search, the product categories that are on the right side of quadrant received the highest share of search referrals (both paid & organic combined). Among the product categories, House & Garden and Sport & Fitness received the most traffic from search, 38% and 35%, respectively. Along the y-axis is the share of paid search traffic, so the product categories in the top right corner are buying the highest share of search traffic. As an example, 40% of the search traffic to the Office Supplies was from paid search.

In addition to offering benchmarking data, these varying ratios can point to the reliance of a product category or industry in driving traffic through organic search results, highlighting the imperative for optimizing a web site vs. the faster testing grounds of paid search copy.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 09:28 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Search Engines | Shopping and Classifieds

August 11, 2008

Google’s share of US searches hits 70%

Each month at Hitwise we release the share of searches by each of the major search engines to measure the impact upon the search landscape. The report tends to tell a similar story each month in terms of the ranking by share of searches, but for July (the four weeks ending July 26, 2008); Google reached a new milestone and accounted for 70.77 percent of all U.S. searches. Google’s share of searches increased 10% over the same month last year and 2% over the previous month. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search (including Live.com), and Ask followed with 18.65%, 5.36%, and 3.53% share of searches, respectively.

At least some of the growth in searches can be attributed to the growing share of visits to Google. Looking back over the past 13 months, in addition to the growing share of searches, traffic to Google has continued to increase. The market share of visits to Google in July increased 25% over July 2007 and has grown each month since January in 2008. Retention of this increased traffic is also coming into play as Google has maintained a consistent returning visitor rate (visitors who have visited the website within a 30 day period) of 95% each month since October 2007 (when Hitwise began tracking this metric).

Next week I’ll be speaking on 2 panels at SES San Jose with some great folks so please join us if you are attending the conference - the 1st panel is Monday morning, the Search Industry Update (where I am sure this topic will come up) and the 2nd panel is Tuesday afternoon, Identify, Analyze, Act: SEM by the Numbers. I encourage everyone to check out the agenda – more than 80% of the panels and content are new so everyone should be walking away with some useful information.

Posted by Heather Dougherty at 03:11 PM | Comments (5) | TrackBack (2)
Posted to Search Engines