Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

July 04, 2008

Adulthood and Kidulthood: sequels and the halo effect

As we highlighted a couple of weeks ago when discussing Google’s holiday logos, one of the delights of Hitwise search data is when it reveals something expected. Seeing the phrase ‘kidulthood’ appear in our list of fast moving search terms last week was one such example. I was expecting to see ‘adulthood’, the new film by Noel Clarke, but not his earlier film. In fact, as you can see from the chart below, searches for both increased recently.

UK Internet searches for adulthood and kidulthood 2006 2007 2008.png

Adulthood is a rarity in British cinema: a movie sequel (to Kidulthood, no less). If the search data is anything to go by, it has clearly been popular. However, the interesting thing that this search data illustrates is the beneficial halo effect of the sequel on the original film. As you can see, a combination of promotion for the Kidulthood DVD and the hype surrounding Adulthood has led to a surge of interest in the original film, with searches for ‘kidulthood’ exceeding the volume when the film was originally released in early 2006.

Posted by Robin Goad at 09:30 AM | Comments (0) | TrackBack (0)
Posted to Movies | Search

July 02, 2008

Asos.com: growth and demographics

Internet clothing retailer Asos.com seems to have shrugged off the economic downturn by yesterday announcing that it had doubled sales over the last 3 months. Following our analysis of the rapidly growing UK online fashion market last week, this didn’t come as a huge surprise to us. We’ve been tracking Asos for a while: it regularly appears on the IMRG – Hitwise Hot Shops List, and is now the second most visited retailer in our Apparel and Accessories category (behind Next, but ahead of River Island, TopShop and New Look). As the chart below illustrates, traffic to Asos.com has doubled over the last 12 months.

UK Internet traffic to asos 2007 2008 chart.png

Asos, which originally stood for As Seen On Screen, specialises in affordable versions of celebrity fashions – the gladiator sandals as worn by Sarah Jessica Parker in the Sex and the City movie are a current favourite. However, while the site’s core customer base is younger women, one of the reasons for its success over the last year has been its ability to appeal to older customers. Looking at our demographic data for the site during June this year and last, you can see that there has been noticeable shift to older visitors. As the chart below illustrates, 18 – 34 olds are still the core audience but the proportion of visitors from the 35+ age group has increased from just under a third to just over a half between 2007 and 2008.

UK Internet visitors to asos segmented by age group 2007 2008 chart.png

Looking at the Experian Mosaic lifestyle data, it’s interesting to note that this doesn’t necessarily equate to a move ‘upmarket’ so much as move into the mainstream. Asos’s clothes are relatively cheap, but a year ago the most over-represented Mosaic group visiting the site was Happy Families, an affluent group defined as ‘families with a focus on career and home, mostly younger age groups now raising children’. Looking at the most recent Mosaic data, the thing jumps out now is that no one individual Mosaic group is particularly over represented anymore. This implies that the site’s customer base now broadly represents the online population as a whole – i.e. the mainstream.

Asos experian mosaic data 2008 chart.png

July 01, 2008

Summer sales and email marketing

The summer sales are now in full swing, as you’ve probably noticed when walking around your local shopping centre / high street. As the chart below illustrates, UK Internet users continue to look for a bargain. Searches for both the singular and plural terms ‘sale’ and ‘sales’ shot up to their highest level since the Christmas / New Year shopping season last week.

uk summer sale sales internet searches 2008 chart.png

I’ve received some emails from online retailers promoting their sales, but fewer than I expected given the economic conditions. The amount of traffic that websites in our Shopping and Classifieds category received from Email Services increased slightly last week to 4.8%, but this number was still lower than two weeks before. Given that the search data highlights an appetite for online sales, I’m surprised that retailers are not engaging in more active outbound email campaigns. The chart below shows that three retailers – Play.com, John Lewis, and Matalan – all received a considerable boost in traffic last week thanks to email campaigns.

webmail email traffic to play john lewis matalan april may june 2008 chart.png

Taking the top 3 webmail providers in the UK – Microsoft Hotmail / Live Mail, Yahoo! Mail and Gmail / Google Mail – it’s interesting to note that one provider in particular seems to be more effective at delivering traffic to retailers than the other two. As the chart below illustrates, Yahoo! UK Mail consistently sends more of its traffic to our Shopping and Classifieds category. Last 13.4% of Yahoo! UK Mail’s downstream traffic went to retail websites, noticeably more than both Gmail (10.5%) and Hotmail (9.6%).

Downstream traffic from live mail hotmail yahoo google gmail to retail websites.png

June 26, 2008

Online fashion retail still growing despite high street slowdown

The CBI has issued a report claiming that clothing retailers have just experienced their worst month for quarter of a century. I can only assume that this fall in sales must be down to an underperforming high street, because the online fashion industry is booming. Our Apparel and Accessories category is currently the fourth largest retail sub sector (behind Auctions, Department Stores, and Rewards and Directories), accounting for almost 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits to an online retailer. As the chart below illustrates, traffic to fashion retailers has shot up over the last three years.

UK Internet traffic to the fashion retail sector 2005 2006 2007 2008 chart.png

One of the reasons for this growth relative to other etailers is that it took the fashion industry a while to realize how to successfully sell online (remember boo.com?). One important source of traffic is social networks, and in May 2008 these accounted for 6.37% of upstream traffic to websites in our Apparel and Accessories category. This makes sites such as Facebook, MySpace and Bebo a more important source of traffic than Lifestyle – Fashion websites (5.13%). In fact, only Auctions sites now receive more traffic from social networks than fashion retailers. As the chart below illustrates, the amount for downstream traffic that our Social Networking and Forums category sends to Apparel and Accessories retailers has more than doubled over the last three years, overtaking department stores and gadget and entertainment retailers on the way.