Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK

Analyst Weblog

Are online discount vouchers on the decline?

July 01, 2009

As we’ve reported a number of times, online vouchers have been one of the recent online success stories. Voucher searches shot up massively in the run up to Christmas as savvy shoppers looked to find a bargain during the recession. But recently we’ve heard some talk that the boom times for discount vouchers may be coming to an end. This begs the question: are consumers and retailers tiring of discount vouchers? To test this hypothesis, I charted searches for the term ‘vouchers’ over the last two years.

As you would expect, there has been a significant decline since Christmas; but last week (w/e 27/06/09) searches for ‘vouchers’ were also down 28.6% on the equivalent week last year (28/06/08). So voucher searches are down? Not so fast – the above chart only includes searches for the single term ‘vouchers’. Over 96% of UK searches containing the word ‘vouchers’ are for a longer term (e.g. ‘discount vouchers’, ‘tesco vouchers’, etc.) rather than just the single word ‘vouchers’, so it important to consider the broader picture. The chart below tracks the breadth of searches for the term ‘vouchers’ – i.e. the number of search terms in the UK that contained the term ‘voucher’.

The breadth of searches for ‘voucher’ has also declined since Christmas, but in this case it is still up year-on-year. This data points to an increasingly sophisticated voucher-searching audience. Now that people are used to looking for vouchers online, they are searching for specific discounts rather than more generic terms. Certainly, the rate of increase in voucher searches has flattened – it is now starting to look more like a mature than a growing market.

The final piece of the puzzle is to look at traffic to voucher specific websites (such as Hot UK Deals, Money Saving Expert and My Voucher Codes). As the chart below illustrates, this has flattened since Christmas and is actually down 12.1% on last year. However, from the retailers’ perspective, voucher sites are sending more traffic now than a year ago. During May 2009 the top voucher websites accounted 0.53% of all upstream traffic to the Shopping and Classifieds industry. This was down from the peak of 0.82% during December, but up from 0.43% in May 2008.

UK_Internet_traffic_to_voucher_websites_2009_2008_2007_chart.png

So, in conclusion: the online voucher market is still huge and voucher sites are sending a significant amount of traffic to retailers. But the market is maturing fast and is no longer growing at the rate it once was.

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Michael Jackson, Twitter and TMZ

June 26, 2009

Following the tragic death of Michael Jackson last night, UK Internet visits to his homepage increased 17 fold. Yesterday www.michaeljackson.com was the 9th most visited Music website in the UK, and the highest ranked artist homepage.

TMZ, the website that originally broke the story, picked up 1 in every 1,100 UK Internet visits yesterday, making it the 73rd most visited website overall. Given that the site usually ranks somewhere between 1,000 and 2,000 in the UK, this was a 20-fold increase in visits.

Of course, the subject is dominating conversations on Twitter and – as the chart below illustrates – the micro-blogging service had its busiest every day in the UK yesterday. That the spike wasn’t quite as huge as may be expected is probably due to the fact that news broke so late UK time. Given the time difference, my guess is that my US colleagues will have some more representative stats that show the true impact later today.

Twitter_traffic_following _the_death_of_michael_jackson.png

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Twitter sending traffic to online media sites, but not online retailers

June 24, 2009

Thanks to everyone that listened to today’s Twitter webinar - we managed to reach capacity with 200 people logged in!. If you missed it, we’ll be posting the recording soon and will email / blog / tweet the link. In the meantime, you can see what people were saying about it on Twitter here.

UK Internet traffic to Twitter, the “micro-blogging” service and social network, has increased 22-fold over the last 12 months. During May 2009 www.twitter.com ranked as the 38th most visited website in the UK and the fifth most visited social network. Just one year ago, in May 2008, it was the 969th most visited website and 84th most visited social network.

Twitter has been the fastest growing major website in the UK over the last 12 months, and certainly the most talked about. The noticeable thing about Twitter’s growth is that the vast majority of it – 93% in fact – has occurred during 2009. If anything, the service is even more popular than our numbers imply, as we are only measuring traffic to the main Twitter website. If people accessing their Twitter accounts via mobile phones and third party applications (such as Twitterific, Twitterfeed and Tweetdeck) were included, the numbers could be even higher.

One consequence of its phenomenal growth is that Twitter has become a key source of traffic to other websites. During May 2009 Twitter was the 30th biggest source of traffic for other sites in the UK, accounting for 1 in every 350 visits to a typical website. Over half of this traffic (55.9%) is sent to other content-driven online media sites, such as social networks, blogs, and news and entertainment websites. However, only 9.5% of Twitter’s downstream traffic is sent to transactional websites (i.e. travel, business and finance sites, plus online retailers). By contrast, Google UK (the country’s biggest search engine and source of traffic to other websites) sends 30.7% of its traffic to transactional sites, while for Facebook (the UK’s most popular social network), the figure is 14.7%.

Downstream_traffic_from_twitter_google_uk_facebook_hotmail_2009.png

Twitter has proven to be a fantastic source of traffic for content driven sites, and the media companies with a strong presence on the service are using it to great effect. However, with one or two exceptions (most notably Dell, which claims to generated $3m via Twitter), very few transactional websites have yet used Twitter to drive sales. During May, Google UK sent 365 times more traffic to transactional websites than Twitter. Given that Twitter has yet to settle on a business model that will take advantage of its huge, loyal user base, this is an issue that needs to be addressed by the people that run the company if they are to make the service a financial as well as popular success.

The third party website that has benefited most from Twitter’s success is Twitpic, a service which allows users to upload photos and pictures to their Twitter profiles. The site was the biggest recipient of UK traffic from Twitter during May, picking up 1 in every 13 downstream visits from the social network. UK Internet visits to Twitpic have increased 250 fold over the last 12 months, and it is now the third most popular photo website in the UK behind Flickr and Photobucket.

Smaller blogs and technology sites were amongst the first to benefit from Twitter, but mainstream media websites in the UK were quick to follow their lead. Twitter was the 27th biggest source of traffic to News and Media – Print websites in the UK during May, and all of the main newspaper websites now have multiple Twitter feeds.

The key to having a successful Twitter presence is to engage the community. Twitter is a great viral marketing channel, and for many users the aim is to have their story ‘retweeted’ – i.e. passed on by other users – as many times as possible. Although all of the newspapers have multiple ‘official’ feeds, these tend to be bland and have very low ‘retweet’ rates. Where journalists themselves are ‘tweeting’ themselves and engaging with the Twitter community, they typically have more success in creating viral stories.

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Iran searches and Twitter

June 23, 2009

Given the current political situation in the country, we were expecting to see a spike in searches for ‘iran’ last week. As the chart below illustrates, there were more searches for Iran during the week ending 20/06/09 than for Iraq, Dubai or Israel (generally the most searched for countries in the Middle East) at any point over the last three years.

UK_Internet_searches_for_iran_dubai_israel_iraq_2009_2008_2007_2006_chart.png

Last week we tracked over 2,600 UK Internet searches containing the word ‘iran’. Here are the top 10:

1. iran (18.5% of searches for terms containing ‘iran’)
2. iran news (5.7%)
3. iran election (1.5%)
4. iran elections (1.3%)
5. iran tv (1.3%)
6. twitter iran (1.2%)
7. iran protests (1.1%)
8. bbc iran (0.9%)
9. iran elections 2009 (0.7%)
10. iran twitter (0.6%)

As you would expect, the top searches refer to the elections and subsequent protests. The presence of two Twitter-related terms nicely illustrates the amount of chatter related to the subject that is still taking place on the micro blogging service. However, as the table below illustrates, Twitter was not one of the top 10 sites receiving traffic from searches for ‘iran’ last week. Most of it went to more established news sites and Wikipedia.