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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific
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ninemsn Weather and Holiday Shopping - Unlikely Combination?
October 31, 2006
Melbourne streets are starting to light up with Christmas decorations in shop windows as retailers give procrastinators like me an early reminder that the shopping season is upon us. It's prompted me to look into Hitwise data for what retail marketers have started implementing online in preparation.
What caught my eye was that ninemsn Shopping had risen to 5th position in the Shopping & Classifieds category for the week ending 14 October 2006, its highest position ever in a period of 24 months. This compared to a ranking of #25 in November last year. The only websites ahead of it were eBay, eBay Australia, Amazon and Email Cash Australia.
Delving into our stats to find the reason for ninemsn Shopping's increase, I created the below chart to reveal that ninemsn's strategy of integrating links to shopping from ninemsn Weather has pushed ninemsn's shopping property into the top tier of retail website visits, which is not an easy feat.
Key Content Traffic Drivers
The above chart shows that ninemsn Weather accounted for over 26% of visits to ninemsn Shopping for the week ending 28 October 2006, compared to less than 1% last year. Other ninemsn properties to have increased clickstream traffic include ninemsn Digital Living and ninemsn Games, which suggests a strategy by ninemsn to concentrate traffic from other popular content areas to its shopping website. We may see more prominent links from other ninemsn sub-domains increase as Christmas draws closer.
But Are Weather Watchers Shoppers?
To understand the relevancy of referrals from ninemsn Weather to ninemsn Shopping we can compare the audience that each website attracts. The below figure shows that ninemsn Weather actually attracts more users from Mosaic Group A - Leading Lifestyles and Group D - Fashionably Wired (above 100 index line) than ninemsn Shopping. Both of these groups have high-disposable incomes and are inclined to shop online, which is an ideal audience source for ninemsn Shopping.
Swimwear Shopping
Finally, many of the shopping links from ninemsn Weather were for swimwear items when I checked; logcial given the warm weather coming up, and an effective tie between website content to retail. The below chart shows the seasonality of swimwear searches peaking right through December last year. Apparel marketers have still got time to tune their online strategies to these searches - ie via leading weather websites.
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Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 03:15 PM
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In Categories Shopping and Classifieds
Comments
Paul, good observation, I guess some marketing tactics will always work ;) Though both websites attract slightly higher volumes of female users.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | November 3, 2006 02:35 PM
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Mosaic groups aside, I think perhaps the key driver of traffic from ninemsn weather to shopping might actually be the big image of the bikini-clad individual.
Posted by Paul | November 3, 2006 02:20 PM