Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific
Analyst Weblog
« ninemsn Weather and Holiday Shopping - Unlikely Combination? | Water Shortage - Key Issue in Victorian State Election »
Measuring Commercial Applications of Consumer Generated Media
November 16, 2006
One of the themes in our Hitwise Australia Consumer Generated Media report, published recently is determining the commercial relevancy of social networking, video and photo sharing websites to marketers. We examine which Hitwise tools can be used most effectively to measure initiatives in reaching consumers through this new channel. I'll highlight two applications explored in the report here.
The first is the Hitwise Clickstream tool, where we analyse the traffic distribution of social networking website, MySpace. The report shows that the phenomenal growth of MySpace in market share of visits since its inception in 2003 has also increased its influence on traffic distributed to commercial websites. The below chart demonstrates this effect:
Weekly Upstream Traffic from MySpace to Online Commercial Industries, November 2005 - November 2006
The key take-away is that as particular industries develop their own advertising models on MySpace and other social networks, the Hitwise Clickstream tool may be used to measure which approaches are successful in driving higher traffic volumes to websites benchmarked against their respective industry.
Another facet we look at in relation to CGM is the Hitwise Lifestyle tool which is used to segment online users according to their preferences and behaviours. What we found interesting in the report was that the Mosaic Group profile of MySpace and YouTube matched closely to the online population. This means that MySpace and YouTube are represented proportionately in most Mosaic Groups online, further proof that the use of MySpace and YouTube amongst all segments of Australian Internet users has been ubiquitous.
The Hitwise Lifestyle profile of MySpace below demonstrates there are no significant skews to any particular group, with the highest index measured 133.9 to "Rewarding Faculties" - Monied and accomplished stable families in mid to outer districts (an index over 150 would be considered significant).
Hitwise Lifestyle Representation of MySpace, 4 weeks ending 11/11/06
This insight for marketers is that there is a wide range of audience groups across different industries that can be targeted on MySpace. To target a specific audience segment, we can examine other social networking websites that do have significant swings to particular groups, covered in the report.
Posted by Sandra Hanchard at 11:14 AM
| 
(4)
| 
(0)
In Categories Consumer Generated Media
TrackBack
TrackBack URL:
http://weblogs.hitwise.com/movabletype/mt-tb.cgi/372.
Comments
Thanks for your query Dan - I've looked at the upstream view from the perspective of each category. This is so that we can see what is the dependency of each category, proportional to its own traffic, on the visits it receives from MySpace.
You're right, it is possible to look at downstream - this gives you an absolute view of which category receives the most traffic from all of MySpace's available traffic (but not proportional to the size of each category).
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | November 17, 2006 10:57 AM
Sandra
Nice piece of analysis. These amazing new sites Myspace, Youtube etc have / are growing out of know where. The rapid rise present many opportunties and also show the ability of the net to create new hero sites basiaclly overnite.
Posted by Justin | November 17, 2006 10:53 PM
Thanks Justin - it is amazing to see these websites gain traction so quickly - as well as a challenge to keep abreast of!
Posted by Sandra Hanchard | November 19, 2006 08:30 PM
Do you mean 'Downstream'? I.e. where the traffic goes from MySpace, rather than 'Upstream' (Where the traffic to MySpace comes from).
Posted by Dan Calladine | November 17, 2006 02:43 AM