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Hitwise Intelligence - Sandra Hanchard - Asia Pacific

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Early-adopters in NZ looking to shop on funky T-shirt websites

October 12, 2009

Last week we launched Hitwise Lifestyle, our online segmentation and targeting tool, in the New Zealand market. Hitwise Lifestyle is built on Mosaic, a geodemographic classification system developed by Pacific Micromarketing and Experian. Each of New Zealand's 1.4 million residential households is allocated into 42 Types within 11 Groups based on a wide range of statistical and independently-researched sources.

One of the key Mosaic Lifestyle Groups is ‘Urban Intelligence'. Accounting for 4.8% of New Zealand households, Urban Intelligence is comprised of tech-savvy young professionals, with high household incomes and strong spending habits (Download our full report on Urban Intelligence).

The retail behaviour of this group is of particular interest leading up to Christmas. While Shopping & Classifieds - Auctions is a significant online industry in NZ, it is under-indexed in visits by Urban Intelligence. Retail verticals that did perform strongly in attracting visits from Urban Intelligence included Apparel and Accessories, Grocery and Alcohol, Health and Beauty, Flowers and Gifts and Department Stores. Below is a table with the leading Apparel and Accessories websites visited by Urban Intelligence:

· Designer t-shirt online shop, 1-Daytee was the leading Apparel and Accessories website visited by Urban Intelligence, 12 weeks ending 3 October 2009. US t-shirt company, Threadless.com also ranked amongst the top sites, and attracted 1 in 10 visits from Urban Intelligence.

· Given that the Apparel and Accessories industry is usually dominated by female Internet users, it was interesting to see that visits to 1-Daytee and Threadless.com were comprised of 59.1% and 56.6% male users respectively.

Urban Intelligence highly engaged with overseas News and Media sites

An important application of Hitwise Lifestyle is understanding the content preferences of a particular segment to inform media spending decisions. Urban Intelligence, for example, has the highest engagement with News and Media websites compared to all Mosaic Groups; 16% above the online average for the 12 weeks ending 3 October 2009.

Of further interest is the strong percentage of visits that overseas News and Media websites attract from Urban Intelligence, reflecting this segment's high education levels. As the below table demonstrates, visits to Guardian.co.uk were comprised of 12.53% by Urban Intelligence households, while Sohu.com News attracted 9.91%, The New York Times 9.37%, CNN.com International – US Edition 9.37%, BBC Homepage 8.1% and BBC News 7.89%.