Hitwise Intelligence - Tim Lovitt - AP

New article, new blog - Australian Media Consumption

2011-09-14T04:08:32Z

The article Australian Media Consumption is available over on the new Marketing Forward Asia Pacific blog.

Australian Media Consumption In the last few weeks we’ve spent a lot of time in the media space, specifically the online media space: who is watching what and reading where. Usual suspects figure highly – News sites, Entertainment sites and even YouTube...more

Mortgages up, Home Loans and Credit Cards steady

2011-08-31T02:07:53Z

The recently released April-June Quarterly Banking Review (available for download) spotlights the habits of Australian consumers – not only are we saving more and paying down debt, but we're not thinking about new debt unless it’s a mortgage.

Searches for credit cards, home loans and mortgages all saw a drop across the quarter, with only Home Loans returning to levels of demand seen earlier in the year.

The variation here between ‘home loan’ and ‘mortgages’ is interesting too, stressing the difference that language
can make when it comes to sentiment – and how that sentiment translates to consumer demand.

In today's tight market, you might well see better returns marketing a mortgage today than you would a home loan. As seen in the charting however, this can change on a weekly basis.

Given this is all within just the Australian market, it’s easy to see the need to be well optimised for not only brand and product terms, but also generic terms, terms likely to be used by your potential customers as they search for you and your products.

For more Banking and Consumer insights, contact your Hitwise representative today.

Equally, if you’ve got a question you think we can answer, ask away and we’ll do our best to feature your queries where we can.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.

The Winner of The Block

2011-08-18T19:14:19Z

Melbourne PR and Communications consultant Hamish Jones yesterday tweeted a question close to our hearts:Never watched an episode of #The Block. Are these odds likely to accurate reflect the results?

Not being home renovators was part of it, but in this case it was his query on the odds offered by Sportsbet.

Commercial odds are a form of predictive market, where the offerer is looking to offset risk as much as possible. Thus, as bets firm around a favourite, odds offered for that favourite decrease.

As you can see below, Josh and Jenna are Sportsbet's odds-on favourites.

Some back of the envelope figurings suggest they seem to be twice as likely to win as Rod & Tania, almost four times as likely as Polly& Waz and just under five times as likely to win as Katrina & Amie.

Given we haven’t watched The Block and aren’t privy to Sporsbet’s actuarial workings, we can't comment on their accuracy.

We do however have Search data, lots and lots of search data. Visualising this in the lead image (click for larger version) you start to see just how much interest there is in Josh and Jenna compared to everyone else. Don't read too much into Josh's slightly larger representation than Jenna's by the way - there's a lot of misspelling of Jenna.

Reviewing these variations analytically we see the following:

Going by public interest, Josh and Jenna are winners in the popularity stakes. However, they’re only just over twice as popular as Katrina and Amie. Rod & Tania / Polly & Waz also seem to have a better chance than the odds alone would suggest.

So, is the field tighter than it looks? Possibly, at least from the angle of public opinion.

In answering Hamish’s question, yes, the odds appear to braodly match the interest in the participants. We'll have to wait until Sunday to see if this translates into the highest sale price.

For more on predictive data, consumer insights and sentiment analysis, contact your Hitwise representative today.

Equally, if you’ve got a question you think we can answer, ask away and we’ll do our best to feature your queries where we can.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.

NB Whilst Sportsbet are an Experian client, they have not been involved in the creation of this report. The odds used were publicly available at the time.

Addendum - 22/08/11There's a result that the data didn't cover - of the four properties, three failed to sell, with Polly and Waz subsequently winning by default. Congratulations!

Predicting Masterchef

2011-08-12T06:09:41Z

Predicting winners is big business, whether in business, at the track, or a punt between friends.

To quote the abstract of Prediction Markets in Theory and Practice by Justin Wolfers and Eric Zitzewitz, “market-generated forecasts typically outperform most moderately sophisticated benchmarks”.

In this case, the Australian public is the market, all those individuals curious enough to run searches in relation to the Masterchef.

My curiosity lead me to have a look at the data last Friday before the final – and I’m happy to say that between then and the Sunday night final, my prediction was heard by friends, family and everyone at the Saturday RMIT Masters of Designlecture: Kate to win.

How did I do it? Well, it’s more hypothesis than even theory at present, but it focuses on search habits over time.

Firstly, it’s important to establish that there has been consumer demand, as manifested by searches. There was, graphed below.

Separate to the prediction, it’s interesting to note the difference in this over the last three years, especially in light of David Mott’s commentary on differing audience numbers over the years, as 2011 interest seems to be down by 50-odd percent compared to 2010.

In this instance, (12 rolling weeks, to week ending 6 August 2011), Kate had almost 50% more searches than Michael. Given the Law of large numbers (the Hitwise sample size 3,000,000±) this isn’t an issue of who is saying what, but around the overall volume of individual searches. In this instance, Kate was winner, just as she was on Sunday night.

Could you have made a guess as to the winner without this information? Yes. Could you make a more educated guess with a higher degree of certainty thanks to this research? We think so.

For more on predictive data, consumer insights and sentiment analysis, contact Hitwise today.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.

Huffpo Australia

2011-07-29T02:06:14Z

Announced recently at the Cannes Lions, the Huffington Post is soon to be launching an outpost in Australia.

This seemed a little strange to us here – Australia is small in comparison to the US, we have a range of media options available and have well resourced independent players. The recent launch of The Conversation adds further to the mix, providing a standalone platform for academic publishing.

Things started to make sense however when we took a look at HuffPo’s rankings – they’re number 1, and have been for every month bar two in the last year.

More incredibly, they’re seeing almost a million Australian visits a month: almost 5% of our population!

In this light the announcement doesn’t seem so strange after all — a cashed up offshore player (HuffPo was bought for US$315m by AOL earlier this year) has noted strong interest and decided to realise an opportunity for growth. In the three years to June 2011, HuffPo increased their Australian market share of the Lifestyle – Politics category from less than 5% to more than 20%. In fact, they're the single largest site in the category by visitation.

Having ranked ranked first in Lifestyle – Politics for ten out of the last twelve months, not to mention regularly pulling 900,000+ visits, Huffington Post is most definitely of interest to Australians, with us now of interest to AOL as a result.

Makes sense to us.

For information on how you can pick the right time to enter a new market, contact Experian Hitwise today.

Experian Hitwise. Now you know.

Australia's enthusiasm for the NBN

2011-07-18T09:27:35Z

Whilst the NBN contractual announcements of the other week were more than enough to send Twitter crazy , the consumer interest in all things high-speed from Australians is greater than it might seem.

Firstly, using Topsy’s Twitter analytics, we can quickly see the volume of interest driven by Telstra’s announcement of their agreement with NBN Co and the Federal Government.

Then, by building a panel of the key terms that drive traffic to the major Government sites, we can gain an understanding of exactly what Australian consumers are interested in, and how those interests change over time.

Firstly, whilst the NBN announcement was a pledge as part of the Kevin07 campaign, consumer interest really began in May 2008, when the then Rudd government announced a controversial 12 week, $5million tender.

NBN – Share of Users

Extended for 12 weeks after extensive appeal, consumer interest bubbled along throughout 2009-10.

Interest kicked up a gear in early to mid 2010, before going ballistic in the closing months, when Telstra backed the revised (and current) plan of building a government backed network. Whilst interest dropped slightly in the negotiation period since, search of late indicates a level of interest above and beyond anything we’ve seen before. The sustained search levels over the past fortnight suggest we’re all interested in high speed, low cost connections.

As an indication of how this interest shifted, we can look closely at the frequency of an individual search term, ‘nbn jobs’. Fourth most popular term of the week, it’s a search that Australians have conducted more frequency over time.

Having made only brief appearances prior, ‘nbn job’ related searches grow month on month, tracking at first behind and then overtaking general NBN searches in recent weeks.

In recent times operational and even commercial terms such as ‘rollout’ and pricing related searches have also taken shape.

From here we suggest search will shift towards more consumer oriented terms, with searches around specifications, pricing, faults and service coming to the fore.

With countries such as Japan and South Korea providing us hints of where connectivity could take us, Experian Hitwise will keep you up to date as Australia embraces its emerging NBN.

For more consumer insights, contact Experian Hitwise today.
Experian Hitwise. Now you know.