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Hitwise Intelligence - Heather Hopkins - North America
Analyst Weblog
Canadian Banks Brand Association
November 04, 2009
Internet search data can be an excellent input to understand what consumers associate with a brand name. Looking at the words that consumers include with a brand name in a search query provides insight into the products, services and attributes consumers associate wtih that brand. The data, updated weekly is far more timely and cost effective than the traditional phone surveys to measure brand association.
Today, I want to follow up on a post from last week to show what Canadians associate with the brand names of the big banks. The following table shows the top 10 branded search terms for the Big 5 banks in the twelve weeks to October 3, 2009.
It is not surprising that most consumers are searching first for online banking for all of the banks. We tend to use search engines to navigate the web and banking is no exception. There are a few other things of note, however:
- Bank of Montreal's Mastercard appears at #8 among search terms for Bank of Montreal, while credit card searches don't appear among most other bank search terms. Notice also the brand for their Mastercard product, "mosaic mastercard".
- CIBC's credit card, Visa, is also among its top 10 brand searches, again at #8.
- TD Canada Trust's search terms reveal the continued strength of the TD brand, with "td" at #2 while "canada trust" appears at #10.
- Looking beyond the top 10 terms, I found searches for TD Canada Trust Insurance offering, "rbc visa" and "desjardins visa".
You can view last week's post on the online strength of the brands of the Big 5 banks here.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 11:30 AM
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In Categories Business & Finance | Canadian Insights
Canadian Banks, Internet Search Data and Brand Strength
October 15, 2009
Internet search data is an excellent source of insight into what consumers associate with a brand as well as the "top of mindedness" of any particular brand. I did some analysis of the top search terms sending visits to Canadian banks to see how Canadians search for their banks.
The top search term sending Canadian traffic to Banks and Financial Institutions in the 12 weeks rolling to October 3, 2009 was "td canada trust" accounting for 5% of clicks to this industry. A close second, searches for "rbc online banking" accounted for 4.85% of clicks.
But while TD may take the top spot in individual search terms, when I aggregated searches relating to TD Canada Trust, Royal Bank and the other big banks, I found that RBC is actually the most searched for Canadian bank, capturing 26% of branded searches among the top 300 terms sending clicks to Banks and Financial Institutions websites. TD was second capturing 20%. The following pie chart shows the breakdown for the Big 5 plus Desjardins.
All but 10 of the top 300 search terms sending visits to Banks and Financial Institutions websites were branded terms. Most generic search terms related to the Canadian dollar exchange rate and they accounted for less than 1% of clicks.
Also interesting, Capital One's URL, GetMyCard.ca was the #171 search term sending visits to Banks and Financial Institutions. The analyst team at Hitwise has done a bit of work in the past to help brand marketers use internet usage data as a measure of the effectiveness of offline advertising. This is a nice example of how awareness of a particular URL promoted in offline advertising can be measured over time and against peers.
Stay tuned for a follow up post on brand association for Canadian banks as measured by Internet search data.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 10:41 AM
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In Categories Branding | Canadian Insights | Financial Services
TD Canada Trust Facebook
October 14, 2009
As the most trafficked site in Canada, Facebook is inevitably going to appear in the clickstream reports of just about every site in Canada. However, the social network is more prominent than you might expect in clickstream reports for TD Canada Trust. TD Canada Trust had for the past couple of years built up a strong presence on the social network, and the question among many Canadian banks and online marketers is whether the effort has been worth while.
TD Canada Trust's most popular Facebook Group is Money Lounge. It was set up to provide budgeting tools and strategies for students and has amassed an impressive 19,000+ fans through contests and promotions.
Hitwise data reveal that TD Canada Trust is getting more traffic from Facebook than the other banks. Last week, the TD Canada Trust Online Banking website was the #24 downstream website from Facebook and TD Canada Trust was #26. The TD Canada Trust websites were the top commercial websites downstream from Facebook last week. Royal Bank of Canada followed at #29 and eBay Canada at #33.
Facebook is an important source of traffic to TD Canada Trust. It was the #3 source of traffic to the site last week, accounting for 6.66% of visits. Facebook accounted for more than twice the share of upstream visits to TD Canada Trust than Bing and Yahoo! Search Canada combined.
Hat tip to Shane Mullane of Hitwise for the idea for this post.
Stay tuned for more posts to come on the banking category. The next one in the hopper is on the brand strength of Canadian banks online.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 09:36 AM
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In Categories Business & Finance | Canadian Insights
Google Street View Launches in Canada
October 14, 2009
Google launched Street View to 10 Canadian cities last week. Our Canadian fast moving search terms report was filled with references to Street View. The #1 fast moving search term last week was "google street view" and 4 of the top 10 fast moving search terms related to the launch.
The launch pushed up the share of Canadian internet visits to Google Maps Canada by 36% to capture 51% of Canadian internet visits among Maps websites last week. The following table shows the top 10 Maps websites in the week to 10/10/2009 based on share of Canadian internet visits.
Google launched Street View in 10 cities but Hitwise search data reveals that while demand for Street View was high for Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver some cities did not even appear among the top 100 search terms that included the words "google street view" last week, including Squamish, Whistler, Kitchener and Waterloo. However, if Google were looking for which cities to hit next, there seems to be a lot of interest in Hamilton and Sudbury.
Posted by Heather Hopkins at 09:06 AM
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In Categories Canadian Insights | Maps
