Hitwise Archive

Back during my corporate days, we subscribed to the competitive analysis Web services that Hitwise offers. Basically you can see data about your site, upstream and downstream traffic, industry traffic, etc. If I remember, each category was $5k/year (might have been more not 100% sure). The data was great (though it wasn’t always accurate) and I enjoyed studying the reports.

Today Google’s Trends application has added Websites to their free offering. You can now enter a Web site into Google Trends and it gives you back information on unique visitors from Google searches (only a relative graph, no actual numbers), location information, "also visited" and "also searched for". Barry Schwartz over at Search Engine Land has an in-depth review which every Internet marketer must read.

Note that if you sign-in on Google Trends, you see more detailed information including numbers on the graph.

Now to be fair, this is only for search traffic so it won’t kill Hitwise’s product offering, just injure them slightly. Theis new Google offering sure does provide a massive amount of free data. You can see what your competitors are doing in search and where their site visitors are heading to. It’s also something to consider for organic SEO purposes.

Here’s the CenterNetworks chart:

As expected, U.S. is first in search traffic to CN. I would have expected Germany to be second but they are eigth and India ranks second in inbound search traffic. The charts at the bottom seem like recent traffic only whereas the graph at the top is all-time. The also-visited shows popular social media blogger louisgray first, then techmeme, scobleizer, inquisitr and gigaom rounding out the top 5.

For comparison purposes, here’s Techcrunch’s chart:

With their pagerank 8, they have significantly more search traffic volume than CN. Here we see U.S. first, then Japan followed by India. I am guessing that Techcrunch Japan plays a role there. As for the also visited, it makes sense that crunchbase is first, many of the outbound links on TC point to their tech directory. It’s interesting that Friendfeed ranks fourth, I rarely see them speak about FriendFeed. Other top blogs readwriteweb, gigaom and venturebeat round out the top sites. They have data in the also searched for field which is dominated by youtube terms.

Again, if you are a social media consultant, an analyst, search engine optimizer, or work as an Internet marketer, you should be reviewing this data on your site(s), your competitors and your industry as a whole. I don’t see any feeds available but I am sure someone will hack that up soon. A widget of the data would be excellent as well.

Heather Hopkins from Hitwise has put together an interesting chart of Google’s top 20 properties by page views. Last week she provided the chart by unique visitors. Heather notes that the pageview chart is in response to a commenter’s question about whether there is a difference between pageviews and unique visitors. I’d suggest the pageview chart isn’t really worth compared to the unique visitor chart because so much of what Google offers is based on non-refreshing technologies.

For example, in the chart displayed below, Google Finance and Google Calendar are at the bottom of the list. Google Finance uses heavy non-refreshing technology and if they did refresh the page each time the graphs were changed by the user, Google Finance would be much higher on the list. With Google Calendar, I don’t even know if it ever fully refreshes the page.  It’s like coming to a fight with Rocky with one arm tied behind your back.

What it does show as Heather notes is that Google search still dominates the Google product lineup. Considering Google is a verb when mentioned in the sense of search, this makes sense.

I’d also be interested to know how Hitwise tracks Google Maps on wireless devices — are those pageviews reported in the number below? And what about downloadable products like Google Earth?

Hitwise is reporting that visits to the Microsoft Zune Web site jumped 299 percent on Christmas Day. Also noted is market share of visits to Zune.net showed an increase of 392 percent when comparing Christmas Day 2007 to the previous day. The Zune is a popular device on Amazon as well.

Yet even with this massive jump, the Zune still lags iTunes by 6x says Hitwise.

Pricing for the Zune starts at $139 for the 4gb and while that’s a bit less expensive than the iPod Nano, the iPod is still where it’s at. Especially with a $79 shuffle to meet almost any budget. One feature I like about the Zune is the FM Tuner, something that is missing on the iPod. 

What do you think? Will the Zune be able to gain market share in 2008 over the iPod?

Update: Jimmy notes the following about the increase, "yeah it was everyone headed to the support pages"

Since we know that Google is on the pace to acquire multiple companies a week, I thought I would take an educated stab at who is next. In the major category, we had DoubleClick last week, this week it's FeedBurner. So here is my prediction for the next company to be scooped up by the Internet's ATM machine, Google.

Experian

Google wants to control offer access to the world's data. Experian controls data about basically every single human being in the U.S. and in a good majority of the countries around the world. Years ago Experian attempted to sell me on using their service to expand my customer database to obtain more profile information about my customers. Imagine Google being able to tie credit data into what ads are shown? Bad credit, see a refinance your car ad vs. the buy the new Benz ad. High income… show an ad of that resort home in the Swiss Alps.

Now some will bitch and moan that tying that information together is bad and evil. But it's just additional data points to the ones Google already knows about you. And believe me, I am still the first one in the "Google owns too much data" line, but this acquisition would just make sense.

Even if we forget the credit data that Experian holds, they still have thousands of data points that could easily benefit Google and its advertisers.

Part II of acquisition – Hitwise

So you heard it here first, once the advertising firm acquisition spree ends, the analytics firm acquisition spree will begin. Advertisers want data about their campaigns but also about where they should be advertising.

Hitwise was acquired by Experian last month making the Experian acquisition that much sweeter. Hitwise is the best in this category. Their data is the most believable compared to companies like Alexa and they offer rich, robust reports. I am a bit of a stats/analytics nut, and so far only Hitwise can satisfy my cravings. After working with them for about 2 years, I know they  have a great set of analytic minds on staff and the Hitwise suite of products would complement Google Analytics very well. In addition this would again bring Google closer to their goal of gaining access to all of the information available.

Imagine being able to go into Adwords and select sites that you want to advertise on and then hopping over to Hitwise (or integrated) to view how that site looks, traffic, in/out links, etc. Hot. Super hot.

So — am I offbase? Hit me up in the comments…