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If you are anything like me you usually get your news from a variety of different sources. As a frequent reader of the NYTimes, BBC and the Boston Globe I don’t have one go to news source.

Looking at Compete.com Industry Category > News and Media > News: World, we can see the top 20 sites for world news are:

Looking further I compared the top 5 news sources Average Stay to see which news site came out on top.

The nytimes.com sees a higher average stay over news.yahoo.com, while news.yahoo.com sees more monthly unique visitors.

Furthermore I wanted to know whether gender was a factor in deciding news source. Looking at the top 3 news sites (non sub domain) we can see that men are reading more from the top sites.

Why aren’t women showing up higher on these sites? What sources are women getting their news from? Are they relying heavily on blogs or magazines?

What do you think? Where do you get your news from?

I still consider myself to be young and hip, so I can’t believe I’m about to do a “back in my day…” post.  So here I go…

Back in my day, when I had to use a dictionary, I visited the public library where it (the big book) was proudly displayed atop a pedestal in all its glory.  Nowadays, students of the Millennial Generation turn to the internet to look up a meaning for a word.  Three sites in particular, dictionary.reference.com, merriam-webster.com, and thefreedictionary.com were in Compete’s top moving sites, month-over-month, for September 2011.  Their M-O-M Unique Visitor increases for the month of September were 35%, 33%, and 27%, respectively.

The chart below illustrates Daily Reach, or, how many people visited dictionary.reference.com (orange), merriam-webster.com (green) and thefreedictionary.com (blue), as a percentage of all U.S. Internet users.  As soon as the school year started, traffic to all three sites soared.  Traffic to those sites typically spikes on Monday and Tuesday, starts to decline on Wednesday and Thursday and by Friday the sites go into their weekend decline.  Those spikes in traffic validate that students might be telling us that they are not doing their homework over the weekend.

Another interesting note from the above chart is that traffic to those sites decline during the summer months; this isn’t a surprise as many students are off on summer vacation.  For example, dictionary.reference.com has a Daily Reach average of 0.55% when school is in session and during the summer months its average is 0.36%.

Online marketers looking to target students in the high school and college demographic should definitely take advantage of the traffic these sites get during the peak days/months of the year.  It’s no secret that the Millennial generation is active online, especially in social media, so finding cost effective alternate online destinations to market to them is key.

Back in June I wrote a blog highlighting our research showing that each new Facebook fan generates on average 20 additional visits to a retailer’s website. However, as every retailer knows, not all website visits are equal. Most eCommerce sites will have an idea of the average conversion rate from a visit to a sale, but in reality the likelihood that a visit will result in a sale depends on a number of factors – from whether the visitor is a regular customer or not, to how far they are down the purchase funnel.

Another key factor is the type of person visiting the site: a rich banker is probably more likely to make a purchase at a high end electronics store than teenager making an aspirational search for the latest expensive gadget. Even mass market retailers that attract customers from across the socio-demographic spectrum have core customers that are more likely to purchase. John Lewis is one such retailer: a major name on the British high street and consistently ranked in the top 10 of the IMRG-Experian Hitwise Hot Shops List, but “middle England’s favourite department store” is also a company with a distinctive core customer base.

Over the last few months, John Lewis has been making a concerted effort to attract fans to its Facebook page, which at the time of writing has almost 180,000 “Likes”. We now have the ability to track visitors to companies’ Facebook pages using Hitwise, and the chart below shows that www.facebook.com/JohnLewisRetail has been picking up an increasing number of visitors over the last few months.

But the question remains: who are these visitors? We are able to overlay visits to an organisation’s Facebook page with Experian Mosaic socio-demographic data, and the chart below illustrates the segmentation of visitors to John Lewis’s Facebook page for the 4 weeks ending 10th September 2011.

The largest group of visitors to John Lewis’s Facebook page come from the Suburban Mindsets Mosaic group (defined as “ maturing families on mid-range incomes living a moderate lifestyle in suburban semis”) – so far, so John Lewis. However, the second biggest group of visitors to www.facebook.com/JohnLewisRetail is a little less expected; Ex-Council Community are defined as “residents with low levels of education but sufficient incomes who live in the better right-to-buy council houses” and account for 11.5% of visitors. To understand a bit more about this audience, it is instructive to compare the Mosaic profile of visitors to John Lewis’s Facebook page with that of visitors to johnlewis.com, the company’s homepage and transactional website.

As the chart above illustrates, the Ex-Council Community Mosaic group is indeed over-represented on the john Lewis Facebook page when compared with visitors to the retailer’s homepage. It is a similar situation for other less affluent groups, including Claimant Cultures, Industrial Heritage and Terraced Melting Pot. On the other hand, while Suburban Mindsets accounts for a similar proportion of visitors to both the homepage and Facebook page, other core groups of visitors to John Lewis homepage -such as Professional Rewards (essentially the more affluent members of the middle class), Liberal Opinions (young professionals) and Alpha Territory (the richest people in Britain) – are significantly under-represented as visitors to the department store’s Facebook fan page. This is despite all of these groups being well represented on the social network, and presumably as John Lewis customers.

Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK and provides brands with a fantastic opportunity to engage with a huge audience, there is no doubt that certain fans will be worth more than others. This example nicely illustrates that simply playing the numbers game may not necessarily deliver the best results on Facebook – as with other marketing channels, quality often provides a better return on investment (ROI) than quality.

Combining Experian’s vast range of data assets with social media expertise (via Techlightenment), we are uniquely positioned to help brands drive ROI from their Facebook and other social media investments. If you would like to find out more about our Facebook Fan Acquisition or customer segmentation services, please email us.

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Amidst the attacks on communities, businesses, properties and houses, one of the key characteristics of the recent rioting in the UK was looting – Theft, on a grand scale.  Another key characteristic was the socio-economic profile of those taking part in the looting – Young people, some perhaps involved in gangs, and others swept along for a variety of reasons that social-psychologists will illuminate in the months ahead. Social housing, unemployment, poor education and low incomes have also been touted as common factors amongst the looters.

Of course, what is reported and what actually happened might be different stories, and in time a fuller picture will emerge. However, looking at the affected city-centres in the UK, there is evidence that the looters targeted premium goods such as phones, A.V. equipment, jewelry, clothing and footwear. (There is also speculation that some of the disorder was organised using smartphones).

This may be a rather tenuous segway, but about 18 months ago Microsoft Advertising released a research study looking at purchasers of premium goods. Note: Purchasers not Looters! However, the name of the study: The Great Ignored, perhaps ruefully hints at marketing’s approach to the premium purchaser.

This is largely due to an assumption that it is primarily affluent people who buy premium goods. Our study found premium consumers are not necessarily wealthy: only 1 in 5 earn £50k or more per year, and the average household income of a premium buyer is £36k. This is because Premium purchase is not a demographic, it’s a behaviour. A behaviour characterised by consumers trading-up to premium brands in a handful of categories where they see value in spending more, and economising in other areas to afford it.
42% per cent of UK consumers buy premium at some point. Traditional demographic profiling of premium purchasers e.g. ‘ABC1’ would hit a third of them. This means that advertisers who rely on demographic profiling are missing a huge group of people who are not affluent, but still buy premium — hence two-thirds of premium purchasers are ‘The Great Ignored’. Our research examines the Great Ignored and uncovers the full story, identifying and defining the premium mindset and making recommendations for marketers to adapt their strategies to both reach this elusive audience, and guide them to information that supports ‘premium’ decisions.

tim – Microsoft Research UK

Foodies, epicureans, gourmets, locavores… these days we have a dozens of names for food lovers and socially conscientious consumers alike. While the taxonomy of these food enthusiasts will change over time, its fascinating to find new websites that blend popular e-commerce paradigms to cater to the food loving collective. One such site, gilttaste.com (part of the popular ‘flash sale’ network Gilt Groupe) launched full-throttle in the middle of May of this year, taking food-lovers by storm. Though the question of their overall success selling food products is yet to be seen, we can see large demographic shifts that indicate they’re attracting young professionals with high-end taste buds and incomes to match.

Demographics: Age

Demographics: Income

While the site is still fresh to Internet, search engines across the web are starting to take notice. It’s likely the baking of SEO efforts into their content strategy with the “stories” section has been successful. Rather than simply relying on brand awareness to drive the new initiative they’ve been smart about enlisting authors and chefs to add their two cents to the site, creating great content and a symbiotic relationship with popular food authorities across the web. In the spirit of sharing, one of my favorite stories was a personal story written by Shauna Ahren a.k.a. gluten-free girl about food and romance: http://www.gilttaste.com/stories/606-how-going-gluten-free-let-me-find-the-love-of-my-life

We can find some other interesting information about how people find the site via search. The top 15 keywords are indicators that Gilt Group has done a good job branding the new site with 5/15 referrals being gilt branded keywords. Additionally, the SEO rich content strategy of creating gilt stories has driven high average time engagement on a keyword level for inquisitive search referrals like “how much real lobster is in a lobster roll?” Where as specific food related searches like “black truffles” drove an overall high time on site engagement while also driving over 5% of search referrals. With so much love from search, Gilt Taste may benefit from featuring a story on black truffles, I know I’d love to hear about the process of finding them, maybe even an interview from a truffle hunter. After all some of the world’s most interesting people were fungi lovers, like conceptual artist and composer John Cage as well as scientist Paul Statmens (link to his inspiring ted talk).

We’ve been talking at Hitwise for a very long time about the benefits of social media and how Facebook in particular is becoming critical to the success of multi-channel marketing. We are constantly asked: “What’s the ROI with advertising on Facebook?”and until now that has always been a difficult question to qualify precisely. Leveraging our unique data sets we now have an answer: for retailers, each new fan acquired on Facebook is worth 20 additional visits to your website over the course of a year.

I’ve blogged on many occasions on just how massive Facebook is online but it is always worth reiterating some of the big “wow-factor” stats which highlight Facebook’s reach and influence online. Facebook is the second most visited website in the UK after Google and is now the second biggest source of traffic to other websites as well. 1 in every 6 page views from UK Internet users goes to a Facebook page, and 20 million hours are spent on the website every day from UK users alone.

With this in mind we’ve decided to launch a new service today which allows brands to acquire thousands of new Facebook fans and then analyse other behaviours these fans exhibit online. We’ve very sensibly decided to call this our Facebook Fan Acquisition and Analysis service.

Our data shows that for the top retailers, even if they have no Facebook fans they can still expect to receive on average 62,000 visits from Facebook each month. However, by utilising this new service, brands can more rapidly build a fan base within Facebook and therefore drive more traffic to their website. Within retail each new fan acquired will drive an additional 20 visits to a retailer’s websites, which in turn will generate extra sales both online and offline.

The figure of 1 fan = 20 extra visits to a website uses a unique methodology that combines Hitwise data with data from social media experts Techlightenment. We took the top 100 retailers ranked in the Hitwise Shopping and Classifieds category and benchmarked visits to those websites against the number of fans those brands had on their Facebook page. We then also looked at the propensity for people to search for those retail brands after a visit to Facebook using our Search Sequence tool.

We’ve used a similar methodology before in a previous blog to find the retail brands that were leveraging the marketing potential of Facebook. Looking at the data for the 12 weeks ending 18 June 2011, we can see that fashion brands once again are utilising Facebook the most, with a much higher proportion of searches after a visit to Facebook than in normal search.

The table above is an updated Index of the top retailers that were searched for after a visit to Facebook. Topshop, Boohoo and Jack Wills lead the pack, with consumers being 54% more likely to search for the ‘topshop’ brand after a visit to Facebook than they would in a normal everyday search in Google, Yahoo! or Bing. Out of the top 10 brands above, WHSmith was the notable exception to the collection, as the only non-fashion retailer in the top 10.

If you want to find out more about our Facebook Fan Acquisition and Analysis service you can send an email to press.uk@hitwise.com. In the meantime you can follow us on Twitter for the latest updates and online statistics.

On Monday the Bank of England (BoE) released its latest Quarterly Bulletin which included an article Using search data as economic indicators. The central bank is using search data to benchmark key areas like housing, unemployment, tax and benefits.

Here at Experian Hitwise we have long been champions of the power of search as a “window into the soul” of the UK population. More than ever before, if someone wants to find the answer to a question, they will invariably ask Google, Yahoo! or Bing to provide them with the answer. Analysing that search data then becomes incredibly powerful, as it allows us to say with confidence what people are interested in, what their hopes and concerns are, and what is happening in their lives.

Property is a great example of how online search behaviour is a reflection of the intent and interests of the UK population. According to an article in The Guardian, April 2011 saw house prices fall at their fastest annual rate for over 18 months as Halifax revealed that the average UK house price dropped to £160,365. Lower house prices meant that opportunistic buyers were searching for properties for sale, but not necessarily properties for rent.

What we saw in the search data over April was a 23% decline in searches for all terms relating to properties to rent, whilst searches online for properties to buy increased marginally by 1%. Interestingly all search term variations connected with house prices increased by 69%.

Regular readers of the blog will know that we often correlate our data with other data sources to show how online behaviour is reflected in real world trends. Last month we looked at how high street Footfall data can complement online retail traffic during the Bank Holidays. In previous blogs we have shown how Met Office weather data correlates with searches for lots of items from garden furniture to snow chains. In the finance industry we’ve shown how changes in the exchange rate between the pound and foreign currency are reflected online with increases in currency searches, or how the declining value of the pound against the euro corresponds with fewer searches online for Eurozone travel destinations. We’ve even managed to predict X-Factor winners with our knowledge of the search landscape.

There is no doubt that search data provides fascinating (and importantly – actionable) insight into virtually any industry. Whilst it is not quite clear from the wording of the white paper used by the BoE, on face value it appears that its search analysis relies on trending single terms like ‘estate agent’ instead of looking at the wider trends of all terms relating to estate agents and the property market as a whole.

Using portfoliios of terms rather than individual terms gives a much more accurate picture of online behaviour. By drilling down into the precise search terms, it is then possible to derive consumer intent. For example, a search for ‘rightmove houses to buy in camden’ reveals much more about the intentions of this consumer than the search term ‘rightmove’. Here at Hitwise we see over 50 million unique search term variations every week, so we can derive an extraoridinary amount of insight from those searches.

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If I had a dollar for every time I wanted to put a virtual post-it on a website/image/link/idea/design/whatever, I’d be on my tropical island and not writing this blog post. Sound familiar? Finally, someone invented a service to help us curate our content into one semi-sensical place. Meet your new best friend, Pinterest. Pinterest is, as stated by Pinterest.com, “a virtual pinboard — a place where you can create collections of things you love and ‘follow’ collections created by people with great taste.”

I couldn’t have said it better, especially that “great taste” part. How do you use Pinterest? “The easiest way to pin an item is to use the Pin It bookmark. This is a special button that lets you grab an image from any website and add it to one of your pinboards. When you pin from a website, we automatically grab the source link so we can credit the original creator.”

Easy to use, easy to categorize, easy to give credit where credit is due. The attribution, categorization, organization trifecta has been met. I have one thing to say: Hallelujah.

Who’s using Pinterest? Let’s find out! Pinterest’s users are 54% female at the moment of Compete’s last data release in April.  And, based on the demographic information available, it looks like the majority of Pinterest members and browsers are shoppers or those with some disposable income, which is interesting to note, because the greatest age demographic is the 28-34 age demographic, which accounts for 28% of their users.

Here’s a peek at their age demographics:

And the income demographics:

Based on this, what can you expect to find on Pinterest? Well, anything. Some really cool ways I’ve seen Pinterest being used:

Wedding boards to save the images of bouquets, wedding dresses, bridesmaids gifts, seating cards, etc. Makes perfect sense, given the demographics. I’m in the 28-34 age range, with lots of wedding bells around me. Some of my best friends are getting married this year or next year, and there are a lot of wedding dresses in my Pinterest dashboard.

Food boards to save recipes, meals to try, table spreads, or plating ideas. Great for people who love to cook, for people with food allergies, or people who just love to eat!

Movember boards to save images of fine mustachery all year long while we wait with bated breath for November 1st to raise money and awareness for men’s health. This is a personal favorite of mine as a Movember supporter.

Cute animal boards. Can we ever get enough cute animals? No, we can’t.

Home decor boards that capture some interior decorating genius in action. This is another one that falls into the no-brainer category since the age and income demographics line up with this particular interest.

Keep in mind that Pinterest is currently invite-only, so I’d expect the demographic information to change as they open it up to more users, but for now, they’ve piqued my Pinterest!

Today (Thursday 5 May) polling stations have opened across the UK to decide whether to change the electoral system from first-past-the-post (FPTP) to the alternative vote (AV) system, under which voters rank candidates in order of preference.

The majority of online searches relating to AV in the last four weeks have been very generic, with UK Internet users mostly searching for ‘alternative vote’ (17% of all search clicks) or ‘av’ (13% of all search clicks).

Internet users were also looking for clarification of how AV worked, with a number of information related search term variations occurring prominently in the above list including ‘what is av’, ‘av explained’ and ‘alternative voting explained’. With this in mind, it is not surprising that the top two websites to receive traffic from all AV-related searches were Wikipedia and BBC News. The official Electoral Commission website About My Vote ranked third, although it paid for almost all of its traffic.

What is interesting is that over the four weeks ending 30 April 2011 the search term ‘no to av’ was more popular than ‘yes to av’, and yet looking at the downstream data above, more visits went to the Yes To Fairer Votes website than the NOtoAV site. The latest polls would suggest that the British public will vote to keep FPTP in favour of AP, but visits to respective YES and NO campaign websites currently point in the opposite direction.

On 3 May visits to the YES campaign website were 8.4 times higher than visits to the NO campaign website. Clearly visits don’t equal votes, but there certainly has been a surge in interest online in the YES campaign, which could well be reflected in today’s voting.

Using Mosaic data we can dig a little deeper into the types of people that are visiting these websites. For both the YES and NO campaign websites, the Liberal Opinions group accounted for the most visits to each website. This group is characterised as young, well educated city dwellers – exactly the kind of people you might expect to take an interest in the AV issue.

The chart above shows the proportion of visits that Liberal Opinions contributed to both of the campaign websites. This highly active online group was responsible for 21% of all visits to the YES campaign website, but also 17% of visits to the NO website – in both cases punching above their weight relative to their representation both online and within the UK population.

As with our previous analysis of visits to political websites, the data shows that more educated groups are more likely to visit websites in general, regardless of their political affiliation. This makes it hard to judge how people are going to vote based on their online behaviour, but perhaps backs up the analysis which claims that the issue of voting reform is not of interest to the wider population. Time will tell if we get a new electoral system in the UK and adopt AV. Keep following us on Twitter for the latest political updates.

We had quite a few comments on my post last month about Groupon UK and the rise of social shopping. Given the interest surrounding this topic, I thought I’d follow up with a post which concentrates on the key differences between the four key types of retail affiliate: Price Comparison sites, Cashback sites, Voucher sites and Social Shopping sites.

One of the first things to realise is that these four groups attract very different online audiences. Using Mosaic, Experian’s in-house audience segmentation system, we can see what types of people are visiting the four categories.

The spider diagram above highlights how different UK Internet audiences use Rewards and Directories sites. Cashback sites for example are most popular with the Careers and Kids and New Homemakers groups, typified by modern professionals with young families. Price Comparison sites are popular with a number of the more affluent groups including Professional Rewards and Rural Solitude. Social Shopping sites on the other hand attract Terraced Melting Pot and Liberal Opinions, which are young urbanites of a brand range of ethnicities living in big metropolises.

As well as attracting different audiences, the four groups cater for diverse sectors of the online retail market. Looking at the breakdown of downstream traffic from each of the four groups, there are distinct variations in where traffic is being sent. Department Stores such as Amazon, John Lewis and Debenhams receive the highest proportion of traffic from Price Comparison Sites, Cashback Sites and Voucher Sites. Where Social Shopping Sites depart from this trend is that most of the traffic sent from Social Shopping Sites like Groupon goes directly to fashion retailers in the Apparel and Accessories category.

We can drill into this further by observing some of the search data of product-related search terms which are driving traffic to the four key sectors.

I’ve divided these search terms into broad product categories of fashion (green), technology (blue), entertainment/travel (pink), home (purple) and insurance (red). So top search terms which are driving traffic to Price Comparison websites are predominantly technology and entertainment based, including searches for ‘ipad 2’ ‘kindle’ and ‘star wars games’. Cashback sites are very much driven by technology products, whereas Voucher sites are driven by insurance products and entertainment products, especially for food and restaurant vouchers. Again, Social Shopping caters to quite a unique niche, with the majority of its top product search terms relating to fashion.

What is very apparent about the search terms driving traffic to Social Shopping sites is that most of them are very specific, looking for items like ‘maxi dresses’, ‘high waisted jeans’ and ‘grecian dresses’. In fact 1.4% of all search terms driving traffic to the Social Shopping category include the word ‘dress’ or ‘dresses’.

As I said in my previous blog, social shopping is definitely a growing trend. What these results highlight is that social shopping is catering to a different audience from the rest of the Rewards and Directories sites and is principally focussed on apparel products sold by fashion retailers.

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