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Case Study

Delta better understands its online customers through competitive analysis

“Hitwise provides competitive information that allows Delta to analyze trends and quickly determine changes in the online marketplace.”
Francis Lavelle, Manager Web Analytics, Delta Air Lines

Delta.com, Delta Air Lines’ award-winning website, uses Hitwise to analyze online competitive information to stay aware of trends and quickly determine changes taking place in the online travel and airline industries.

The Challenge

The travel and airline industries are both highly competitive – especially in the online space where it’s easy for travelers to quickly search for the cheapest airline tickets available. Understanding what is working most effectively and efficiently within the industry online, as well as having the ability to react and adapt swiftly are a must.

The Solution

“By keeping up-to-date with competitive trends, we are able to react to changes in consumer behavior and investigate causes for that behavior,” says Francis Lavelle, Delta’s Manager of Web Analytics. “The value is in the analysis—by creating a Hitwise report of our exact competitive set, we are able to analyze their activities and understand how traffic is driven to each site by marketing channels.” Using My Hitwise, a customizable tool for creating custom categories and aggregations, the Delta team created a custom category of airline websites they view to be their online competition - something they were unable to achieve with any other provider.

Using Hitwise Rankings, Charting and Clickstream tools, delta.com was able to run a competitive analysis to determine:

• Where delta.com ranks against specific competitors.
• How much market share delta.com gains or loses in comparison to the competition on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.
• Whether marketing, search and advertising campaigns have a direct impact on delta.com’s market share – the very next day.

“Using Hitwise, we are also able to analyze and understand what’s happening in the online travel industry daily,” said Lavelle. “We discover the most notable changes that occurred and react accordingly. For example, discovering which sites had the biggest increases in market share on a particular day, leads us to investigate further to identify the reason for the movement.” Using Hitwise Clickstream data, Delta can determine whether the changes were a result of new search campaigns, advertising partnerships or other promotions and then apply that knowledge to the airline’s own marketing strategies.

The Benefits

Since using Hitwise, Delta has been able to “understand and react to industry changes, applying new insight to our own online business like never before,” said Lavelle.