London, 25 April 2005, New research from Hitwise reveals that nearly 8 in 10 searches for leading travel, retail, and insurance brands send visits to that company’s website, with 1 in 10 sending visits to a site offering the same or similar product.
The research from Hitwise, global leader in real-time competitive intelligence, comes at a critical time for the search industry: recent lawsuits have attempted to hold search engines responsible for policing trademarks, whilst Thomson, Thomas Cook, and First Choice have banned third parties from bidding on their brand names.
Marketers can easily find out if anyone else is bidding on their trademarks but finding out if they are losing potential customers is much harder, commented Heather Hopkins, Senior Research Analyst at Hitwise. This research allows firms to quantify the extent to which they are losing potential customers to competitors and affiliates, providing critical context to this growing area of anxiety for marketers.
The key findings of the Hitwise analysis include:
Brand is important online
Leading brands rarely receive visits based on searches for competitor brands
It’s harder than you might think to capitalize on someone else’s brand
Firms need to be very aware of common misspellings of their brands
Methodology
The following steps were followed in preparing this analysis:
About Hitwise:
Hitwise is the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.
By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.
Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.co.uk
For media enquiries, please contact:
Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com
Tel: 020 7378 3619