Airline Wars – Qantas and Virgin Blue battle it out online
As Australians returned to work in January from the Christmas and New Year's break, airlines engaged in aggressive online marketing to entice web users to book flights early for the year ahead. Hitwise data report a spike in visits to the Aviation - Commercial Airlines category of 51% between December 10, 2005 and January 7, 2006, where daily usage peaked on January 3, as most consumers returned to work.
Hitwise daily traffic analysis shows that Qantas (www.qantas.com.au) and Virgin Blue (www.virginblue.com.au) closely mirrored each other in online peaks and troughs between November 2005 and early January 2006. While Virgin Blue surged ahead in all categories on January 3 and January 11, 2006 with 0.23% on both dates, Qantas has fought back with market share spikes on January 17 (0.21%) and January 23 (0.19%).
Email marketing, according to Hitwise Industry Clickstream data, was a significant source of referral traffic to airline websites over the holiday period, with an upstream traffic peak of 6.73%, week ending December 24, 2005. The Qantas Frequent Flyer 20% discount offer on January 23, which was promoted via email, is likely to have been a direct cause of the surge of traffic to the Qantas website on that date. Hitwise Search Intelligence shows that the most popular variation on the term 'frequent flyer' was 'qantas frequent flyer' with 39.1% of searches, for the 12-week period ending January 21, 2006.
Virgin Blue's Velocity frequent flyer program (www.velocityrewards.com.au) attracted a significant amount of online attention when it was launched in November 2005, debuting at 4th position in the Aviation category. The search term 'velocity rewards' reached a peak during the week ending December 17, 2005.
Search terms to the Hitwise Travel - Destinations and Accommodation industry suggest a preference for domestic destinations, with 4 of the Top 10 search terms referring to holiday destinations around Australia, including, 'hamilton island', 'gold coast accommodation', ‘jamberoo’ and 'tasmania'. The most popular overseas destination searched for was, 'fiji', for the 12-week period ending January 21, 2006.
Fast Mover - Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race
www.rolexsydneyhobart.com
Position week ending November 26: 9,331
Position week ending December 31: 62
Positions jumped: 9,269
The official site of the Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race is found at www.rolexsydneyhobart.com. The 2005 race saw Wild Oats XI depart Sydney Harbour on December 26 at 1.20 pm and arrive at Hobart on December 28 at 8.01 am to win in a record time of 01:18:40:10. Compared to all websites visited by Australian Internet users, the site ranked 9,331 for the week ending November 26, 2005 and 62 for the week ending December 31, 2005 and peaked at 27, in the heat of the race, on December 27. In the Sports category, the site ranked 586 for the week ending November 26 and 1 for the week ending December 31. In the Yachting and Boating category, the site had cruised into the first spot by week ending December 31, 2005.
Google Australia (www.google.com.au) supplied the greatest source of upstream with 27.58% of traffic for December 2005, 44.16% of the upstream traffic to the site was from Search Engines and Directories. Bureau of Meteorology (www.bom.gov.au) with 5.40% and Google Earth (earth.google.com) with 3.80% were the 2nd and 3rd ranking downstream sites for December 2005 and both received significant increases in market share.
The primary sponsor, Rolex.com (www.rolex.com), increased its rank from 31,354 for the week ending December 17 to 6,915 for the week ending December 31 and had fallen to 22,548 by the week ending January 7, 2006. Google Australia with 22.89% and Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race with 10.29% were the two highest sources of upstream to Rolex.com in December, 2005. The fact that Google Australia was the highest downstream site from Rolex Sydney Hobart Yacht Race shows that many visitors were taking an extra step to reach Rolex.com.
"sydney" and "hobart" were the most popular search terms over the 12 weeks ending January 14, 2006 with "sydney to hobart" being the number 1 search term. "rolex" appeared in some form in 5 out of the Top 10 search terms, which is encouraging for the sponsors.
Category Spotlight: Shopping and Classifieds - Sport and Fitness
This category includes sites that sell goods and apparel for all things related to sport and fitness. It incorporates both online and offline vendors. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 14/01/2006 » Ranks by 'Visits'.
Hitwise at Work - Search Marketing
The search industry has experienced explosive growth over recent years, as online marketers recognise the value of obtaining low-cost, qualified leads for their website through search engine optimization and marketing.
Hitwise has developed a range of tools to help with search term research and analysis to ensure you are targeting the right search engines and search terms for a successful campaign.
For example, if an online travel agency wanted to reveal new search marketing opportunities, evaluate keywords and report on a campaign's success, here are some of the insights that could be uncovered with Hitwise.
- Which search engines perform best for driving qualified traffic to websites in the Aviation, Travel - Destinations and Accommodation industries?
- Which search engines perform best amongst my target audience?
- Which search terms have been successful in driving traffic to my competitors?
- Which search terms have my competitors successfully used to drive traffic that I do not currently use?
- Since implementing a new search campaign, has traffic to my website increased?
Media queries at Hitwise
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Additionally - if you require assistance with statistics or content, please feel free to contact James Borg at james.borg@hitwise.com.
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Copyright Hitwise Pty Ltd, January 2006
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Hitwise Australia Newsletter - January 2006
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