| Hitwise Australia January Retail Update |
Retail sector winners; Apple iTunes grows 15% year-on-year
Hitwise has revealed that retail sectors have performed strongly online during the 2007 Christmas period. Appliances & Electronics, Books, Music and Video & Games experienced substantial increases upwards of 30% in website traffic in the last quarter of 2007. Visits to the Department Stores online industry were also solid, increasing in category share by 42% between weeks ending 6 October 2007 and 15 December 2007.
Visits to Shopping & Classifieds websites peaked during the holiday shopping period in 2007 during the week ending 1 December 2007. This compared to the week ending 25 November 2006 the prior year, confirming that the optimum time for reaching consumers during the holiday shopping period remains between late November and early December. Searches for 'boxing day sales' spiked dramatically during the week ending 29 December 2007, with the News & Media industry capturing 19.6% of related search traffic, compared to 8.03% for Shopping & Classifieds websites.
In the Appliances & Electronics industry, consumer searches were dominated by bricks & mortar brands, including 'harvey norman', which accounted for 5.36% of search volume, 'good guys' (1.62%), 'jb hifi' (1.55%) and 'retravision' (1.45%) for the 4 weeks ending 29 December 2007. 'Mobile phones' and 'digital cameras' remained top product terms to the industry, while 'digital photo frames' spiked during the week ending 15 December 2007; almost triple the volume of searches compared to the same time last year.
The strong growth in visits to the Music retail industry was due to the growth of Apple iTunes, which experienced a year-on-year increase of 15%, comparing weeks ending 30 December 2006 and 29 December 2007. New users comprised 72% of visits to the Apple iTunes website for the week ending 29 December 2007, suggesting that recipients of iPods on Christmas day were eager to log on and download media for their new gifts.
Pure-play retail websites, DealsDirect.com.au, oo.com.au and Lasoo.com.au had a strong impact on driving growth to the online Department Stores industry during early to mid-December, as consumers made allowances for shipping times; while Kmart, Big W and Myer enjoyed significant gains peaking week ending 29 December 2007, enjoying last minute and post-Christmas sales visits.
Visitors to the Shopping & Classifieds industry were highly represented by users in the 25 - 44 age bracket, who were likely to visit retail websites for toys. There was a year-on-year increase in visits by female Internet users to the Shopping & Classifieds industry, who comprised 55.64% of visits the week ending 29 December 2007, compared to 47.47% week ending 30 December 2006. This was a reflection of increasing visits to Health & Beauty shopping websites.
|
|
| Industry Search Terms Report for News and Media - IT Media |
The following report lists the most popular terms typed into a search engine over the 4 weeks ending 05/01/2008 that resulted in traffic to websites classified by Hitwise within the 'News and Media - IT Media' industry. For example, the most popular search term was 'whirlpool' representing 0.85% of all search terms that delivered users to websites classified by Hitwise in the 'News and Media - IT Media' industry.
|
|
| 1. |
whirlpool |
0.85% |
| 2. |
cnet |
0.66% |
| 3. |
digg |
0.21% |
| 4. |
nokia 6300 |
0.20% |
| 5. |
iphone |
0.16% |
| 6. |
stuff |
0.12% |
| 7. |
january 1 tcp/ip |
0.11% |
| 8. |
nokia n95 |
0.11% |
| 9. |
nokia 6288 |
0.10% |
| 10. |
limewire |
0.09% |
|
|
|
|
|
| Get More Sitelinks |
Sitelinks are a great way to get search engine users to the most useful pages of your website very quickly. Sitelinks are the extra links you find at the bottom of some search results, and they mainly appear when searching for a particular brand.
For example, searching for 'CNN' in Google will return the results displayed below:
Google displays up to 8 sitelinks per search result. The sitelinks that Google chooses to display is dependant on a number of factors such as:
- the popularity of the pages
- the navigational structure of the website
- the number of backlinks to the website
- the text used by other websites to link to the website
- the way that pages within the website interlink
Businesses that do not have sitelinks may be lacking one or more of the factors mentioned here and as a result, they may find that people looking for their brand are ending up on competitor's websites.
If you search for your brand on Google, how many sitelinks does your website have?
To learn more about best practice search engine optimisation, download the white paper.
|
|
| Todays Turkey - www.todaysturkey.com.au |
The festive month of December 2007 saw the Todays Turkey website increase its market share of traffic by 576%, and was ranked 25 in the Food and Beverage - Brands and Manufacturers industry, moving up 106 places from its previous monthly rank of 131. The website received 63.05% of its visits from Search Engines in December 2007. The most popular term typed into a search engine over the 4 weeks ending 29 December 2007 that resulted in traffic to the Todays Turkey website was 'turkey stuffing', representing 17.58% of all search traffic. Of the website's total upstream traffic in December, 89.81% consisted of new visitors and 10.19% consisted of returning visitors.
|
| Lifestyle - Environment |
Sites in the Environment category encourage ecological conservation, recycling and environmental awareness. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 05/01/2008 » Ranks by 'Visits'.
|
|
|
|
|
|
| 59.8% |
|
of traffic to this category was directed at domestic sites.
|
|
|
|
|
| 1. |
Computers and Internet |
47.89% |
| 2. |
Search Engines |
34.85% |
| 3. |
Government |
12.51% |
| 4. |
News and Media |
12.47% |
| 5. |
Education |
9.41% |
| 6. |
Reference |
8.22% |
| 7. |
Lifestyle |
8.07% |
| 8. |
National |
6.81% |
| 9. |
Weather |
6.30% |
| 10. |
Business and Finance |
5.70% |
|
|
|
|
| 1. |
Computers and Internet |
21.60% |
| 2. |
Government |
15.79% |
| 3. |
News and Media |
14.85% |
| 4. |
Lifestyle |
12.73% |
| 5. |
Business and Finance |
10.08% |
| 6. |
Education |
9.77% |
| 7. |
Reference |
8.34% |
| 8. |
Entertainment |
8.13% |
| 9. |
Environment |
7.70% |
| 10. |
National |
7.29% |
|
|
|
|
