In the lead up to Christmas retailers implemented varied strategies and tactics to deliver buyers to their online stores, some with outstanding success.

Each retailer and their customer base is different and react to different and multiple marketing stimuli. To highlight this Alan Long, Hitwise Research Director, reviewed three of the top retailers brandsExclusive (www.brandsexclusive.com.au), EziBuy (www.ezibuy.com.au) and Threadless (www.threadless.com) in the Shopping and Classified - Apparel and Accessories industry and how they garnered website traffic in the weeks leading up to Christmas 2009.

Alan explores the different strategies that these retailers employed to achieve online success.

To read the Alan's article, please visit Experian Hitwise Weblogs.

By using Hitwise Search Intelligence™ Paid and Organic Reports, you can identify which search terms competitors are focusing on for their Pay Per Click (PPC) and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) strategies.

For example, if you are an online wedding website and one of your competitors is House Of Brides (www.houseofbrides.com), you can discover that 63.91% of all search traffic to their website, was paid for and 36.09% was organic during the four weeks ending 09/01/2010.

Additionally, you can reveal the paid and organic breakdown on specific search terms. For example, looking at the term 'wedding dresses', 89.33% of the traffic sent to House of Brides was paid and 10.67% of it was organic. Given the volume of visits coming from this term and the paid versus organic breakdown, it is safe to assume this is a term that House of Brides invests a lot of money in. Information such as this can provide invaluable insights for gaining a competitive edge over your direct competitors.

Learn more about Hitwise Search Intelligence™.

To discuss this product further, please contact your Account Manager or Hitwise Customer Support at csm.ap@hitwise.com or 1800 816 997.

In January, we released an exciting new Charting functionality into the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence product, enabling trending of all data metrics available from Hitwise - including:

• Demographics;
• Lifestyle;
• Paid versus Organic Search; and
• New versus Returning visitors.

The new functionality provides automatic visual representations of the subject of any data report requested. This allows better understanding of how the data has changed over time and greater opportunity to discover the cause of these changes. As always, the goal is to provide clients with the best data, insights and customisation possible.

For more information, please contact your Account Manager or Hitwise Customer Support at csm.ap@hitwise.com or call 1800 816 997.

Websites weighed down with Flash, images and unnecessary content may be costing your business more than you think - with higher bandwidth costs and server rent aside, a slow website may be impacting your overall revenue more than you realise.

Why Do Users Convert Better on Fast Sites?

Mihaly Czsikszentmihaly¹ has posited a state of mind which people get into when highly engaged, called the ‘Flow Zone’ - in which users are completely immersed in their tasks and time passes blissfully. One element consistent amongst Flow activities is, immediate feedback - people have to know when they are doing something right or wrong.

Therefore, as online marketers, to improve the user experience, you need to be sure your page load times are so low, so that they result in immediate feedback for users. That way, users are more likely to become immersed in your website, enjoy their experience with your brand, find what they‘re after and take action.

In addition to this, the less time they spend waiting for your pages to load, the less likely a distracting thought may take them away from your site.

How Can it Affect My Business?

A slow website can mean the difference between users staying on your website, taking action (e.g. making a purchase, etc) and re-visiting your website. The effects of page load times have been quantified by many of the larger industry players:

• Google found that a 30 results per page and a 500 milli-second increase in load time, decreases searches and revenue by 20% ²;
• Amazon found that every 100 milli-second increase in load time, decreases sales by 1%²;
• Facebook found that page load time is inversely proportional to pages/visit³;
• Bing tested increased page load times and found that it reduced revenue and user satisfaction (results shown below)⁴.

Quick Tips You Can Use to Improve Your Website's Speed

• Use Content Delivery Networks - if your audience is scattered across continents, you should ascertain the need for a Content Delivery Network (CDN) which distributes your content to many different locations around the world and serves content to users from the nearest server. This reduces website response time and bypasses network congestion.
• Reduce the size and number of page elements - cutting out unnecessary images, scripts and content can significantly improve load times. It can also be effective at reducing bandwidth.
• Implement server-side and client-side caching - if your website has static content like images, CSS, and JavaScript, caching them on visitors‘ computers will hasten subsequent page loads. If visitors consistently request the same pages, you may opt to cache these pages on the server-side with a reverse proxy (Squid, Nginx) to speed up page delivery.
• Reduce the number of page views required to complete tasks - one way to reduce page load times, is not to have pages load and/or re-load at all. Facebook does this, by using Ajax to dynamically update content (i.e. updating your status and refreshing your news feed) without the need to refresh a page.

If you're looking for some quick and easy gains in visitor engagement, try speeding up your website.

For more information please email search.csm@hitwise.com or call 1800 816 997.

_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ ¹^{Csikszentmihalyi, M., & Csikszentmihalyi, I. S. (1992). Optimal Experience. Cambridge University Press.}
²^{King, A. B. (2008). Website Optimization. O'Reilly.}
³^{Yang, Z. (2009, August 28). Every Millisecond Counts. Retrieved December 18, 2009, from Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=122869103919
4Schurman, E., & Brutlag, J. (2009, June 23). The User and Business Impact of Server Delays, Additional Bytes, and HTTP Chunking in Web Search. Retrieved January 8, 2010, from O'Reilly: Velocity 2009}.

Using Hitwise Lifestyle, which incorporates leading household segmentation system, Mosaic Australia, you can uncover the most popular websites in an industry that attract a specific audience segment.

For example, an analysis of 35-44 year old males that fall under the Mosaic Australia Type ‘Mortgaged Aspirations’ reveals that the top three television programme websites were SBS - The World Game (theworldgame.sbs.com.au), CBSNews.com (www.cbsnews.com) and ET Online (www.etonline.com) during the four weeks ending 09/01/2010. Which means, if you are looking to target people that fall within this criteria, advertising on these sites, or their affiliated television programs, would likely provide the greatest reach.

The ‘Mortgaged Aspirations’ Type are characterised by young and large families, aged primarily between 35-44, many of whom are born overseas. They work pre-dominantly in the manufacturing industry as machinery operators, or in clerical and administrative roles and their household incomes are slightly above average. Credit interest costs and family expenses (such as infant clothing, childcare, and health and education fees) dominate spending in their budgets. ‘Mortgaged Aspirations’ typically reside in the outer suburbs and which make vehicles (usually family and budget models) important for accessing schools, shopping centres and other services.

These households are building better futures for their families and, in the process, they love shopping and looking for a bargain - coupons, competitions and special offers are particularly attractive to ‘Mortgaged Aspirations’. Despite low disposable incomes, these people like to follow new trends, and seek the latest look and the right brand. They love to search the internet, with nearly half of all Mortgaged Aspirations households having broadband access, with a further 20 percent using dial-up internet connections. Newspapers are not prominent in these households - TV and commercial radio are the main sources of news and entertainment.

Learn more about Hitwise Lifestyle.

For Hitwise clients who would like to discuss this product further, please contact your Account Manager or Hitwise Customer Support at csm.ap@hitwise.com or 1800 816 997.

*Please note: Gender and Age data is based on head of household.

The following report lists the most popular terms typed into a search engine over the 4 rolling weeks ending 16/01/2010 that resulted in traffic to websites classified by Experian Hitwise within the 'Travel - Agencies' industry. For example, the most popular search term was 'webjet' representing 4.86% of all search terms that delivered users to websites classified by Experian Hitwise in the 'Travel - Agencies' industry.

In anticipation of the new season of the long running Australian TV soap Neighbours, the show's website has raced up the rankings in the Television industry to rank 33rd for the week ending 16/01/2010.

The website, which is the official online presence for Neighbours, features full cast and crew details, TV timeslots, plotlines, a history of the show and news. The website's average visit time was at its 2nd highest at 19 minutes and 25 seconds (week ending 16/01/2010), after peaking at just over 20 minutes in the week ending 05/12/2009 - the week that Steph betrayed best friend Libby, with her husband Dan.

The website attracted 53.83% of upstream New Visitors during the week ending 16/01/2010. The top 3 websites referring the highest percentage of upstream New Visitors to the Neighbours website were: Oasis Active (www.oasisactive.com.au) (85.72%), The Vine (www.thevine.com.au) (80.41%), and MSN (www.msn.com)(80.35%).

Meanwhile, visitors to the Neighbours website were most highly represented by the Mosaic Australia Groups (four weeks ending 16/01/2010): Family Challenge, Pushing the Boundaries and Community Disconnect.