Local News Site Takes Advantage of Katrina
Among the destruction left in Hurricane Katrina's wake were the printing presses of New Orleans' daily newspaper, The Times-Picayune. Despite setbacks in the ability to physically print the news, the organization rallied behind its website, www.nola.com, to provide continuous, in-depth reporting of the disaster and host other critical information services.
Traffic to Nola.com began skyrocketing on August 27, 2005 and peaked on September 1, with its market share of total U.S. Internet visits up 1,133 percent versus the seven-day average before the destruction began.
As of September 17, traffic to the site was still up nearly 200 percent versus pre-Katrina levels. This increase boosted The Times-Picayune website to number 13 in the Hitwise News & Media category for the week ending September 3, 2005, up from 108 the prior week.
"Audiences to news sites tend to increase around major events, but The Times-Picayune's Nola.com is a unique story unto itself," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Worldwide Research at Hitwise. "Not only did the website succeed when the printing presses failed but the staff also adapted to the situation by adopting a blog-like format with continuous news and visual updates from staff reporters, citizens and other sources. The site also incorporated various message boards, missing-persons databases and external links - community features that are more often associated with sites like Craigslist or Wikipedia, not traditional newspaper sites."
Nola.com Becomes National News Site Overnight
Nola.com's traffic increase occurred as the news site quickly transformed from one with a local and regional audience to one with a local, regional and national audience. While Internet users in the state of Louisiana represented 66.1 percent of visitors to Nola.com in the four weeks period ending August 13, 2005, they represented only 23.9 percent of the total audience in the four weeks period ending September 10, 2005.
Meanwhile, the majority of U.S. States increased their share of visits to Nola.com by at least double. Among the U.S. States with the greatest traffic contribution and increases to Nola.com most often were those with the highest proximity to Louisiana: Texas' contribution increased from 5.3 to 10.9 percent; Florida 2.4 to 6.7 percent; California 2.6 to 5.6 percent; Alabama 1.7 to 3.5 percent; and Georgia 1.3 to 3.5 percent.
'Missing Person's Database' Nola.com's Top Downstream Site
Nola.com's downstream visits suggest the utility of its informational links and databases to assist in a disaster recovery. For example, the most popular site people visited after Nola.com was its Missing Person's Database (people.nola.com), which received 5.1 percent of all downstream visits for the week ending September 10, 2005. Other downstream sites among the top 20 included: The National Geodetic Survey (alt.ngs.noaa.gov); The Federal Emergency Management Agency (www.fema.gov); The American Red Cross (www.redcross.org); The Saint Bernard Parish Government (www.stbernardparishgovernment.com); New Orleans Flood Map from C&C Technologies Survey Services (mapper.cctechnol.com); and The Jefferson Parish Hurricane Katrina Emergency Site (www.jeffparish.net).
Gap.com and Oldnavy.com Close for Re-launch
Gap Inc. shocked the retail community this summer by closing the Old Navy (www.oldnavy.com), Gap (www.gap.com), and Banana Republic (www.bananarepublic.com) online stores for several days for complete site and system overhauls. Despite this unusual decision to close down their entire online storefronts, shopping traffic has since recovered.
While losing visits during the period of the site overhauls, Old Navy and Gap experienced growth in their market share of visits once the sites re-launched. The sites saw increases of 5% and 13% respectively when comparing between the first full week the sites were re-launched (week ending September 10, 2005) with the final week before the site closings (week ending August 20, 2005).
"The lengthy closures for Gap's online store provides a unique opportunity to examine how consumer behavior changes when top sites within an industry segment are inaccessible," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "In this case, Gap's online stores experienced both an incremental lift in visits after the stores reopened as well as increased search on their brands during the site closure."
Shut-down Drives Curiosity
Stymied shoppers turned to search engines for answers while the site was down - searches for "old navy" and "gap" increased by 69% and 88%, respectively, for the week ending September 3, 2005, versus the week before the stores went offline (week ending August 20, 2005). Interestingly, the share of searches for "old navy" and "gap" during the down-time was greater than the share of searches for those terms during the peak of the holiday season in December 2004.
"Search term data provide an unprecedented insight into how key events impact online and offline brands," said Bill Tancer. "While it is counter-intuitive that the market share of visits to Gap and Old Navy online stores would increase after lengthy closure, this data, in conjunction with the search term data, demonstrate the strength of the two brands and points to firm loyalty of their customers."
Search Analysis – Search Term Suggestion Report
Hitwise Search Intelligence data reveal the most popular search terms containing the term "ipod" for the 4 weeks period ending September 17, 2005. The results are ordered based on the volume of searches (see table below).
Top 10 Search Terms containing the term “ipod” Period - Four Weeks Ending 9/17/2005
| Search Term | Share (%) |
|---|
| 1. | ipod | 14.88 |
| 2. | ipod nano | 13.12 |
| 3. | ipod mini | 3.08 |
| 4. | apple ipod | 2.44 |
| 5. | ipod shuffle | 1.09 |
| 6. | ipod accessories | 0.91 |
| 7. | free ipod | 0.59 |
| 8. | mini ipod | 0.55 |
| 9. | nano ipod | 0.49 |
| 10. | apple ipod nano | 0.45 |
Fast Mover - Rockstar INXS
rockstar.msn.com
Position week ending July 23: 51
Position week ending September 17: 28
Positions jumped: 23
On Tuesday September 21, 2005, J.D. was chosen as the new lead-singer for the band INXS. The television show Rockstar: INXS, which was aired every Tuesday through the summer, began with 15 contestants who were slowly voted off each week to leave one winner - a lead singer for INXS.
On the last episode, when the show was down to 2 contestants, US audiences were encouraged to vote for their favorite singer via the website rockstar.msn.com or through Verizon wireless text messaging. Hitwise data show that the website increased significantly in popularity as the show progressed, climbing the ranks in the Hitwise Entertainment - Television category from number 51 (week ending July 23, 2005) to number 28 (week ending September 17, 2005). An audience voting strategy was also adopted for American Idol (www.idolonfox.com). According to Hitwise data, peak visits to rockstar.msn.com were almost half the market share levels compared to the American Idol website at it's peak (week ending May 28, 2005).
Hitwise Clickstream data reveal that after visiting rockstar.msn.com, 17 percent of visits then went to MSN Music (music.msn.com), presumably to listen to music from the show. For the 4 weeks period ending September 17, 2005, 65 percent of visitors to rockstar.msn.com were females and 33 percent of visits were from the age group of 35-44.
Category Spotlight: Travel - Agencies
Travel agencies and businesses which provide planning and organisational services for holiday and travel. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 09/17/2005 » Ranks by 'Visits'.
Case Study
A major retailer discovered through Hitwise 'Clickstream' data that its customer referrals from search engines was considerably lower than that of their direct competitors. As a result, the company decided to re-evaluate their search marketing strategy.
Using Hitwise 'Clickstream' and 'Charting' data, the major retailer was able to identify which competitors were optimizing search traffic, which search engines were the most effective partners for the retail industry, and the timing of competitive campaigns.
In addition, by using the Hitwise 'Search Terms' analysis, they were able to determine the most successful keywords across all major search engines for driving traffic to their competitor's sites and to their industry in general.
With Hitwise 'Clickstream' and 'Search Term's information, the online marketing manager was able to:
- Justify to the management the need to allocate more dollars to search engine marketing programs.
- Identify the most popular and successful keywords that are driving traffic to competitive sites, across major search engines.
- Understand which search engines are the most effective for the online apparel industry, and which search engines have been under-utilized by the competition.
- Track the effectiveness of search engine campaigns.
- Cost-effectively increase referral and conversion rates by attracting qualified traffic.
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Copyright Hitwise Pty Ltd, September 2005
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Hitwise United States Newsletter - September 2005
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