While it seems that retailers begin marketing the holidays earlier and earlier each year, it appears that consumers have taken note and began planning for the holiday season as early as September.

The share of US Internet searches on the term "christmas" was up 41 percent for the week ending November 5, 2005 versus the prior week (week ending October 29, 2005). Additionally, the terms "christmas gift ideas", "christmas gifts" and "christmas decorations" were up 185 percent, 92 percent and 75 percent respectively for the same time period.

"The fact that Christmas-related search queries begin ramping up in September demonstrates the length of the online researching and buying process," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "A similar pattern was noted when Halloween-related queries began increasing in mid-August. Clearly online shoppers have become accustomed to longer lead times and use the Internet to plan out their holiday activities."

iPod continues to dominate product searches

What products are consumers searching for in the months leading up to the holidays? Analysis of Hitwise industry search terms reveal that of the top 10 product search terms, Apple's iPod dominates, with "ipod" being the most popular product search term. Variations of "ipod", such as "ipod mini", "ipod nano" and "ipods" take three additional slots in the top 10 product searches. Other popular product searches include "dell computers", "barbie", "xbox 360" and "build a bear".

In October, visits to the Hitwise Online Retail Index, a collection of 100 top online retail domains in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category, was up an average of 7 percent when comparing year-on-year daily data for October 2005 versus October 2004. In 2004, visits to the Hitwise Online Retail Index increased by 64 percent between the week ending October 30 and the week ending November 27, 2004. Based on the similarity in traffic patterns between 2004 and 2005, it can be expected that visits to online shopping sites will accelerate as the season progresses.

"As we can see when examining visits to the Online Retail Index from 2004 to 2005, the pattern between the two periods is very similar" said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "This similarity, which also occurred when comparing 2004 data to 2003, provides us with the ability to predict timing and magnitude of visits to online retailers for the 2005 holiday season."

This category includes sites that sell various appliances and consumer electronic products, such as whitegoods, audio appliances, TV and video, and communication products. It incorporates both online and offline vendors. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 11/19/2005 » Ranks by 'Visits'.

Fast Food Company

An online food delivery service, which provides customers with a variety of cuisine choices, found that although the site was attracting many visitors, sales were not increasing accordingly.

Using Hitwise 'Clickstream' data, the food delivery service found that it was losing 15% of its visits to a variety of competitive websites - specifically 10% to Pizza Hut.

Hitwise 'Search Terms' data revealed that almost one third of the top keywords driving traffic to the Hitwise Food & Beverage category contained the term 'pizza'.

With these competitive and customer insights, the online food delivery service was able to:

• Make several content & programming changes to its website to satisfy customer demand:
• Add pizza to the menu
• Accept coupons from competitors

• Reduce customer churn to competitive sites by 50%

• Increase sales