While the Winter Olympics took place several time zones away in Torino, Italy, daily results were announced long before United States primetime television hours. To find out the medal winners and losers, Olympic fans turned to the Internet to get up-to-the-minute results on their favorite sports.

According to Hitwise, the website NBCOlympics.com ranked at number 116 among all Internet sites for the week ending Feb. 18, 2006, receiving a similar market share of visits as the New York Times website, which ranked at number 106 for that week. NBCOlympics.com received a greater market share of visits than the CNN Sports Illustrated website (number 223), and the other leading site for Olympics news, Torino 2006 (number 588). The average visit to NBCOlympics.com during the week ending Feb. 18, 2006 lasted 9 minutes and 29 seconds, which was 29 percent longer than the average for sites in the Hitwise Sports category at 7 minutes 20 seconds.

ESPN and Google main sources of traffic for NBCOlympics.com
The leading source of visits to NBCOlympics.com for the week ending Feb. 18, 2005 was ESPN, which accounted for 23.4 percent of upstream visits. NBCOlympics.com also partnered with Google in sponsored results for Olympics related searches, and Google was the second largest referrer of traffic for that week, accounting for 15.7 percent of visits to NBCOlympics.com.

The Olympic sponsors benefiting the most from a partnership with NBCOlympics.com were Visa and Chevrolet. For the week ending Feb. 18, 2006, Visa Championships accounted for 3.79 percent of visits leaving NBCOlympics.com, while Chevrolet accounted for 0.87 percent.

"Olympics fans are taking advantage of the web for viewing results and video highlights in unprecedented numbers," said Bill Tancer, General Manager, Global Research for Hitwise. "This data indicates that Internet users have a strong interest in news and sports video content in addition to syndicated programming. Media companies and advertisers should work closely to optimize user experience."

"Curling" and "Shaun White" lead searches

Search term data show that curling was the sport that most captivated Internet users during the week ending Feb. 18, 2006: searches for "curling" were up 2,467 percent versus the week ending Feb. 11, 2006. "Curling" received a greater share of searches for the week ending Feb. 18, 2006 than other popular Olympic sports like "figure skating" and "snowboarding." The most searched-for athletes in that same week were snowboarding gold medallist Shaun White, short-track skater Apolo Anton Ohno, figure skaters Emily Hughes & Michelle Kwan, and freestyle skier and teen heartthrob Jeremy Bloom.

Leading Search Terms Sending Visits to NBCOlympics.com Week Ending Feb. 18, 2006

Hitwise has acquired HitDynamics, a technology platform that combines search campaign management, search marketing reporting and conversion tracking analytics into a single, intuitive interface.

The HitDynamics online marketing platform is currently used by agencies and website marketers to implement search marketing campaigns and track the success of their PPC, search engine optimization and affiliate marketing campaigns.

Initially, HitDynamics will operate independently and will continue to service its existing client base in Europe. In the coming months, Hitwise intends to leverage the HitDynamics technology in conjunction with its industry-leading Online Competitive Intelligence research, to deliver integrated services to its 1,200 global clients.

According to Andrew Walsh, CEO of Hitwise, "Hitwise is proud to announce this significant strategic acquisition, which will give our clients access to the first integrated platform that seamlessly leverages our unique, daily competitive intelligence data to drive cutting edge online customer acquisition, retention and optimization strategies. We think this is a powerful combination of technologies and data and is one of many initiatives Hitwise will undertake to help our clients better leverage Hitwise competitive insights."

Financial terms of the acquisition have not been disclosed.

Hitwise Search Intelligence data reveal the websites receiving the most traffic from the search term "port security" for the 4 weeks ending March 11, 2006. The results are ordered based on the volume of searches.

Top 10 Sites Receiving Traffic from the Search Term “port security” – Based on Volume of Searches over Four Weeks Ending March 11, 2006

This category includes all sites that provide sports betting, fixed odds betting, and betting exchanges. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 03/18/2006 » Ranks by 'Visits'.

A Major Retailer

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 Terms' information, the online marketing manager was able to:

• Justify to 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.