Yahoo! FIFA World Cup Website Receives More Visits Than Official Major League Baseball Website

The Yahoo! FIFA World Cup website (fifaworldcup.yahoo.com) was the fifth most visited website in the Sports category for the week ending June 24, 2006, accounting for 4.1 percent of US category visits. For that week, the Yahoo! FIFA World Cup website ranked at number 68 overall among the more than 500,000 US websites tracked by Hitwise.

The Yahoo! FIFA World Cup website received a larger market share of visits than the leading Major League Baseball site, Yahoo! Sports MLB, on June 22, 2006, the day of the US-Ghana match that dashed the US team's hopes of advancing in the tournament. Visits to Yahoo! FIFA World Cup did not drop after this event, reaching their largest market share of visits to date on Saturday June 24, 2006. The Yahoo! FIFA World Cup website has also consistently received a greater share of visits than the official MLB site since the tournament opened.

• McDonald's/FIFA World Cup Fantasy Game accounted for 8.8 percent of downstream visits for the week ending June 24, 2006.

• ESPN Soccernet and Fox Sports Soccer achieved respective ranks of 14 and 17 in the US Sports Category for the week ending June 24, 2006.

• ESPN Soccernet accounted for 1.1 percent of category visits, while Fox Sports Soccer accounted for 1.0 percent in that week.

• Urban Uptown, the most affluent urban social group, comprised 16.5 percent of FIFA World Cup visitors in that period.

• Urban Cores, comprised of the lowest income urban residents, accounted for 8.8 percent of visitors to Yahoo! FIFA World Cup website, but accounted for only 4.0 percent of total Internet users.

• Midtown Mix, the middle income urban PRIZM NE social group, comprised 7.4 percent of visitors to FIFA World Cup, but accounted for only 4.5 percent of total Internet users.

Hitwise has announced the launch of Hitwise Conversions. Hitwise Conversions is a new custom reporting capability that provides clients with insight into how online users navigate within specific sections of competitive websites.

Hitwise Conversions can be customized to meet the needs of marketers, reporting on a range of data points such as promotional pages, shopping cart activity, registration page completion, loan application submissions, auction bids and user interaction within a specific channel of a site. This flexibility allows clients to understand consumer preferences and purchase behavior on competitive websites.

According to Stuart Parish, Marketing Manager for Travelocity UK, "Hitwise Conversions provides an added layer of insight which allows us to determine how we compete against key competitors in specific product areas. Hitwise Conversions is an important input for us to understand how certain product searches convert for our competitors' websites."

In addition, Hitwise Conversions will enable marketers to gauge the success of various traffic generation strategies, by reporting on which specific search terms, demographic profiles and traffic from upstream websites have led to the highest conversion rates on a competitor's website.

"Hitwise Conversions offers our clients a deeper view into competitive online marketing activities. This new capability has already benefited our clients as they monitor competitor promotions, product offerings and customer engagement strategies," said Chris Maher, EVP of Global Sales of Hitwise. "We can identify the key traffic drivers to a website that lead to conversions, including search terms. For example, we can identify a keyword that leads to a hotel or flight booking online to a travel site. Hitwise Conversions brings a whole new level of informed online marketing strategy to clients."

Hitwise Conversions is available to existing Hitwise clients. To find more data and insights go to www.hitwise.com or weblogs.hitwise.com

Hitwise Search Intelligence™ data reveal the top 10 of the complete list of 608 search terms containing the term(s) "tour de france" for the four weeks ending July 22, 2006. The results are ordered based on the volume of searches.

Fast Mover – Wimbledon.org

www.wimbledon.org


Position week ending June 17, 2006: 18,725
Position week ending June 24, 2006: 3,991
Positions jumped: 14,734

The 120th championships were a success for wimbledon.org as well as for the pros. In addition to top ranking Roger Federer winning his fourth title, the official Wimbledon website, which features all the best of Wimbeldon, including scores, a Wimbedon Museum, player profiles, a mobile game and the Wimbeldon Shop, was a winner as well.

Hitwise data show that www.wimbeldon.org experienced a 339 percent increase in market share of visits (week ending June 24, 2006 versus week ending June 17, 2006) as US Internet users went online to follow the developments of this tennis classic. The following weeks saw the site climb the ranks in the Hitwise Sports - Tennis category to a rank of 1 (week ending July 1, 2006).

Category Spotlight: Sports - Cycling

This category encompasses all websites related to cycling. The data below is based on All sites » Weekly rankings for the week ending 07/22/2006 » Ranks by 'Visits'.

Top 10 Sports - Cycling sites		Average Session Duration
Yahoo! Sports Cycling Velonews.com CyclingNews.com Tour de France Trek Bicycles Performance Bicycle Bicycling MtbREVIEW.com CyclingForums.com Bike Forums		The average session duration for the Sports - Cycling category during the week ending 07/22/06 was 8 minutes, 14 seconds which represents an increase of 12 seconds compared with last week.

Post accident, I've been going through cycling withdrawal, my only fix is watching the Tour de France on OLN (although now I turn away from the television during crash replays). Maybe it's time to generate some cycling charts.

Last week I had dinner with my good friends Bill and Elaine Yang (Bill is in my cycling group), and after hearing about data that I have access to at Hitwise (warning: if you ask me out to dinner I will talk for hours about Hitwise data), Bill asked a very interesting question: Does the Tour de France affect the sale of bicycles and cycling equipment in the US?

Sticking with our syndicated data, I decided to create a custom category of the top cycling retail sites. If we assume that an increase in visits to these retail sites would loosely correlate with increased sales, then a chart visits to these sites alongside a chart of volume of searches on the Tour de France (as a way to mark the tour dates and consumer interest in the tour) should answer our question:

It looks like a very strong correlation, but not so fast, Bill had a follow-up question: Does the Tour de France cause an increase in sales to bikes that are prominently featured in the tour? I created two charts and discovered that visits to the Trek cycling site (official bike for the Discovery Channel Team) was responsible for driving the spike correlating to the Tour de France.

Check out the conclusion of Bill's post.

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Copyright Hitwise Pty Ltd, July 2006