HITWISE SEARCH UPDATE

1 in 10 Searches for Leading Brands go to a Competitor Website

London, 25 April 2005
New research from Hitwise reveals that nearly 8 in 10 searches for leading travel, retail, and insurance brands send visits to that company’s website, with 1 in 10 sending visits to a site offering the same or similar product.

The research from Hitwise, global leader in real-time competitive intelligence, comes at a critical time for the search industry: recent lawsuits have attempted to hold search engines responsible for policing trademarks, whilst Thomson, Thomas Cook, and First Choice have banned third parties from bidding on their brand names.

“Marketers can easily find out if anyone else is bidding on their trademarks but finding out if they are losing potential customers is much harder”, commented Heather Hopkins, Senior Research Analyst at Hitwise. “This research allows firms to quantify the extent to which they are losing potential customers to competitors and affiliates, providing critical context to this growing area of anxiety for marketers.”

The key findings of the Hitwise analysis include:

Brand is important online

• Nearly 8 in 10 searches for a leading brand send visits to that company’s website.
• Brand related searches are also important to website traffic for the leading brands. 4 out of every 10 search terms that send visits to a company’s website are for the company’s own brand.
• The importance of brand is even greater than these numbers suggest, as these figures include statistics for both websites that rely on agencies, resellers and affiliates as well as websites that are affiliates.

Leading brands rarely receive visits based on searches for competitor brands

• Just over 1 in 20 visits to websites for the leading brands was a result of a search for a company that offers a similar product.
• This figure drops to just over 1 in 50 when brands that sell through affiliates are removed.

It’s harder than you might think to capitalize on someone else’s brand

• Around 1 in 10 searches for a brand goes to another site that is offering the same or similar product.
• This figure is much lower for brands that do not rely on resellers. For example, Ryanair, EasyJet, Comet, and Argos each lose less than 3% of visits to competitor websites.

Firms need to be very aware of common misspellings of their brands

• Nearly half of searchers that misspell the brand are enticed to someone else’s website and in many cases, the brand itself is not represented in the search results.
• Around 1 in 10 these searches for the misspelled brand go to another site that is offering the same or similar product.

Methodology

The following steps were followed in preparing this analysis:

1. Select a basket of brands to analyze, using the strongest five online brands in the most successful and most competitive e-commerce industries: Shopping & Classifieds, Travel, and Insurance.
   
2. Analyse which websites UK Internet users visit when they search on these brands.
   
3. Analyse the search terms that Internet users typed into a search engine before visiting the websites of these brands.
   
4. Analyse the destinations of searches on the leading brand names.
   
5. Analyse the destinations of searches for common misspellings of the leading brand names.

About Hitwise:

Hitwise is the world’s leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.

By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites.  Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.

Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore. 

More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.co.uk

For media enquiries, please contact:

Jannie Cahill
jannie.cahill@hitwise.com

Tel: 020 7378 3619