I have been telling clients (and anyone who’ll listen) that HitWise provides more precision in search traffic measurement (to sites other than your own) than any other competitive analysis product.  Hitwise was able to show:

"The market share of visits to Kayak has increased by 64% in the past 6 months (week ending 8/26/06 vs. week ending 2/25/06). In the US Travel Report we showed the downstream categories from Kayak, which for the most recent week were Travel Agencies and Transport sites (includes airlines and car rental sites). "

One of the things that is HitWise does - categorize traffic by industry segment (both upstream, or traffic coming to Kayak, and downstream, or traffic leaving Kayak and going somewhere else- this kind of segmentation is fundamental to understanding the impact of traffic.  For example, downstream traffic (leaving Kayak) - 75% of it went to another travel site:

And half of that 75% went to a Travel Agency (38.83%) while very little of it went to book Cruises!  What that might mean, is people don’t want to book a cruise vacation using Kayak - but they will book a flight or Kayak will be effective in routing traffic to other travel agencies.  One of the things I might question is calling Orbitz, CheapTickets and Travelocity travel agencies - as I think of them more as online booking sites where as I would call Liberty Travel - a travel agency.  

No matter - it’s partly in how  Hitwise can categorize traffic of sites you don’t own or have analytics to (99.99999%) that makes it worth buying for businesses that need percision data analysis.

Another chart shows that HitWise is feeding Orbitz, CheapTicket, Travelocity, etc by doubling the traffic to such sites from 6 months earlier.

If Hitwise could not categorize the upstream and downstream traffic, it would be almost useless - it’s power is it does this

But lets face it - the reason for that (and it’s not in the article) has got to be:

There’s more AdSense advertising by those sites on Kayak - and then it makes total sense that Kayak would have doubled traffic to say….Orbitz.   

Now this is where it gets really interesting from a Web Analyst point of view - if Orbitz were to connect traffic from Kayak.com to a doubling of conversions (or at least more of them than before the advertising) - using internal analytics AND HitWise data, it will valadate both the source of traffic and the value of that traffic.

In other words, to get the fullest value from HitWise, you need someone to pull the site conversion data and match it up with the HitWise data.  With out that piece, the tool is still good as a competitive analysis and forcasting tool but not as a conversion analysis - which it can also be.

LeeAnn’s article goes a great deal farther than you’d get using free tools - but stops short of where it could go had it been married to say…Orbitz own site analytics.  In fact, I personally mentioned such a solution to HitWise at SESNY06 to HitWise.  At that time I was connected with a project to merge industry segment data by reverse IP lookup to HitWise’s categorization of traffic from industry segments going to competitor sites.  With the HitWise data AND…….my own site analytics merged….you’d have the keys to kingdom.

For example: you know how much traffic your site gets (because you can look at your own web analytics)  and you can compare what HitWise shows as your traffic and come up with a good idea of what your competitors traffic really is.

You can do a lot fo stuff like that with HitWise - yet the full value of the product seems to be largly unrealized - judging by stories I have heard of people who buy HitWise then only use it a couple of times a year.