HitWise put out a press release today that, among other things, announced new features of their Search Intelligence 4.0 product.

"It is the ability to report the paid and organic split that is new. For each term, we can also see the rate at which consumers reached the site from a paid or organic link and rank the search terms sending visits to the site from either paid and organic traffic."

 However, there’s still work to be done:

"Can we tell if consumers prefer organic or paid listings and if this varies by the type of query? Not yet……".

Actually, I’m not sure if that’s true - at the end of this post ..

"In the next two posts on this topic, I’ll explore this issue of whether consumers prefer paid or organic results. It will be interesting to see if there are any differences by industry as well as by site. Stay tuned…"

I’m finding that I don’t want to get into the details of each HitWise PR - I’d rather go after something larger - like a change in the platform or a software enhancement.