I got here, at the Jarvis Center on the west side of mid Manhattan, around 5 PM tonight, just in time to take a quick look at the exhibition hall and the early evening keynote with Bill Tancer.

Bill Tancer’s new book, CLICK, is worth checking out.

Bill Tancer is using Hitwise search query data, almost as a lens, to turn it back on ourselves, to find out insights that don’t normally show up in market research studies. Examples might be Gas Prices orvour real fears, segmentation.

Cognitive dissonance - are we really catching what goes on online?

I guess the full Hitwise database allows you to test out ideas on what motivated an audience in a different way then ComScore or anything you can now get from Google.

I have wanted to have the HitWise data to play with for some time, but I have never worked in a place where HitWise was purchased (and HitWise is pretty expensive).

There is an Art behind the Arbitrage and it can be used for financial predictions, like unemployment percent before the department of Labor announced it.

Can we predict the outcome of the US Presidential Election beforehand?

Diffusion of Innovation and how products diffuse in our society. How fast does a bussiness innovate? Which segments are the early adopters?

Early Adopters visit Tattoo sites, video directory web sites, there is so much video out there that semantic search might not be capturing all the information out there.

Ilovedata.com and the Science of Data in Time Magazine.

I will buy a copy of CLICK today, get it signed by Bill Tancer now, more to get ideas on how to use data I can get my hands on.

The problem is the data you can get out of Google Trends, Compete.com, and other sources that are available to me are “noisy” and lack resolution.

I get those emails from Hitwise which calls itself the "leading online competitive intelligence service" (not sure what happened to Comscore and Nielsen and anyone else) regularly - usually they're not all that interesting and seem to just say that Google wins and everyone else should get out of Search - well, sorta.

However, with Google Receives 67 Percent of U.S. Searches in March 2008 an interesting dynamic has been detected - Ask.com will probably overtake MSN and become the #3 Search Engine by the end of the year - that's unusual.

Google accounted for 67.25 percent of all U.S. searches in the four weeks ending March 29, 2008. Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com each received 20.29, 5.25 and 4.09 percent respectively. The remaining 46 search engines in the Hitwise Search Engine Analysis Tool accounted for 1.72 percent of U.S. searches.  

Percentage of U.S.Searches Among Leading Search Engine Providers
Domain	Mar.-08	Feb.-08	Mar.-07
www.google.com	67.25%	66.44%	64.13%
search.yahoo.com	20.29%	20.59%	21.26%
search.msn.com	6.65%*	size="-0">6.95%*	9.01%*
www.ask.com	4.09%	4.16%	3.48%
Note: Data is based on four week rolling periods (ending 3/29.08, 2/23/08, 3/31/07) from the Hitwise sample of 10 million US Internet users. * - includes executed searches on Live.com and MSN Search.
Source: Hitwise

It's even more interesting in that MSN is trying to acquire Yahoo - which at last check (today) isn't going according to plan with Yahoo Rejecting Microsoft Bid Again according to the New York Times.

I also found the chart below interesting, but not for the reasons HitWise presents:

What I'm interested in is not the part of the industry traffic that Google gets - but that someone has defined what the average traffic from search engines to industry verticals are.  

I would wish for this information to be integrated with Google Analytics Trending - so far, there's been some movement in providing customized trend data in GA, but it's been limited.

And as far ask Ask.com moving ahead of Microsoft Search, one has to wonder it Search is really what it's about anyway - a company like Microsoft might be focused on so many things besides search, that it might not be able to make changes quick enough - there may be too many layers of change control in order to get anything done (being more conservative - and then people who would want to make changes, give up).

Right now, I'd expect Ask.com to overtake MSN as early as year's end. 

If you like your daily shot of HitWise data, you can get it served up to your desktop with the new "HitWise to Go" applet which you can have "frothed" off your desktop or laptop screen.

I haven't decided if I want it on my desktop or not…the problem for me is it's still a broadcast model - it's the data HitWise wants you to have .. not the data I necessary want - it's been their problem all long.   Still, this idea is a good one - if you want HitWise on your Desktop.

HitWise being sold is Anti-News as far as I am concerned - I've been detecting "nibbling" activity (search queries from investment firms that touched webmetricsguru.com) for over a year now. 

In fact, I wrote that HitWise was for sale and going to be sold at least 3 times over the last year -and just in January I asked Was HitWise sold yet?

It was never a question in my mind that HitWise, overvalued, would be sold, just WHEN and to WHOM. 

The sale of HitWise to Experian makes a lot of sense, and gives a backdoor to merging Experian's Mosaic Geo Demographic data with Microsoft AdCenter down the line (even though that's probably not on anyone's mind right now at Experian, Hitwise or Microsoft); an opportunity exists to get HitWise's excellent, but overpriced, data flowing into Experian's products - and that's a good thing.

Here's a part of the Press Release from Experian

 "..Costa Mesa, Calif., 19 April 2007 - Experian, the global information solutions company, announces that it has acquired Hitwise, a leading Internet marketing intelligence company, which helps clients monitor the performance of their websites and target their online advertising spend more effectively.  The purchase price is approximately $240m and will be funded from Experian’s existing cash resources.  The transaction is subject to regulatory approval."

I think HitWise cashed out while they still could- in the last year Quantcast and Compete have been chipping away at Hitwise with free snapshots of data, on demand, that were almost as good as the high priced versions that HitWise is selling to select customers.

And no question - if you had deep pockets and needed precision data, HitWise was the right decision in most cases- but most people don't need that level of data and HitWise never figured that out.  And even when they tried to release a crippled version of their keyword tool for 89 dollars a month, 2 years ago, it was totally overpriced then, and that keyword tool had limitations the full blown HitWise suite did not.

But the problem for HitWise - they only had 1200 customers - and I have read that some of those customers would buy HitWise,  use it once or twice for a project, and then not ever use it again, cancelling after the year was up.  Don't know how many cases of that there was.  Still, it just shows me that HitWise was going in the wrong direction and if they did not sell soon, in a year or two, there might be nothing to sell. 

But in the case of Experian, the acquisition of HitWise made a lot of sense - so, it was a win-win for both parties:

Andrew Walsh, Chief Executive Officer of Hitwise, said:

“Over the last 10 years, Hitwise has developed a truly unique digital intelligence service that helps inform the online marketing strategies of 1,200 clients around the world every day.  We are excited to become part of Experian, having worked with them for over four years.  We will now be able to accelerate Hitwise’s growth and profitability through access to Experian’s wider pool of data, tools and clients, while more quickly expanding our global footprint.”

Notice they keep pulling out the 1200 customers - why only 1200?  They were overpriced. There are not too many companies that will pay for a product they don't understand how to use (well..maybe that's not 100% true - lots of companies bought Omniture but I hear many don't know what to do with Omniture either - but at least, that's a Web Analytics platform - what is Hitwise - not really a platform).

Again, the acquisition of Hitwise by Experian makes sense:

"..Hitwise strengthens Experian’s position in market research by bringing new, unique data to Experian on how consumers behave online, to complement our existing knowledge of how they behave offline.  Hitwise’s services are also complementary to other Experian products.  For example, Hitwise will leverage the sales and distribution network of CheetahMail, our email delivery and analytics company."

But I'm looking forward to getting some of HitWise's data filtered though Experian's products without the expensive price tag ..that's a Win - Win for everyone.

So… good move Experian.  Hitwise did well too, selling before the company started sinking in value (which may have already begun).

I think HitWise's post about determining the  optimal amount of PPC vs. Organic listings is interesting (for a change) subject but the blog post did not answer the question.  I liked the "bubble" diagrams that were used in the post.

"…In answer to the question in the title of this post - "what is the optimal balance" - it depends. It depends most on what works for you. Test, monitor and adapt constantly and continue with the tactics that yield a positive return on investment. It also depends on the structure of your website (how search engine friendly is it?)."

In this case…I'd like HitWise to come up with something beyond what I already knew….testing, monitoring and adapting tactics depending on your goals and website is not noteworthy by itself.

I'm not sure if PPC and Organic Search Traffic are mixed in the chart above or not; I'd have included two charts for each site - the bubble diagram for Organic Search traffic (they don't seem to have one for that) and the bubble diagram for PPC Traffic (above).

Otherwise, I liked the post - I think there is an optimal value of PPC vs. Organic and would like to know what it is or could be for each type of site.

I noticed HitWise's commentary on Clinton Campaign Website Receives 2X More Traffic than Obama Website on Campaign Announcement Day    and wondered if I could get the same quality of information with free tools and my own ingenuity.  Granted, we're measuring different things (HitWise Search Share vs. Blog Citations) in the first case.

Note: the focus of Leeann Prescott's post - using HitWise data to understand who is contributing to the political campaigns of the democratic candidates being examined here.  My post is about comparing the quality of HitWise, BlogPulse and Quantcast.  Decided not to go beyond that focus for this post.

Here's the HitWise chart showing Hillary getting twice the traffic of Obama on the day of their announcements of exploring running for the US Presidency in 2008.

There's two URLs for Hilary and Obama and one for Edwards.  I put the three main URLs into BlogPulse and showed the trend for the last month (see below).

There's a  relationship between US Search Share and Blog Citations; I get almost as much useful information from from BlogPulse ans I could from HitWise.

Look what happens when I superimpose the HitWise chart over the BlogPulse chart.

For hillaryclinton.com and barackobama.com the spikes on Jan 17th and Jan 20th are almost identical!

The main limitation of BlogPulse, as far as I'm concerned, is the limit of 3 terms that can be compared at any one time; I think BlogPulse should be made to allow up to 6 terms to be compared in one chart.

What about the Demographics part?  First I'll compare Gender of visitors to Hillary and Obama's official campaign sites. Can I get good enough data out of a free tool that match a paid one?  Yes.

The Quantcast data is arranged slightly differently than HitWise's chart comparing the gender of visitors to Hillary and Obama's site - but I can argue the differences are almost meaningless at this point. 

I got a result that was good enough.  In Hillary's case, there are more females visiting than males - and personally, I find that more believable than HitWise's greater skew toward male visitors of Hillary's site over females.

How about comparing the ages of visitors to Hillary and Obama's site?  The Free Quantcast.com tool provided results as good as, if not better than HitWise.

The data is arranged differently yet I come to same conclusions - Hillary Clinton has the strongest segment from young people 18-24 years old and Obama draws from 25-34 year old segment of visitors.   Is this a cause of concern for Hillary? Yes, because voters who are older are more likely to vote in the next election.  However, at this time, the comparisons are almost meaningless to what's going happen on Election day, 2008.   I'd argue that I got good enough data from Quantcast to do basic comparisons.  If I wanted more precision - yes, I might have to buy HitWise - but the case to buy HitWise licenses, now,  is much weaker now than it was 2 or 3 years ago.

Finally, there's income - can I get good enough income profiling from a free tool vs. a paid one?  Yes.

There's not that much difference between the quality and resolution of free tools and the more expensive paid one versions.

One thing is for sure - the bar is always being raised - while Hitwise has been a premium tool - it's too expensive for most people to use  - and now, that power is becoming almost irrelevant as QuantCast and Compete move into areas that were once the exclusive domain of Nielsen Netratings, Com score and later on, HitWise.

2007 should be pretty interesting in terms of more powerful metrics packages being available at free or low prices.

read more »

I've been suspecting for sometime that HitWise was fishing around to sell itself - or be acquired.  Somehow, I missed the news early last month that HitWise put itself up for sale; haven't heard if the HitWise was actually sold though.  According to Centerworks blog:

"…..The Telegraph (UK) is reporting that website monitoring firm Hitwise is up for sale. The asking price: $350 million. The Telegraph lists United Business Media and Experian as possible purchasers of Hitwise.  I could see many types of firms interested in Hitwise, including Google. Clearly this data is very valuable and worth a lot of money in future potential. I have used the tool for a couple of years and found it to be a better monitoring tool than say, Alexa. Is it perfect? Nope. Though using Hitwise will cost you a pretty penny.

The company, founded in 1997 by Australian internet entrepreneurs Andrew Barlow and Adrian Giles, has investment from Allen & Buckeridge and Insight Venture Partners. It has since moved its headquarters to U.S., to New York City. "

Here's the thing - is HitWise really worth $350 million dollars? Why should Google pick up HitWise when they could pick up Quantcast for a fraction of the cost (and Quantcast technology is more interesting than what HitWise is actually doing).

I will admit I have seen Hitwise digs in NYC recently, and it looks pretty fancy, like a news room, really.

To me, HitWise would be much more valuable if it could multiply it's clients tenfold while decreasing it's prices tenfold.  Pretty much, they'd make the same money but have a much wider user base and a brighter future if they did that.  I doubt they'd do that as they're marketing to the high end customer.  The problem is …. there are not enough customers who'll buy it.   

With a basic set of licenses to the full set of industry segments running between 40,000 - 60,000 a year (estimated price - I really don't know what the real prices are - I suspect they vary somewhat) I don't know how many clients they really can expect to get (1000, 2000, 3000…..)  

When you have an expensive product, like an Omniture or Visual Sciences roll out, you don't need that many customers because each roll out might run over 1 million dollars.   HitWise's products are not that expensive, but expensive enough to rule out most people who'd want to use it from buying the product.

Now, if HitWise drastically lowered it's price it would pick up many more customers (providing the marketing message was right) and would have a better shot and become a standard.  On the other hand, bringing the price down would be a big gamble.   However, if they picked up enough customers, they'd have a better chance of being aquired for more money, I feel.

But the other side of it, with Compete.com and Quantcast.com nipping at their heels, HitWise's products are beginning to become less and less competitive - meaning they have to sell soon, or else the price they can expect, I feel, is going to go down and it won't make sense to sell at all.

All this, by the way, is just speculation on my part.

HitWise took a stab at the Google - YouTube merger rumors.  I think everyone is wondering if this is actually a real deal or just a unsubstantiated rumor. 

Perhaps Google is buying YouTube to kill it - because they could build the same features into Google Video.  It would not be the first time companies are bought more for their strategic value than their financial worth.

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.

I wrote about HitWise as a Political Tracking Tool the other day and around the same time Bill Tancer indicated that HitWise has improved it’s categorization and charting of clickstream analysis to include blogging activity.

"Today we issued a press release regarding search and online politics which revealed the top issue related terms driving traffic to our politics category of over 800 sites. Leveraging some of our new charting and clickstream functionality, I decided to take a closer look at the traffic channels driving traffic to the politics category. The News category, particularly the Print News subcategory, has always figured heavily as an upstream provider, but the chart below indicates the increased influence and dominance of blogs as traffic contributors to online political sites"

Interesting.  This is the first time I heard about the improvements.   It would help HitWise if they published a list of all the improvements they make to product line, as the changes are added, and open it up so anyone can see it.   Most of the new charting abilities seem to be related to how data is categorized.

Hitwise shows that blogs (5.32%) are now contributing more attention to political sites and causes than newspapers (4.28%) and that newspapers are declining as source of traffic to political sites while blogs are continuing to gain.  No surprise, there are more and more blogs and less and less newspapers, and most of the newspapers (in electronic online form) are not as effective as blogs (but they’re trying to be).

HitWise provides, using it’s Upstream Categorization, which sites you’d want to advertise on (left and right) for politicians.

Again, no surprise here ,but if your on the left, go with the Daily Kos (even though it is mucho expensive, it gets the job done) and on the right, MichelleMalkin.com and Instapundit.com.

Point being, HitWise is the place to be if you need the most accurate data you can get on how traffic is coming and leaving your site and your competitiors.  I think HitWise is an excellent tool for any politician who knows how to use it - well worth whatever it costs. 

Spend on one less commerical and buy it and put it in the hands of someone skillful, inciteful, someone like me - not that I want the job, I don’t - but you do need people who know how to use the tool and know how to ask the right questions.