Press Release: Hitwise Launches Online Competitive Intelligence Service in the USA
CNET: Metrics firm Hitwise enters U.S.
IAR: Hitwise Launches U.S. Online Measurement Service
MediaPost: Hitwise Completes The Online Picture
You can read about it at the above links and/or more below, as I briefed with these guys last week. Short story is they offer online competitive and audience intelligence by tracking surfing behavior of a massive panel of users (~10 million in the U.S.). They launched in 1998 in Austrialia, and the U.S. is their latest (as of yesterday, officially) of six international markets now (also New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong and U.K.). Sounds somewhat reminiscent of Compete, comScore, NetRatings? Perhaps, but they're positioning their strengths as competitive intelligence, self-service, friendly pricing and daily reporting, among other things. (Read details below.)
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Unlike panel based approaches for web audience measurement, Hitwise partners with ISPs to monitor the daily anonymous surfing of some 7.5 million users in the U.S. In addition, it does track a panel of another 2 million surfers through partnerships with browser plug-in tools. (Hitwise declines to reveal which ISPs and tool makers it partners with, to prevent companies trying to game their methodology.) Of this nearly 10 million total, some 700,000 represent at-work surfers, with a similarly large student panel as well.
What the service specializes in is self-service client reports, refreshed on a daily basis, to show how dozens or hundreds of sites rank relative to each other within pre-set or customized categories.
I've had a look at the interface and will get a more extensive tour of my evaluation account tomorrow, but what I've seen so far shows a flexible, easy-to-use interface to drill down into traffic stats and other data analyses (e.g., most popular referring pages and trailing pages) for a heck of a lot of sites.
One significant shortcoming of the service, to my mind, is that it takes only a daily snapshot of traffic patterns with no persistence to track unique individuals for more than 30 minute sessions, meaning it cannot distinguish over the course of a month how many visits are one-offs and how many are the same users returning twice or more often. The managers I spoke with (CEO Andrew Walsh, U.S. market General Manager Chris Maher and Sr. Marketing Manager Lizzie Babarczy) did not indicate in my conversation that this was something they recognized as a priorty to change, as it would probably require a massive retooling of their methodology. Perhaps it's less important to marketers than I imagine, but to my mind it would be a pretty essential data point to have.
Some highlights from my notes:
- worldwide panel size: 25 million
- 550+ clients globally
- 75 employees worldwide
- 75% annual customer renewal rate
- price runs up to ~$20,000 / year
- U.S. service tracks 200,000 sites
- reports on 150 categories of sites
- profitable in all markets
In June they plan to launch a keyword analysis service to track what keywords are driving traffic to specific sites and from which sites.
All the stats the service provides are presented as comparitive percentages reflecting share of market within a competitive set of sites, as opposed to actual page views or number of uniques visitors because, they explained, they don't want to put out another set of numbers to confuse the market with what comScore Media Metrix, NetRatings, et al. already report.
Because of the large size of the sample, Hitwise believes one of its key value differentiators is its ability to report in detail on a daily basis. Ausie CEO Walsh says the key value points of the service are "breadth, depth, frequency and accuracy."
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