Viewing all posts categorized as 'Hitwise Web Trends'

Looking at data provided by Experian Hitwise, we can confidently say that the email channel has lots of traction with some of the most sought-after consumers in the country.

If you follow media news, chances are you’ve heard the expression “coveted demographic” used to refer to a particular audience segment that most advertisers wish to target. Often times, TV networks, magazines, websites, and movie studios tout their “coveted demographics” to give the impression that advertisers are only an ad placement away from reaching the hearts (and wallets) of the free-spending masses.

But what about email? Does the email channel reach these “coveted demographics?” A quick look at the data indicates that yes, email is a popular choice among consumers with the most spending power.

Of the top four Mosaic lifestyle groups that use email the most, three of them are what you would describe as upper-middle to high-end American consumers. In other words, a large proportion of email users have discretionary income to spend on the products and services of their choosing.

Read More »

A new report available today from Hitwise reveals that 11% of all upstream traffic to the top 500 retail websites during the 2008 Holiday season came from email.

The clickstream data shows that the triumvirate of search (30%), other Retail 500 websites (15%), and email represented more than 50% of all upstream holiday web visits to the nation’s top e-commerce sites. So what can we take away from this information? For starters, it means that SEO continues to be a big deal for leading retailers worldwide, and rightfully so. Secondly, this data indicates to me that when people know which product (i.e. a Nintendo Wii) or category of products (a video game system) they are looking for, their first destination will be the search engine. From there, they will be taken to a retailer’s e-commerce site, which may inspire them to compare offers with other e-commerce sites.

But what if the customer doesn’t know what he/she is looking for?

Read More »

Do you ever wish your marketing emails drove more of your total website traffic? If so, I have great news on how you can finally achieve this goal: start working for a dating website.

Here’s a statistical anomaly that will make your head spin: websites in the “Lifestyle” category receive twice as much web traffic from email as “Entertainment” or “Travel” industries. I discovered this while poking around in the Hitwise application to see which industries rely most heavily on email to drive traffic to their websites. Apparently, the “Lifestyle” industry is head and shoulders above the rest (see the pink line, below) when it comes to email driving traffic (probably due to high clickthrough performance). And not just by a little bit, either.

Read More »

At the beginning of 2008, I had a number of people ask me the same anxiety-riddled question: are Facebook and MySpace going to kill email?

My response then is the same as it is now: email is fine, the kids are alright, and we can all play in the same sandbox together.

My impression at the time was that many industry veterans seemed genuinely freaked out by the fact that their own kids were now using these new and different forms of communication a lot more than email. And truth be told, the meteoric rise of social networks, particularly among young people, was (and remains) worth noting, learning about, and venturing into for some businesses. But social networks’ relationship with email is less about “this or that” as it is about “this and that” — the two channels are not competing with one another so much as coexisting peacefully within one online ecosystem.

One easy way to understand this coexistence is to take a look at clickstream data from this past week (ending 10/4/08), provided by our friends at Hitwise:

The above data shows that nearly 15% of all social networking site traffic is currently coming directly from email accounts like Yahoo! Mail, Windows Live/Hotmail, Gmail, and AOL Mail (These are 4 of the top 13 sites visited immediately before social networks).

Read More »