Using Hitwise Data to Relaunch Your Website

Using Hitwise to
Relaunch your Website
March 2008
The power of competitive intelligence1 Introduction 1
The company website has become a crucial communications and sales platform for many businesses. Relaunching a website is therefore critically important. It often involves months of internal negotiations, external research and corporate soul-searching. Firms have only a few seconds to capture the attention of shoppers and readers - and those visits may come through your home page or a deep linked page from a search on Google or Yahoo!.
There are several sources that a ? rm will turn to when relaunching a website, such as site-centric data, internal marketing guidelines and customer research. Hitwise data is one such source and being based on the browsing behavior of over 25 million Internet users worldwide, offers context and guidance to the best practices employed by competitors to allow ? rms to evaluate a website's success. This insight can be critical to avoid costly mistakes and to allow for prioritization of initiatives.
This white paper has been created for Hitwise clients to provide guidance on best practice uses of Hitwise when relaunching a website. The white paper focuses on three phases of the relaunch:
Content Research: Identify best practices among your immediate competitors and among the leaders in your industry for engaging customers and maximizing sales. Determine which content is most appealing to customers in your online industry.Marketing: Conduct competitive analysis to optimize the relaunch through search engine optimization, search engine marketing, af? liate marketing and by identifying relevant advertising opportunities to attract your desired audience. Reporting: Measure the success of your website relaunch and identify opportunities for future incremental improvements.
The white paper relies on the example of FAO Schwarz (www.fao.com) to illustrate how this toy retailer could use Hitwise data in a website relaunch. The same principles can be applied to any industry and any website.
All data in this report is sourced from the Hitwise Competitive Intelligence service (www.hitwise.com). thAll data is as of January 12 , 2008.
More information on Hitwise is available on the last page of this white paper and at www.hitwise.com.
The power of competitive intelligence
©2008 Hitwise Pty. Ltd. All trademarks and logos are the property of their respective owners. All rights reserved.2 Executive Summary 2
The following is a list of how each Hitwise competitive intelligence tool can be used when planning or reporting on a website relaunch.
Hitwise RankingsIdentify industry leaders based on market share of Internet visits overall and within select industries. Find websites of product lines popular with consumers which are ranked highly in a speci? c industry of interest.
Hitwise Conversions TechnologyCompare popularity of various sections within competitor websites.
Hitwise Clickstream ReportsPrioritize content to add to your website by analyzing downstream traf? c from your website and highlighting content your consumers are looking for, but may not be ? nding on your website. Identify af? liate partners that are working for competitors that might also be good sources of traf? c to the relaunched website. Filter reports by new and returning visitors to identify af? liate partners that are more likely to deliver new customers. Evaluate success at search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM) by comparing the relative volume of traf? c from search engines with competitors before and after the relaunch. TMHitwise Search Intelligence : Website Search TermsFind the words that your customers use to describe your products by reviewing search terms sending visits to competitor websites.Benchmark the proportion of paid and organic traf? c your website receives against your competitors. Establish budgets for the relaunch based on norms for your industry. TMHitwise Search Intelligence : Search Term Gap AnalysisPrioritize keywords for search engine optimization or search engine marketing by identifying keywords that are sending traf? c to competitors, but not to your own website.
My Hitwise: Search Term PortfoliosCreate a search term portfolio to store keywords for future ref... [download for more]