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Hitwise Rankings identify industry leaders, based on market share of Internet visits overall and within select industries.
Using the example of the toy seller, FAO Schwarz, we begin our research at the highest level by reviewing the top-ranked websites within the Shopping & Classifieds - Toys & Hobbies sub category, as well as the Shopping & Classifieds parent industry. The following industry rankings report for the Shopping & Classifieds – Toys & Hobbies industry reveals the websites that attracted the largest share of US Internet visits in December 2007.
A review of the top-ranked websites in your industry may identify product lines popular with online customers pointing to content that should feature prominently on your home page. In the Toys & Hobbies example above, we see that Barbie, My Scene and LEGO are popular product lines, indicating that toy sellers should feature this content prominently on the home page. TOYS ‘R’ US – USA and KB Toys.com also use popular product lines and brands as navigational aids, ensuring that these popular products are referenced and linked to on most pages of the website.
FAO Schwarz can review the top-ranked online shopping websites for best practices and innovative features to identify what is hot now. A useful tool in this analysis is a matrix that lists the websites considered and the innovative features and technologies employed.
In this case, the analysis reveals that Target and Amazon are leveraging Web 2.0 to encourage customer participation through product reviews and interactive navigation using Java. Direct competitors in the Toys & Hobbies sub-category, such as TOYS ‘R’ US and KB Toys.com, are also encouraging consumer participation through ratings and reviews. Similarly, TOYS ‘R’ US – USA is also leveraging these reviews throughout the website by displaying product search results in order of customer ratings as well as by sales popularity.
Research: Specific Competitor Review
After the high-level Internet overview, firms can conduct a review of their website’s marketing performance compared with competitors. The analysis provides an in-depth understanding of competitors’ traffic sources, performance in search marketing and the demographic and lifestyle profile of website visitors.
Competitor Clickstream Profile
Analyzing where customers go after visiting a website can offer insight into the content consumers are looking for, but not finding on your website. This insight can help prioritize content that should be added to a website.
For example, analysis of the Industry Clickstream report for FAO Schwarz reveals that one of the top industries visited after www.fao.com in December 2007 was Lifestyle, receiving 4.22% of downstream US visits. The following table lists the top five Lifestyle websites visited after www.fao.com. FAO Schwarz could analyze the content of www.americangirl.com, for example, to identify content to add to http://www.fao.com.
Competitor Search Terms
Website content can play an important role in search engine optimization. Having relevant content that is search engine friendly (readable by search engine spiders) and that attracts links from other websites will help a website appear higher in the organic search engine results. (See Section 4.1 for a more detailed list of search engine optimization tips).
A review of the search terms sending more traffic to competitor websites for products you offer, might identify content that needs to be added to your website or changes to the language used to describe your products.
Consider the following Hitwise Website Search Terms report for TOYS ‘R’ US – USA, showing the top ten among 2,864 search terms sending traffic to www.toysrus.com in the four weeks to January 12th, 2008. While the highest volume search terms sending traffic to TOYS ‘R’ US – USA are branded terms, the report contains nearly three thousand search terms, many of which may be opportunities for FAO Schwarz. A Paid and Organic filter was applied to this report, allowing FAO Schwarz to further understand the TOYS ‘R’ US – USA search strategy, and to identify content opportunities.
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