CHRISTMAS RELATED SEARCHES BEGIN BEFORE HALLOWEEN
DECORATIONS COME DOWN
Hitwise 2005 Holiday Shopping Series Installment #1:
iPod Continues to Dominate Product Searches
NEW YORK, Nov. 8, 2005— While it seems that retailers begin marketing the holidays earlier and earlier each year, it appears that consumers have taken note and began planning for the holiday season as early as September.
According to Hitwise, the world's leading online competitive intelligence service, the share of US Internet searches on the term "christmas" were up 41 percent for the week ending November 5, 2005 versus the prior week (week ending October 29, 2005). Additionally, the queries "christmas gift ideas," "christmas gifts" and "christmas decorations" were up 185 percent, 92 percent and 75 percent respectively in the same time period.
"The fact that Christmas-related search queries begin ramping up in September demonstrates the length of the online researching and buying process," said Bill Tancer, General Manager of Global Research at Hitwise. "A similar pattern was noted when Halloween-related queries began increasing in mid August. Clearly online shoppers have become accustomed to longer lead times and use the Internet to plan out their holiday activities."
iPod tops product searches
What products are consumers searching for in the months leading up to the Holidays? Analysis of Hitwise industry search terms reveals that of the top 10 product search terms, Apple's iPod dominates, with "ipod" being the most popular product search term. Variations of "ipod," such as "ipod mini," "ipod nano" and "ipods," take three additional slots in the top ten product searches. Other popular product searches include "dell computers," "barbie," "xbox 360" and "build a bear."
In October, visits to the Hitwise Online Retail Index, a collection of 100 top online retail domains in the Hitwise Shopping & Classifieds category, was up an average of 7 percent when comparing year-over-year daily data for October 2005 versus October 2004. In 2004, visits to the Hitwise Online Retail Index increased by 64 percent between the week ending October 30 and the week ending November 27, 2004. Based on the similarity in traffic patterns between 2004 and 2005, it can be expected that visits to online shopping sites will accelerate as the season progresses.
"As we can see when examining visits to the Online Retail Index from 2004 to 2005, the pattern between the two periods is very similar" said Bill Tancer, general manager of global research at Hitwise. "This similarity, which also occurred when comparing 2004 data to 2003, provides us with the ability to predict timing and magnitude of visits to online retailers for the 2005 holiday season."
Sign Up For the Hitwise blog
In addition to the Holiday Shopping Series 2005 weekly installments, Bill Tancer will provide further retail analyses via his blog at http://weblogs.hitwise.com/bill-tancer/.
Weekly Holiday Shopping Tracker:
Data period: week ending Nov. 5, 2005
U.S visits to retail websites accounted for 8.52 percent of all visits to the Internet.
Top growing retail categories last week were: Ticketing (up 4%); Department Stores (up 4%) and Flowers & Gifts (up 3%).
Retail (8.5 percent) was the third most popular online category after Adult (17.3%) and Email sites (8.9 percent).
The leading product-related search terms driving traffic to retail Web sites were "ipod," "dell computers," "airsoft guns," "barbie," "ipod mini" and "ipod nano".
Search Terms (by Brand and Product) that drove Traffic to Shopping & Classified Websites
Period - Week Ending 11/05/05
Brand
Product
1.
ebay
ipod
2.
walmart
dell computers
3.
ebay.com
airsoft guns
4.
best buy
barbie
5.
craigslist
ipod mini
6.
target
ipod nano
7.
amazon
ipods
8.
amazon.com
dell coupons
9.
home depot
xbox 360
10.
sears
build a bear
Hitwise U.S. Data
Top 15 Shopping & Classifieds Web Sites (ranked by % of total Visits)
Rank By Visits for Week Ending 11/05/05
Rank
Name
Domain
Market Share
% growth weekly (w/e 11/05/05 compared to w/e 10/29/05)
1.
eBay*
www.ebay.com
21.43%
+0.05%
2.
Amazon.com
www.amazon.com
2.84%
+0.12%
3.
Walmart.com
www.walmart.com
1.45%
+0.18%
4.
Craig's List
www.craigslist.org
1.43%
+0.17%
5.
Dell USA
www.dell.com
1.29%
+0.23%
6.
Target
www.target.com
1.06%
+0.10%
7.
BestBuy.com
www.bestbuy.com
0.98%
+0.28%
8.
NetFlix.com
www.netflix.com
0.77%
+0.05%
9.
JC Penney
www.jcpenney.com
0.76%
+0.20%
10.
Overstock.com
www.overstock.com
0.64%
+0.12%
11.
Shopping.com**
www.shopping.com
0.54%
+0.01%
12.
BizRate.com**
www.bizrate.com
0.53%
-0.13%
13.
QVC.com
www.qvc.com
0.51%
+0.02%
14.
Sears.com
www.sears.com
0.50%
+0.01%
15.
Ticketmaster
www.ticketmaster.com
0.50%
+0.04%
*Does not include stand-alone visits to other eBay sites ( eBay Motors, eBay Stores)
**Only includes visits to these stand-alone sites www.shopping.com and www.bizrate.com and not other Shopping.com or Bizrate owned properties.
Contact: For media inquiries or to schedule an analyst interview, please contact Lizzie Babarczy: press@hitwise.com (212) 380 2910.
About Hitwise:
Hitwise is the world's leading online competitive intelligence service. Each day, Hitwise monitors how more than 25 million Internet users interact with over 500,000 websites across 160 industry categories.
By monitoring more people, more websites, more often, Hitwise provides marketers with timely and actionable marketing insights on how their online presence compares to competitive websites. Companies use this information to maximize the return on their online investment, in efforts such as search marketing, affiliate programs, online advertising, visitor segmentation, content development and lead generation.
Hitwise collects Internet usage information via a combination of ISP data partnerships and opt-in mega panels, and complies with local and international privacy legislation as audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers. Founded in 1997, Hitwise is a privately held company, headquartered in New York City and operates in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong and Singapore.
More information about Hitwise is available at www.hitwise.com
