Taking the Guesswork Out Of Online Marketing

MEDIA RELEASE –

From today Hitwise Takes the Guesswork Out Of Online Marketing

Embargo –5th June 2001

In the past, online marketers and strategists have had to fly blind when planning, implementing and evaluating their online campaigns.

From today, thanks to world-first technology developed by Australian company Hitwise, the New Zealand marketing industry, including website owners, media planners and online marketers, can accurately assess the rankings of particular sites, as well as where visitors come from and where they go afterwards.

Hitwise, New Zealand's leading online competitive intelligence service, has launched an online marketers 'tool kit' that will bring a whole new level of accountability to the commercial online world. The tools are:

Hitwise Click-Stream Analysis
Click Stream Analysis provides information on the top upstream and downstream sites for thousands of sites categorised in the Hitwise database. This allows web marketers to identify (a) from which sites users have originated, and (b) where they go to after visiting a particular site. Click Stream information allows websites to analyse and track the reasons behind the success of their direct competitors. Using this information, New Zealand website owners can then revise their marketing efforts in line with what is working for their competitors. Hitwise Click Stream Analysis also reports on the percentage of upstream traffic a site receives from search engines and allows a comparison to be made against the industry category average.

Hitwise Rankings
In addition to ranking websites based on pages, Hitwise now offers online marketers the ability to rank websites by different criteria, including user visits (the number of times a site is visited) and visit duration (the average amount of time users spend on a particular site). By offering a range of ways to qualify the competitiveness of a site, online marketers can better gauge if a site should be considered in a media plan or alliance.

Unprecedented Level of Transparency

Adrian Giles, Executive Director of Hitwise, said the new click-stream analysis tools provide an unprecedented level of transparency for web marketing.

‘Now, on-line marketers will have access to information regarding which sites users come from before visiting a particular site, where they go to and how long they stay there.

‘While other online monitoring services offer some of this information on relatively few sites, only Hitwise is able to report this data on thousands of the most popular sites as visited by New Zealanders,’ Mr Giles said.

‘These new tools will empower website owners, online media planners and marketers to construct highly targeted and effective marketing plans with a competitive edge.

‘Because site owners and media planners will actually know how their competitors are attracting users, media plans can now include niche sites in addition to the top sites” Mr Giles concluded.

About Hitwise

Hitwise is a unique website metrics service that provides intelligence about the online competitive environment. It is entirely web-based, providing real-time access to the comparative performance of more than 100,000 local and international websites.

Hitwise employs an innovative new methodology based on partnerships with a wide range of Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to capture the usage patterns of more than 400,000 New Zealand Internet users. This allows Hitwise to monitor a breadth and depth of websites not covered by existing web metrics companies, and opens the market to small and medium website owners who can now access daily information on their website performance.

The Hitwise methodology and privacy controls have been independently audited by PriceWaterhouseCoopers. The Hitwise methodology and metrics definitions conform to the international standards supported by the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB), the Advertising Research Foundation (ARF), and FAST (Future of Advertising Stakeholders).

The Hitwise service is currently available in Australia and New Zealand, with services soon to launch in the United Kingdom, Hong Kong, Korea and Taiwanese markets.

ENDS

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